Fishbowl Solutions is Taking OOW 2010 by Storm!  Your favorite E20 Jedi & Oracle ACE will be there.

Yep, it says "E20 Jedi - Billy Cripe" Sweeeeeet

The Fishbowl Solutions Booth is in Moscone West (PDF warning) in space 3630 (center).

We also have a limited number of Discover passes for you if you want to get there and get in.  Let us know asap because once they’re gone, they’re gone.

You can Register from our website

Plan Your Sessions Now! There are over 48 breakout sessions in the E20 track (content management, portals and collaboration).  That’s more than 2 per time slot and doesn’t count the general sessions, booth presentations, parties and meetups.  The result is that the E20 opportunities for learning are HUGE.  Be sure to register early for our sessions as they will fill up.

SUNDAY: SIG Sunday: Presentation S318459 – “So You Discovered You Have Oracle ECM. Now What?”
Sunday, 12:30 – 1:30pm

MONDAY: Architect to Architect Broadcast: The Architecture of E20 – Mason St. Tent between Hilton and Nikko hotels with Bob Rhubart, Billy Cripe, Vince Casarez and Bex Huff
…Monday, 1-1:30pm

TUESDAY: Breakout Session S319079: Mobile ECM for the iPad, iPhone, Android and Mobile Browsers
Mariott Marquis Salon 7
11am – 12pm

One on One Meeting Times are Filling Up Fast! Schedule Yours Now.  Email 11g@fishbowlsolutions.com for a time.

Finally a Wiki where Articles are Fully Managed Content

Wiki’s are one of the most mentioned Enterprise 2.0 tools.  Most (dare I say all?) E20 vendors have one or incorporate one into their solution stack.  However, if you look more closely, many of them simply roll in some open source wiki server and call it a day.  While basic functionality for wikis is almost standard these days, the information architecture underpinning the wiki is often overlooked.  What happens is that the “wiki-widget” proponents end up sacrificing information availability for information presentability.  The “we’ve got a wiki too” crowd is so caught up in achieving buzz-word parity that the real benefits of a fully managed and integrated wiki solution are passed over.  The result is a loose hodge-podge of stand alone “web 2.0″ widgets that have been lumped together with a common user interface thrown on top.  The vendors call it good.

Portal vendors are some of the worst offenders here.  The ease with which widgets are surfaced in a single common UI lends itself to lazy integration. In these kinds of environments the wiki widget may appear next to the JCR enabled content repository but there is NEVER ANY LINKAGE BETWEEN THE TWO!

Seriously, WTF???  If enterprise Wikis are the best place for enterprise knowledge bases, best practices and employee generated tips and tricks (AND THEY OFTEN ARE!), then what in the world is any enterprise information architect worth his or her pay grade doing being happy with throwing key corporate knowledge assets into its own walled off database silo?  The answer is that most are happy with the loose “on the glass” integration provided by a portal or creative use of iFrames.  This is a tragedy and a terrible mis / under use of corporate knowledge assets.  Fortunately, Fishbowl Solutions has developed a fully ECM integrated wiki that combines all the latest wiki features with the power of Oracle Enterprise Content Management.

Edit in Context, Search within Section, Update Metadata and REUSE Content Articles ANYWHERE!

Because wikis allow for easy end user access, capture and preservation of institutional knowledge they are fantastic tools for any number of applications.  From call centers to support desks to sales force automation and project management and product documentation they provide an easy way to navigate to, find and consume information.  The best part is that they capture what makes YOUR business different from your competitors and socializes those differentiators among the rest of your employees.  Fishbowl Solutions Wiki is built with that end user in mind.  So the system is incredibly easy to use.  It allows for both in context editing as well as document uploading, remote posting and even posting from your mobile device like an iPad.

But the best part is that it is built around a solid information architecture.  With Oracle’s UCM (Universal Content Management) server under the hood, the articles, documents, images, tags and metadata are fully managed assets.  This means that you don’t need separate security models for your wiki and your content store, or even worse, some kind of spaghetti integration to map security attributes from one system to another.  This also means that you can single-source your information.

Think about product documentation.  Your customers want product documentation so you have it available for search or download on your website.  But your engineers and developers need product documentation too because they use it as a reference.  So WHY IN THE WORLD would you have it twice in two places (or more!)? Why not have it once and surface it on your WCM website for your customers and surface it inside your internal Wiki for your dev teams?  That’s what the Fishbowl Wiki allows you to do.  Now, if you’re an E20 smarty-pants you’re thinking, but what about all those user created edits?  I don’t want my dev team’s additions to be public.  Good thought, but you are forgetting about the power of the single-source security model.  If your internal teams make edits they are associated with an internal only security group and only show up for your internal teams.  External users see only pristine documentation.  Single Sourced power, Multi – Channel Delivery.

We rely on standard Oracle information architecture to delivery a compelling and simple user experience without dumbing-down the features and capabilities.  Got a portal?  No problem, simply surface the Fishbowl Wiki in the portal with our Portal Integration Suite.  Because the wiki is built on Oracle UCM, managed with WCM features and integrated into the Oracle information management stack, you don’t sacrifice information availability for presentability like other wikis force you to.

