Lampitt or Leave It

Achieving an Enterprise Information Portal with Social Networking and Deep Contextual Integration

I read with great interest an article from eWeek, authored by Pringo's Majid Abai, entitled "How Enterprise Information Portals and Social Networking Are Converging."  I think Majid is right on the money, and his comments are quite close to zAgile's vision.

In the past, I recognized how zAgile's vision matches up well with emerging trends including: Unified Collaboration, information sharing, semantic discovery, social networking, contextual computing, and the surge in mash-ups.

The thing that intrigues me is that it seems that not many people are putting together the critical idea, that comprehensive, contextual, enterprise collaboration requires a mastery of data and more specifically, that's about semantic data. Certainly SOA / web services are great for connecting data from point A to point B, but if every time you must define all the meta data characteristics of A & B and how they are related, you waste a lot of time, you will get inconsistencies, and you still won't be able to infer meaning with respect to A & B concepts, let alone how they relate to C.

This is why ontology-driven solutions for any kind of enterprise collaboration will become so obviously critical in the coming couple years. The point-to-point hacks will no longer be enough. What is required is an enterprise, contextual, structured foundation, which semantically plugs together all collobartion tools, social networking tools, engineering tools, CRM, and other applications. Ideally, the solution should use semantic web standards and be open source with an open source ecosystem of stanadardized connectors. This is what zAgile delivers.

Learn How to Apply the Benefits of the Semantic Web to Your Organization Today: Atlassian HQ, April 9 in San Francisco

We are on the cusp of an exciting new era with the Semantic Web. Just as we recall how the web popularized the internet, we are all just about to experience "the new web", one that recognizes the content within any given web page and how it is related to other information on the web. The Semantic Web promises to revolutionize the accessibility of information on the World Wide Web. But until the Semantic Web is a fully implemented and adopted by consumers like "Joe User", how can the benefits of the Semantic Web be applied to your organization today? Semantic wikis hold the answer!

Just as one might argue that Wikipedia is a microcosm of the web, a semantic wiki within your own organization is a microcosm of the worldwide semantic web. Semantic wikis add structure to the wiki enabling the traditional, unstructured content to be complimented with meaningful structure. Now Atlassian Confluence has become an intelligent semantic wiki thanks to an open source semantic web infrastructure called zCALM and a Confluence plug-in called Wikidsmart for Confluence, both from zAgile and free to download from www.zAgile.com. This means the promises of the semantic web can be immediately applied within your organization today, and with open standards and a flexible open source ecoystem.

At the Atlassian headquarters (375 Alabama St in SOMA, cross street 17th) in San Francisco on April 9, 6.30-8.30pm, zAgile will discuss tangible benefits of the Semantic Web and practical ways it can help you to become more efficient, automate processes, and empower your organization. As an example we will discuss and demonstrate zCALM, an open source semantic infrastructure. You will see how zCALM may be used to semantically enable your enterprise wiki (Atlassian Confluence), achieve "intelligent mash-ups" -- deep interoperability and exchange of context-sensitive information between applications (eg, Confluence, Jira, and Subversion - including WANdisco multi-site/cluster versions for Jira and WANdisco for Subversion, Perforce, IBM tools, HP tools, and Salesforce), and even act as a powerful search across your applications and tools.

So come by to learn how you can realize the promises of the semantic web internally in your own organization.  If you cannot make it til later, afterwards, we will move over to a nearby bar called Circolo (500 Florida Street, between 18th St & Mariposa St), around 8.30pm to continue discussions.

We look forward to meeeting you! Please make sure to reserve your spot here. Many thanks to Jessie Curtner, Trisha Hong, and Todd Revolt at Atlassian and Marco Neumann from the New York City Semantic Web Meet-Up for enabling this!

zAgile Goes Open Source - Announces Public Beta of Wikidsmart v1.0 for Confluence

I am pleased to announce that zAgile is going open source with its first publicly available product, the v1.0 Beta of Wikidsmart for Confluence, under the GNU Affero GPL v3.  Wikidsmart turns Confluence into a "semantic wiki." The Wikidsmart v1.0 Beta is available here for download. This entitles you to download and use Wikidsmart freely within your organization. Any time a modified version of the binary product is made available to the public, the code with its modifications needs to be also made available to the public.

Whereas a wiki provide an easy mechanism for users to collaborate, develop, and maintain documentation and other content within an enterprise, its inherent wiki characteristics also come with some natural limitations:
- Content organization is limited to mostly page-level hierarchies (though Confluence can help alleviate this with Spaces)
- Content Categorization may be implied in the page hierarchy but there is no inherent structure to support it
- No wiki page attributes or meta data
- Limited interoperability with other applications
- Static versus Dynamic Content

This open source license is great for your organization because there are no obligations to purchase a license, and you can prove out Wikidmart’s use in your organization, risk-free, to:
-    Use semantically enabled forms to capture information in a consistent way across your user base. This ensures easy, consistent data entry that is “semantically” understood for easy cohesion across all systems other than the wiki
-    Automate content exchange between systems rather than manual updates which can create bottlenecks in engineering operations and outdated and/or erroneous information
-    Turn your Wiki into a Knowledge Repository that captures information across your tools and applications

A detailed description of Wikidsmart and its approach may be found here.

