In-Cider Knowledge: Web 2.0

Web 2.0: The Blind Technology Rush

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 01:23:50 GMT

If you ever read Brian Kelly's excellent UK Web Focus blog, you will often come across comments by myself. Almost always, I am taking the role of the grumpy naysayer, attacking many of the notions of Web 2.0, as presented enthusiastically by Brian.

The funny thing is, as Web 2.0 technologies go, I am a keen and long time user of the sort of tools which people lump under the category - I have been regularly contributing to wikis since 2002, had a blog since 2004, have a page on Facebook which is a significant part of my social life, have messed around with a lot of mash-ups (such as the mapping posts I made on this blog) and use countless services which are regarded as Web 2.0. So why grumpy?

Well, let's go through the services I use. I started to contribute to our wiki at work because we decided in our organisation that this was the best way to flexibly disseminate and update information for those people who needed across a very devolved structure. I started my blog in 2004 primarily as a development diary for those people who were interested in or using FirefoxADM. I got a page on Facebook because I was out at the pub and at parties and friends and, more importantly, good looking girls were asking that question "do you have Facebook?". Saying no was a bad answer... Even the stuff I did for the mashups was my attempt to see if I could produce a better version of the mapping site the University of Edinburgh used. Every Web 2.0 technology I use is used because I had a reason to use it.

The fact is every time you choose any technology first and then try to figure out a reason to use it, it does not work. This is not just with Web 2.0 technologies, but ANY technology - people don't go to DIY shops and buy hammers and then get home and then figure out what things they can hammer, they have a problem in their home and go out and buy the right tools for the job.

Yet, it is all too common with Web 2.0 technologies that people are encouraged to adopt them without this reasoning in place, and often when there is a reason it is the circular argument of "because its Web 2.0"! The granddaddy of these is the blog. People, teams, organisations are told "you should blog" and they are encouraged and encouraged to set one up. The problem is, all too often, they have nothing to say. So, they get told they should blog at a Web 2.0 conference and get back to work the next day and enthusiastically go to Wordpress or Blogspot and set one up, and start off with a "hello world, this is my blog" post. Then a day or so later, a real post of meaning, something they are getting off their chest. Then, time passes, maybe a third post a week later and then one or two more sporadic posts and the blog dies. Even worse are those organisations who indoctrinate their blog into their policy when they have no reason to blog. Libraries are particularly bad for this, having had it rammed down their throats that they must blog and wiki and use all these other Web 2.0 tools to be "Library 2.0". These librarians often have no reason to blog than the FUD of "you'll be left behind as Library 1.0!", so library blogs are forcibly created. Unfortunately, because they have nothing really interesting to say on them, they become full of nothing more than the same content that used to live under the news link on the library's home page.

Interestingly, also on Brian's blog, he points to an library-targetted OCLC report he contributed to on the use of these sort of technologies. Some of the quotes are quite interesting:

This was clearly the case for the authors of this report when we began our research on social networks a year ago. There is no doubt that our initial perceptions of social networks influenced our approach to this study. Handicapped by only limited personal experiences with sites, we began our study as we had every study before it—by looking at social networks as a service or set of services to be studied, learned and implemented. We conceived of a social library as a library of traditional services enhanced by a set of social tools—wikis, blogs, mashups and podcasts....

Becoming engaged in the social Web is not about learning new services or mastering new technologies. To create a checklist of social tools for librarians to learn or to generate a “top ten” list of services to implement on the current library Web site would be shortsighted. Such lists exist. Resist the urge to use them.
The social Web is not being built by augmenting traditional Web sites with new tools.
And a social library will not be created by implementing a list of social software
features on our current sites.

Very interesting. I wonder if we are now starting to see a maturity of Web 2.0 as people move away from a belief they have to implement certain specific Web 2.0 technologies and actually start to think of how and which ones can be used to be a worthwhile contribution to the services people use and run.

Its got to be better than it is now...

Its All In The Process

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:02:18 GMT

Earlier this week, whilst waiting on other processes to complete I started to play with the Shared Document feature of our team's Sharepoint Services install. We put this in place earlier this year after one of my colleagues in the team played with it and convinced us it was a good idea - a system to help track changes, track what each other was doing (especially as we had a new job share post in the team) and allow us to have internal task lists, and with Sharepoint Services being essentially a free "role" built into Windows Server 2003. I was pretty sceptical but had no better ideas so agreed we should give it a go. Over the past couple of months, my scepticism has been allayed, as I have found it more and more useful. Certainly, the 2 team members in the job share have found the blogging extension to it almost essential to their job, as there is no overlap in their hours.