Fishbowl Collab Wiki with Collaboration Manager Driven Navigation as well as Content and Wiki Article Listings and Access

Finally, because we’ve designed our Fishbowl Wiki product this way, we are able to easily(!) incorporate it into other Oracle ECM

All Project Team Members Can Share and Collaborate With Confidence that All Content is Stored in an Enterprise Scale ECM System

modules.  For instance, it can be combined with the Oracle UCM Collaboration Manger to provide a project wiki where all the wiki content is associated with project collaboration content while navigation is governed by your project access.  Now your project teams, including external client teams can share not just documents but also wiki based articles, schedules, status updates and messages.

The vital innovation here is not that Fishbowl Solutions has a wiki product.  Like I started off saying, wikis are among the most widely touted E20 tools out there.  But you must ask yourself and your E20 widget sales rep, “what is the point of a cool E20 wiki if I cannot get to any of the information outside of the wiki?”  If governance or compliance was holding you back before, you can breath easy now.  With the Fishbowl Wiki your internal knowledge and articles are protected, managed and secured.  But you don’t have to sacrifice a great user experience to comply with regulations.  You don’t have to forgo the latest best practices or rely on antiquated delivery models to get information out to employees, partners and project teams.  You don’t have to pay outrageous sums to “integrate” silo’d wiki data with the rest of your internal knowledge centers.  What you do need to do is reach out to Fishbowl Solutions to ask for a demo and see how this can help you.  We can be reached at 11g@fishbowlsolutions.com

What People do Mobile Devices

The email marketing crowd are great for doing and finding research.  It is no wonder that they are fully onboard the mobile computing bandwagon.  Email, after all, is still one of the leading activities done on mobile devices.  But the chart to the right is interesting for a number of reasons (source).  More folks perform search on mobile device than check email.

As an organization that is focused on providing and managing content for mobile and internet enabled devices, I have to ask: What are they searching for?

The answer is, of course, content.  While the search providers see the graph and quiver with excitement at the portent of a rocketing market, those of us a bit more stable understand that search is simply a means to an end.  Content is that end.  It is the content that is valuable.  Less so, the path to get there.

If content is managed, tagged, categorized and delivered to mobile devices then people spend less time in the Means and more time with the Ends.  That is the appropriate and most valuable “place” where their time can be spent.  While the other bars on the chart are variations on the category “news” (weather news, sports news, entertainment news) the assumption is that people are going to web properties dedicated to that news subcategory and then browsing the information they desire.  These are categories that have successfully led people, efficiently, into their content gardens and set them free.

We can, after all, assume that people are spending less time searching for “Sports News” than they are for other things simply because “Sports News” is a substantial category of content that is a primary destination for users.  Rather than searching for “sports news” people are going to “sports news” and consuming and enjoying content.  They do this to a variety of apps, browser bookmarks and socialized links.

Fishbowl Solutions has a range of mobile content solutions from apps, to mobile browser ready web sites to easy ways to socialize links on mobile devices like the iPad, iPhone, Android Phones and mobile web browsers.  I’m even speaking about it at this year’s Oracle Open World (Session S319079 – Information Mobility with Oracle ECM – Tuesday Sept 21 at 11am-12pm, Mariott Marquis Salon 7)

Bridge Ratings Research http://www.bridgeratings.com/press.02.22.10.MobilePhoneUsage.htm

So think about this.  You are on the road or on a client visit and need access to information back at the office.  Rather than slogging through some crazy VPN-as-Remote-Desktop thick client, you can get your videos, presentations, documents and images on your mobile device.  You can even fill out forms, perform workflow tasks and do contribution.  Rather than lamely searching through repositories you hope your IT admin made public or put into a DMZ, you can self-service without any disruption in capability or service.  Rather than calling a co worker who is back at the office or your spouse who is back at your home office and asking them to email that thing you forgot, you can do it all right from the computer in your pocket.

That is real enterprise 2.0.  See you at OpenWorld

Nielsen Graphic - Time Spent Onlilne

My Grandmother messaged me on Facebook today. Seriously. There was dear grandmother’s picture saying “Hi Billy, Loved the visit with the grand kids, wish you could have been there.” This noble woman has never ever sent me an email. And yet here she is, 80+ years old, socially messaging me and comfortable as ever with the technology and the use. Her wall is rife with exchanges between friends and family.

It is no wonder, then that there has been a lot of chatter on twitter, on industry blogs and here, and in internet trends research recently about the rise of social computing activities and the fall of email.  So it is confusing to me when folks leap to calling email “dead”.  This was the impression among recent discussions of the linked Nielsen online activity reports.  What the reports actually show is that social computing at home on personal computers accounts for more time than email at home on personal computers.  But this is a far cry from email being replace, wholesale, by the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and a myriad of others.  Indeed, the Nielsen reports actually show that email is far and away the largest consumer of mobile internet time and when you combine time spent online regardless of device, email still “wins”.

Mobile Device Time Spent Online

Now there are some important caveats.  As I have previously posted, I believe that social computing will eventually take over email – even in the workplace.  I happen to think it will happen sometime in 2013 given the trajectory of the downward trend of email and the upward trend of social computing.  As Laurence Hart talks about in his recent article, the E20 tools have a long way to go to overcome the simplicity and ubiquity of email systems – regardless of their many flaws.

So while we all experience more messaging coming through non email channels, email will still be around for some time.