Attensa

Enterprise 2.0 is Self Service

If you are looking for insights into the role of social networking in the Enterprise, you need to subscribe to Dion Hinchcliffe's Enterprise 2.0 blog.

In today's post he looks at the new Gartner Hype Cycle report.

Gartner sees collective intelligence as the most important trend coming from the application of Web 2.0 technologies to solve business problems.

Here's the Gartner definition:

collective intelligence: an approach to producing intellectual content that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost effective way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

Dion explains the why...

"That might be because Web 2.0 offers a sort of inverted way of looking at the way we do things now.  Web 2.0 frequently embodies the emergent and freeform instead of the predefined and structured.  It's often bottom-up instead of command-and-control.  It's self-service instead of being mediated."

Both the Gartner report and Dion's analysis make the point that companies who have a clear vision and plan for putting social networking to work behind the firewall will have a clear competitive advantage.

Flog Blog: Goodbye Bookmarks!

I'm the head of Customer Service at Attensa. The other day, my boss (you know, that Scott guy) wandered into my office and told me to blog.

OK.

I get pretty busy testing things and logging issues, but every day I hear and read and discover things about Attensa for Outlook that make me love my job. So, I can blog. Here we go...

I used to build catalogs of bookmarks. My bookmark file has travelled from computer to computer as I've upgraded my home office over the years, becoming ever more bloated and less organized. I'm a messy person. I have stacks of papers and kids toys and art projects living on my desk. I will never take the time to open my bookmarks file and clean it up properly... the best I can do is make a half-hearted attempt to purge broken website links once in a while.

Then along came tagging... wow! My life has suddenly changed!

I love tags. As I work through my feeds in Attensa for Outlook, I can tag articles on the fly to use later.... and the cool thing is, I get to make up my own tags (keywords) that work for my brain. When I'm working through my various projects and I need to put my hands on information quick, finding a web page in my catalog is as simple as pulling down the Attensa Tags menu and looking under the most logical keyword. No more hunting under bookmark sub-folders looking for a bookmarked site. With tagging, I don't lose web pages anymore. I use my del.icio.us account with Attensa so I have access to my tagged items from any computer.

Tip:
Attensa's River of News has its own tagging button, on the article toolbar, making it really easy to save that article for later. When you tag the article, a link to the web page itself is created in your tags, not a link to the article in Outlook.

P.S. My boss made me write this.

Attensa at Supernova in Second Life & Real Life

On Thursday evening  at Supernova, the real world and the virtual world can watch Craig Barnes, Attensa CEO, explain in five minutes why the AttentionStream technology and products we are building matter. It's all part of the Supernova Connected Innovators showcase and gala created in collaboration with TechCrunch.

If you have a Second Life account you can catch streaming video of Craig's pitch in the Supernova Lounge.

You can keep up on the Supernova happenings in the Supernova media center and you can access the Supernova blog, wiki and more at the Supernova Community Connection.

10 Business Wiki Applications

Brian Keairnes at the StartupSpot has compiled a very practical list of business wiki applications covering sales, marketing, research, customer service, product planning and more.

"Making Corporate RSS Dreams a Reality" - Somewhat Frank on the Attensa RSS Server

We met Frank Gruber at Syndicate in New York in May and last week our Director of Product Management, Matthew Bookspan, brought Frank up to date on our RSS server plans. He's posted an overview on Somewhat Frank covering RSS applications, how an appliance approach simplifies installation and how having a central access point for receiving and distributing internal and external feeds uses bandwidth efficiently.

Thank you Frank.

The Growth in RSS - The Fire Hose is Getting Connected

Jupiter Research has a report "RSS Comes of Age: Budgeting, Deploying, and Measuring RSS" by Greg Dowling. Currently 29 percent of large companies ($50 million + in annual revenues) publish content via RSS. That number is projected to jump to 63% by the end of 2006. That's just six months away.

The report's recommendation's include, "In order to maximize their investment in RSS, site operators should leverage emerging tools and technologies specifically tailored to RSS."

If you're one of the companies making the move to RSS, talk to us about lowering the barrier for feed management and deployment while helping users control the flow of the inevitable RSS fire hose. It's what Attensa is all about.

Moonwatcher on the Attensa Enterprise RSS Server

We gave Charlie Wood an overview our Attensa Enterprise RSS server yesterday and he has a great write-up on Moonwatcher.

We're planning a July launch of our server which includes RSS proxy services, a web-based reader, optional integration with Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, and support for secure feeds.

To simplfiy installation and configuration we'll be offering the server as an appliance. The major advantage of shipping a pre-integrated hardware appliance is the dramatically simplified install and config process. It's built on Linux, Apache, Tomcat, PHP, and an open-source database, and includes all of those components out of the box.

Charlie does a great job on his competitive comparison. In an earlier post he discusses the pros and cons of software versus appliance for installation.

If you want more details on the server let us know.

Charlie - I talked to Matthew Bookspan this morning and he's ready for the podcast.

The State of Enterprise 2.0

Three articles caught my attention this week and together they create a snapshot of the current state of affairs of Enterprise 2.0.

The first is BusinessWeek's CEO's Guide to Enterprise 2.0 written by Rob Hof. It's a terrific overview with examples of how innovative companies are using blogs, wikis, search and RSS to improve customer communications, overcome information overload and streamline collaboration. The article concludes with an observation by Tim O'Reilly that companies who embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies will outperfrom those who don't.

Next I read Enid Burns' piece on Executives Slow to See Value in Corporate Blogging on ClickZ. In a survey with 150 senior executive from Fortune 1000 companies only 5 percent said they see corporate blogging as a communications medium; 3 percent see it as a brand-building technique; and less than 1 percent see it as a sales or lead-generation tool. Many respondents doubt the credibility of blogs as a communications tool (62 percent); brand-building (74 percent) and a sales or lead generation channel (70 percent). Robbin Goodman, EVP and partner at Makovsky & Company, the firm that released the study, said in what may be the understatment of the week, "There is a learning curve that needs to take place." Robbin also points out "The benefits of blogging for a business can significantly outweigh possible risks."

I also listened to David Berlind's podcast Reality Check: Wikis? Sorry. Never Heard of Them. He turns the table on a technology tradeshow by interviewing the attendees instead of the exhibitors. His conclusion, technology executives who are beginning to explore these new technologies and tools are extremely clear on why they need to embrace the newer technologies but they're just not sure what those technologies are.

Taken together, the articles are a clear indication that companies including Attensa need to do a better job explaining the benefits of adopting our technologies. They also point out that technology executives who embrace Enterprise 2.0 tools early can have a significant competitive advantage.

Attensa is a Supernova Connected Innovator

It's good when your company name begins with the letter A. That puts Attensa at the top of the list of the Supernova Connected Innovators. Attensa joins 11 other companies with "extraordinary potentional to create new markets and shape the connected future."

The companies were selected by Supernova and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch from nearly 100 submissions. Thanks.

Supernova 2006  is June 21 -23. In San Francisco.

Attention and Social Network Analysis

Luis Suarex at ELSUA - A KM Blog links to an article in CIO titled "Who Knows Whom and Who Knows What" which delves into the value of understanding Social Networks in your business. Social Network Analysis can be used to indentify experts, thought leaders and the most effective communication channels for disseminating critical information that can create strategic advantage.

It won't be long before AttentionStream analysis will be used to improve colloborative networking by automatically identifying the most efficient information distribution channels.

You can read more about the role of AttentionStream technology and SNA in our new Download attensa_enterprise_rss_whitepaper_0605.pdf .