In the last week, though, I have been looking at how we can use the Shared Documents feature and have been very impressed - not so much by the technology itself, but by how it manifests itself. The Document Lifecycle is, especially in Office 2007, a first-class citizen. You can open, check out, modify and check in content all from within Office. It works almost as smoothly as opening and saving to disk (I say almost because checking in and checking out files is a bit of a foreign concept to most, at least at the start). You can also add the likes of tasks, notifications and permissions which are major requirements for collaboration. On top of all this, in the 2007 version, Office has clarified the process of document preparation, to make processes like mark-up removal, adding data protection, signatures and compatibility checks, more naturally flowing (thanks to the ordering in the new Office button menu).

The point here is not to say anything particular about how good or otherwise Sharepoint or Office 2007 is, but to say, it is a good example of the sort of process we need to be thinking about. At the moment, a lot of Web 2.0 services are based on a very old school method of creating your document/data in your software application and then once complete going to the web site, browsing to where you saved it on your hard drive and uploading. I think it is becoming all the more clearer that desktop/software and cloud/services are not mutually exclusive paradigms, and if we want to get the very best of both, we need to think of the best processes to make the differences between the two much more smooth, to the point where users might not even be able to tell between the two. We also need to be minded towards making sure the services give us the flexibility we need in a two-way direction. It is only then that we will find an approach which fit our needs and allows our users and our systems to be as productive as they can be with these services.

Web 2.0 - A Year On

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 20:48:33 GMT

I first wrote about Web 2.0 on this blog almost exactly a year ago with this post. Looking back, I talked about Web 2.0 as a kind of threat, "competition" for the services IT Services provide, and suggested IT Services risked becoming irrelevant if the services did not match or better these sort of services. In my opinion, the relevancy would come by realising what we can work with and what battles weren't worth fighting. Reading some blogs and news items of the time, I think that was a pretty accurate snapshot of where we as a profession were a year ago. How have things changed?

One strange thing is that its almost as interesting to talk about what HASN'T happened, as what has. To be honest, when I was giving my theory that Web 2.0 "equates to one of the biggest changes in the way services are delivered" since the Web itself, I expected a whole lot more to have happened in the past year than it has. I did expect Web 2.0 to take off in a big way in the past year; I expected to see by now what I would call the "Web 2.0 software stack" - in that users will log into any machine and then go off to Windows Live or Google and from there, their entire software experience is based around that web service: email, IM, VOIP, Documents, Presentations, Storage, etc. Why hasn't things happened quite to this extent?

Firstly, the technology wasn't and, dare I suggest, isn't mature enough. Or powerful enough. If you analyse, for example, Google Docs (Writely), it is now barely better functionality-wise than Wordpad or the equivalent application on other platforms. There is no doubt that the likes of Google are currently developing these apps to make them better but I wonder just how powerful they could make an application running in a web browser, across the Internet. To be honest, I think you can only go so far before edging at the security and performance boundaries. There is no doubt to me that these boundaries will offer less features, be less responsive and end up giving less productivity in these applications than in a traditional desktop application.

One area that grown over the past year is the concept of Enterprise 2.0. The whole area of "Enterprise 2.0" has really matured in the past year from being an idea championed by the likes of Andrew McAfee (who, well, coined the term) and Dion Hinchcliffe to having real possibilities. There are real steps being taken forward. However, if you search Google for "Enterprise 2.0", you will see that there are still a lot of baby-steps occurring, and a lot of people still figuring out where this area needs to go. Its important to note though that Enterprise 2.0 is not really a revolution - it is more an organic development of understanding how Web 2.0 can fit into the very rigid structures of an enterprise environment and is being crafted into the latest take on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). One offshoot of this is that Enterprise 2.0 tends to be less burdened with the more extreme and ridiculous ideologies that Web 2.0 has.

For myself, a complete pragmatist when it comes to IT and technology, this is important. I look back over my posts of the past year and see myself go through a similar maturing from what could be defined as Web 2.0 thinking to Enterprise 2.0 thinking: I like a lot of the ideas of Web 2.0, but many of the practicalities don't fit an organisation/enterprise environment, therefore there needs to be a different take. When I blogged about "IT Services 2.0", it was very much angled towards this idea of Enterprise 2.0, more than Web 2.0.

So, for the year ahead? Over the next year I expect, actually, very little. By the middle of 2008, you can expect to see a lot more Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 applications get targeted towards the enterprise but the current problem is that everyone lacks a clear leading platform to work against. And that is the area that will form up in the next year (and it wont be Facebook!). But that's for another post.

The Unwanted Invasions of Facebook

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 21:58:20 GMT

I never expected the topic and arguments in my previous post to be justified so quickly! Yesterday, this story broke:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/18/noxford118.xml

http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/news/story/0,,2128269,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=11

I see this as very different a situation than the Facebook threats at Keele. In the Keele case, all the students were doing was criticising the University, and seeing as they pay a lot of money to go to these institutions, it was wrong to threaten those students. However, in this case, the students are learning the hard way everything I said in my previous post: things put up on Facebook are not private, and things that are put up there can and will come back to haunt you. There is a beautiful quote in the Telegraph report of the story, from the University spokesperson: "The perception is that this site is private. But it is not and everyone in the modern world has to adjust to that.".