Today, the Wikidsmart Beta v1.0 is available for the Atlassian Confluence enterprise wiki. Please contact us if you would like to use zAgile with other wikis including MediaWiki, Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS) Wiki, MindTouch Deki, SocialText, or others.

Wikidsmart is the first of three zAgile products; the others include zPortal and zComposer which are both available as early adopter releases upon request from zAgile at [email protected]

zAgile Pioneers Unified Collaboration for Software Engineering

Looks like there are a lot of unified collaboration (UC) suites popping up, described in 2007 by Robin Bloor as an integrated suite of “voice communications, with definite traces of VoIP, conferencing, single contact number, voice mail, mobile telephony … suggests email, chat and collaboration.” Robin points out that if you ask what UC is to Avaya, Siemens, and Nortel , they focus on the voice aspect while if you ask Microsoft and IBM, you get more of a software oriented answer of course.

The newer generation of companies and their products for UC seem to all have their particular focus too, leaning all the more on the software side:
-    Project oriented
-    Web meeting oriented
-    Enterprise wiki oriented
-    Instant message and/or VoIP oriented

I would not and had not originally described zAgile as UC, but from the descriptions of UC I am seeing, apart from any emphasis on voice specifically, looks like zAgile fits well into that space too. Otherwise, we typically identify zAgile as ALM 2.0 (Application Life Cycle Management) or a new category called SIM (Software Information Management).

zAgile pioneers UC specifically for software engineering segment and is doing so thanks to collaboration (wiki, forums), communication (instant messaging) and social networking tools as well as an underlying rich network of software engineering ontologies that enable deep, contextual integration of teams, tools, processes, and knowledge across the engineering environment. In this way, teams can collaborate more effectively with respect to their specific engineering tasks at hand. You can also think of zAgile as a sophisticated mash-up platform for software engineering information. (But the term “mash-up” seems to me to hint at a hacked point-to-point ad hoc solution rather than a thoughtful platform and architecture. ) 

I am not aware of any particular companies focusing on a specific business segment for UC. I would be pleased to learn of other specialized UC environments. Any takers?

zAgile: Live on ReadWriteWeb with Web 3.0 and Start-Up Luminary Sramana Mitra

zAgile was selected to present at the ReadWriteWeb Roundtable of Web 3.0 start-ups today.  Each vendor was allotted 3 minutes, and zAgile was selected to present first.

I presented the zAgile pitch live via inernet to Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley-based technology entrepreneur who has founded three companies and provided strategy consultation to over 75 organizations. She writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy and is a columnist for Forbes.  Sramana also writes for ReadWriteWeb, where she described her take on Web 3.0 back in February 2007.

I was hoping to post the recording, but apparently there were technical glitches and some of the presenters' pitches were lost. None-the-less, we appreciated the opportunity to show-off the zAgile vision and recieve Sramana's confirmation that she saw a solid business opportunity.

Gartner and Project10X Agree on Hottest Web 3.0 Trends

Looks like industry pundits would agree zAgile is on the right track.

Mills Davis and the semantic web / Web 3.0 gurus over at Project10X have issued their Web 3.0 Manifesto. zAgile solutions utilize semantic web technologies and collaboration tools to "unify any software engineering environments with cohesion, collaboration, and confidence." The underlined Enterprise categories below from the report apply to zAgile technologies.

Top-10 List -- Enterprise
1 Information sharing
2 Semantic search, discovery, & navigation
3 Semantic mashups and composite applications
4 Semantic infrastructure / middleware SSOA, SBPM, SWS, virtualization, policy-based computing
5 Semantic business intelligence
6 Semantic ERP applications CRM, PLM, SCM, HRM
7 Semantic governance, compliance, & risk
8 Semantic web sites, wikis, collaboration, interest networking, & collective knowledge systems
9 Semantic advertising, marketing, personalization, & customization
10 Intelligent systems knowledge-based research, design, engineering, simulation, planning, scheduling, optimization, & decision support.

ReadWriteWeb reports: Mills Davis says the report, "reveals how semantic technologies will drive product and service opportunities in the next stage of the internet."

Gartner published their own list earlier this year about disruptive technologies for 2008-2012 (zAgile captures the categories underlined below)...

    * Multicore and hybrid processors
    * Virtualisation and fabric computing
    * Social networks and social software
    * Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
    * Web mashups
    * User Interface
    * Ubiquitous computing
    * Contextual computing
    * Augmented reality
    * Semantics

... as well as well as a report this week for strategic technologies of 2009. Again, zAgile fits into the list, this time for EnterpriseMashups which it describes as follows:

Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications. Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises.

Now, if we can get that multi-core, cloud computing, augmented reality project out of the labs...