Vancouver Convention Centre, venue for the Social Intranet Summit

Top 5 Reasons to Come to the Social Intranet Summit

#1. Top-notch mix of cross-disciplinary intranet experts. Dion Hinchcliffe (Enterprise 2.0 Analyst for CBS, ZDNet, ebizQ) for high-level strategy. Stewart Mader (author of Wikipatterns) for hands-on practical advice. Eric Karjaluoto (author of Speak Human) on the importance of design. More speakers will be announced soon!

#2. Learn how real companies are using social intranets to transform collaboration and knowledge sharing. Hear case studies presented by real organizations, like EA and Oxfam America.

#3. Learn more about SharePoint 2010. SharePoint is loved by some, hated by others. It can be a key part of your social intranet — if you know what you’re doing.

#4. Full-day pre-event workshop for ThoughtFarmer customers. Do you use the ThoughtFarmer solution for your social intranet? Attend a full-day pre-event workshop on Wednesday, October 27th for advanced, hands-on training specifically for ThoughtFarmer customers.

#5. It’s in Vancouver, and Vancouver is awesome. It’s got the highest concentration of coffee shops, sushi bars and graphic designers in the world. And where else can you go sailing, golfing and skiing — all in the same day?

Register now and save $450! Early bird registration ends September 3, 2010.

This segment of the technology industry attracts sharp minds who are intrigued by the same difficult problem: How can technology make workplace collaboration more effective? The answers require experts not just in technology, but in ethnography, human factors and psychology too.

Last night our VP Gordon Ross discussed the writings of Richard Sennett with Michael Idinopulos, a deep thinker from SocialText with whom I’ve engaged in lively online debate. We also talked about some of our common problems as vendors, such as figuring out the best way to explain comprehensive software suites in terms that the target customer appreciates. Are we enterprise collaboration, chaos management, Facebook for the enterprise or social intranet software? Is “social” even a good word to use?

Michael, Deb Schultz and Gord in deep discussion

Shortly before that, we were guests at an event hosted by Aaron Fulkerson and Isaac Garcia, CEOs of MindTouch and Central Desktop, respectively. Aaron introduced Darren to the noted Open Source developer Miguel de Icaza, creator of Gnome (Miguel is famous in geek circles). Aaron showed me his MindTouch tattoo (don’t worry, it’s on his calf), and we talked openly about a large bid that we’re competing against each other on. Isaac shared his advice on server farms as we move towards a hosted version of ThoughtFarmer.

I attended the Jive “New Way” briefing on Monday and enjoyed the free chocolates . Jive puts on a flashy show, and their new executives are seasoned presenters. I have to say, though, that there are too many men in suits at Jive for my liking. It was comforting to see their soon-to-be-very-wealthy co-founder and CTO, Matt Tucker, doing network configuration on the Macs at their booth. He’s still a geek.

Percentage of execs in suits apparently peaks around $100M in revenue

Lawrence Liu, now of Cisco and formerly of Telligent and before that, Microsoft, told me that all these software packages are overbuilt and 5 to 10 years ahead of where the customer base is at. We discussed ThoughtFarmer’s forthcoming SharePoint 2010 Connector, and he said there’s a lot of money to be made riding Microsoft’s coattails — if you don’t mind being their lackey.

Gord, Darren and Chris at the ThoughtFarmer booth. Photo by Jordan from Traction Software -- another friendly competitor. Thanks Jordan!

Rather than avoid or resent my competitors in this space, I like to embrace them. They’re great people with great ideas that I can learn from. And as Isaac said last night to the guests at his event, “This is a huge market. There’s going to be a lot of winners.”

Imagine this scenario, which plays out millions of times a day: A colleague emails you a Word doc. You double-click the attachment. It downloads and opens in Word. You make some changes and click “Save”. The “Save as…” dialog pops up, you choose a smart location for it, give it a filename, then save it. Next, you open your email program again, hit “Reply” on your colleague’s email, select “Attach file”, locate your file, and hit okay. Finally, you send it back.

Ugh.

Detaching, editing, saving, re-attaching and sending is a nightmare. And it’s a nightmare that almost all of us are forced to deal with daily.

At ThoughtFarmer, we’ve come up with a brilliant solution for this problem that we call round-trip file editing. It’s a knowledge worker’s dream, and we’re unveiling it next week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

Here’s how that same Word doc works with round-trip file editing: You go to a ThoughtFarmer page that contains the Word doc. You click “Edit”. It automatically downloads and opens in Word. You edit, and every time you hit “Save”, the file is automatically uploaded back to ThoughtFarmer, ready for your colleague.

Unlike SharePoint, which only does round-trip editing on Windows using Internet Explorer for certain types of files, ThoughtFarmer does round-trip editing with any browser, on Windows or Mac, and with any type of file — Office, PhotoShop, AutoCad, you name it. It works through the firewall — if your browser can see your intranet, you can do round-trip editing. You can even work on the file offline and it will automatically sync up when you reconnect.

All this is made possible via our new Desktop Connector:

The ThoughtFarmer Desktop Connector lets you open files from your ThoughtFarmer intranet and edit them directly in their native application. No detaching, no emailing around, no re-uploading.

For anyone who’s suffered through downloading and re-uploading of files while trying to collaborate with a colleague: we’ve been there, we’ve felt the pain, and now we’ve done something about it.

If you’re in Boston next week, come visit us at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference for a demo.

EphraimJF: How do you address information flow needs for both vertical and horizontal organizational structures?

Thomas Vander Wal: The multi-directional flows can be addressed in a few ways. The first is people acting to direct the flow by tagging or writing pointers in other affinity areas. Tagging provides the means to add context for groups with different interests and key terms. Writing quick posts pointing to something that may be of interest or needs to be seen is one good way.

The second is having an area, page or service where a group can curate what has been found through search, aggregation tools (feeds or alert searches), or found through people who cross purpose.

Last is using feeds of searches or filters to automatically populate pages. Paying attention to other group’s flows on terms that have know interest or affinity.

Josh Glover: We’re trying to source a group of volunteers to gather feedback on ideas for our new intranet – one concern is that we’ll be full of people who will be easy adopters. Any suggestions on how we identify who might be the laggards up front, so we can see what they might want to see and attempt to address that group with initial design/roll-out.

Thomas Vander Wal: One of the better ways of ensuring those outside the early adopters get included is to ask the known early adopters to make a list of people who they continually are helping grasp the new things. This identifies who the next stage adopters or the group after that will be.

Also dig into the ecosystem of how things are done now outside of the tools. Most organizations have one or two central node people who are the ones who act as liaison to new tech or are the person through whom the informal information flows go through. They will be able to help map not only who the next round of adopters are, but they may be able to identify who the experts are as well. Finding experts are hard as they often are not the users of the new social or communication tools, but it is the broadcaster or rebroadcasts of their info that are much more easily seen. The experts are usually overly busy and do not have interest in attracting more attention or work. If you can get the experts into the early rounds or the broadcasters or rebroadcasting types, that would be really helpful.

One thing to keep in mind is those who are often central nodes for communication may be a tough sell as they like their role and the tools as they are as they have value for themselves tied into it.

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Thanks again to Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions and to all of our participants for joining us.

Look for upcoming ThoughtFarmer sponsored webinar announcements on our mailing list or posted here to our blog.