In a way, these students have found this out in a not too bad way. If it wasn't the Oxford deans who found these photos first and made students tighten their privacy on facebook or better still take the content down, then it would have been an interviewer doing "research" on that student as a potential employee, where the research is done via searching Facebook, Google, Bebo, MySpace et al (and they DO!). This slap on the wrist from Oxford staff is better than being turned down for a job because the employer thinks you are a potential trouble maker who plagued the residents of Oxford with anti-social behaviour...

The reaction of the students in both the Keele and Oxford cases makes one thing abundantly clear, though. The Oxford Student Union President makes it clear how students see Facebook and that is "the ethos of the site" is a "community for connecting friends". In other words, Facebook is about life at University (friends, lovers, socialising) and not University life (studying, lectures, exams). In that these two areas are so well defined, it should be possible for student bodies such as the Student Union to come together with the University and draw up some "rules" on appropriateness for the University to involve itself in the Facebook (or whatever Social Network is in fashion) community. Personally, I'd want the University to stay as much out of it as possible, as they are mostly an unwanted invasion into the students' space.

I do hope one thing, as an aside. I hope a lot of those in Higher Education institutions who hype Web 2.0, stop and take a long hard look at this situation. A lot of the hype of Web 2.0 has been by their definition of "user-centric" - instead of creating tools and portals at the University, port and outsource your services to the tools and sites the users use. The release of Facebook Apps API left many frothing at the mouth with the possibilities (I'll come back to Facebook as a platform in a post soon). I've never bought into this idea (especially with web sites - students have figured out they can SHOCK! have more than one site open at a time, so having Facebook in one tab and the Web Portal in another is not really a user-crippling inconvenience...). This definition of "user-centric" has, essentially, been derailed because it forgot to factor in one important component: what the users actually want! And all the evidence in this case is, such developments, such involvements are simply unwanted.

Permanent Footsteps in the Internet Sand

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 19:36:02 GMT

The year was 1996. At the time (and still so), I was heavily into electronic and dance music. I was coming up to the end of my first year at University and had an idea. Down in Oxford, at the start of May, there was a big dance music festival called Tribal Gathering organised. The lineup was amazing. Me and a friend got tickets and made plans - this was the perfect event before we knuckled down to our final exams of the year. Then, barely a couple of weeks before the event, the license for the event was not given, citing "traffic concerns". My plans and what was effectively my holiday for that year, was ruined. My sense of outrage was massive, but tipped over the edge a few days later when it was announced The Who were going to be playing a massive event that summer in Hyde Park. That is a big park in the centre of London. Where were the "traffic concerns" here? The whole thing looked like yet another state-sponsored attack on dance music culture.

At the time, I often wrote on a Usenet newsgroup called, uk.music.rave. It was, despite the name, a newsgroup for all dance music. I spent a lot of time on the group doing the rather sad but useful activity of track spotting - people would post asking if anyone knew a tune which has this or that sample and I had a good knack of remembering the name of tunes. Soon after the Tribal Gathering debacle, I posted a rant about the event blaming everyone from the organisers to the police to politicians. Soon after, exams and flat hunting matters meant I forgot all about it.

Many, many years later, I was in the pub with some friends having a regular drink when one of them pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and, to me cringing like I had just been wrapped in fibreglass, he started to read out the rant I posted. For my friends, this was amusement and me getting slightly embarrassed. They especially took great amusement at me, these days darkly cynical about the world, signing off the message with the acronym, PLUR (which I find amazingly has a wikipedia entry...). How had this happened? Simply put: In 2001, Google bought the Usenet archive from DejaNews and made it simple to search. My bored friend searched for my name and found my post.

I never considered that 7 or more years after I wrote the post, it would come back to haunt me. Usenet was one of the earliest "user generated content" parts of the World Wide Web and Internet to be archived in such a way where you can identify a person's posts, profile them if you want. Now consider the Web of today, and in this area, it starts to look, frankly, scary. Take Facebook as an example. Users these days not only supply a LOT more information to this service, but supply a lot more intimate details, down to their list of friends and even who they are dating and their religion. Even worse, an attitude has sprung up on Facebook where, as I suggested in my post about Keele University and Facebook, people regard messages and groups on Facebook as akin to pub talk. The situation is not helped at all by the rather poor definition of privacy these sites have. I've been experimenting with accessing data from the site whilst not logged in on a test machine and, to my surprise, knowing some URLs, I can extract a load of data from Facebook (and even logging in is rather insecure, using just HTTP as opposed to SSL and HTTPS). All in all, as most technical people will tell you, the difference between putting something up on Facebook and something up in the public domain is pretty damned slim.

Working at a University, I truly believe it is our job to advise the students who are using the likes of Facebook about the dangers, about the possibilities that something written on the site, maybe even in jest, could come back to haunt them in a possibly awful way years later on. Seeing some of the stuff I've seen on Facebook, we're talking about the likes of the difference between getting jobs and not, the difference between being labeled a team player and labeled a troublemaker. Or worse. I believe we need to open their eyes to the fact that these services might seem free but these companies will always try and find new ways to exploit this data for profit. Of course, this should be tempered with explaining the "no such thing as a free lunch" principle - they will get a certain amount of targeted advertisement and profiling and this is the price you pay for services like GMail, Hotmail, Facebook and Bebo. Simply, just be as clear as possible about this from all angles.

The problem is, if an institution is looking or has adopted these sites for their services, will they be willing to tell their users these realities? What if, such as an outsourcing to a Google or Windows Live, you are not giving your users any choice in the matter of whether or not to adopt these services? The privacy aspect of adopting these services simply isn't being held in high enough regard amongst the people who decide on the matter at institutions because they keep seeing the word "FREE" in front of the service. Free to the University, maybe. But at what cost in the future to the users?

Web 2.0 And The Lack Of IT Strategy

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 21:48:56 GMT

The more and more I hear of institutions using Web 2.0 and the hype around it, the more and more this nagging, agitated feeling I get. Simply put: When it comes to Web 2.0, where's the strategy?

It seems to me that people are adopting Web 2.0 services, "free" services, with no real strategy of where they want to be regarding this service, 1, 2 or 5 years down the line. There's no thought on how this service interacts with other strategies inside your organisation and, what is probably the most important thing to consider when entering into a service like this, very few organisations have an exit strategy. I think its the most important thing because, otherwise, you are effectively outsourcing your IT strategy - your services are defined by the strategies of Google et al and the whims of the financial backers of these companies who can pull the plug on what become essential services to your organisation (and taking the very valuable content you've added to that resource with them?). Or worse, start to charge for them.

The biggest mishap here is that it is not so much as people forgetting to have a strategy for these sort of services, but its justified as part of the whole ethos around Web 2.0. The argument goes like this: with Web 2.0, instead of providing services all you do is enable your users to get to the Web 2.0 services they want to use. This is them being "user focused", they argue. And this is correct, to a level. And that level is how much it fits with your IT strategies.

I'll give you an example. For many, email is the perfect candidate for allowing users to use a Web 2.0 mail service as opposed to the institution-provided solution - institutions simply cannot keep up with the sheer size limits provided by a Gmail or a Hotmail, and email is a nice standard. You can have users move over to this and all you have to do is change the email address in the relative database at your University (I'm massively simplifying this example to only talk about the technology implications). However, there are services where it cannot be in the users' best interests to let each of them choose their own services. Services like Calendaring, Collaboration Tools, General groupware, presence-based systems. For example, unless you have everyone in your institution using the same calendaring service, it becomes almost impossible to use it in a proactive manner (eg. looking at your calendar and others to decide when everyone is free to have a meeting, as opposed to a reactive method by suggesting a date via email and then adjusting based on feedback). If some users use Google Calendar, others use Yahoo Calendar, etc. your "calendar service" becomes useful for nothing more than giving reminders. The crux is, these sort of services tend to come as tools that integrate many services together. The most common example is, of course, Microsoft Outlook. And the main service integrated into Outlook, the one that stitches so much of the rest together? Email.

So, what you may find is that, down the line, for those people using gmail or hotmail accounts instead of their institutional email, you either cannot provide a good enough service or have to provide a hack to implement it for them. On the other hand, you may find that its OK and can be implemented whether they use gmail or hotmail or whatever. I'm not saying either one is right, but at least if you consider it, you have a part of your strategy for both services. And this should happen for all "outsourced" Web 2.0 technologies you adopt.

Which leaves me one big question. I wonder what Trinity College Dublin's exit strategy is for signing over their email service to Google?

Keele-Hauled

Thu, 31 May 2007 00:14:52 GMT

One of the things I find totally fascinating about Web 2.0 and Social Networking is just how far many institutions are from "getting it".

The latest example is a stunning lack of nouse from the University of Keele. This episode started with a couple of groups on Facebook - one suggesting that a Keele lecturer was not very nice (except they used a much, much harsher turn of phrase) and another group which was basically protesting that the Vice-Chancellor of Keele, recently got a pay rise which the students felt did not match her performance. Keele responded in the dumbest way possible, sending a threat of legal action and expulsion to all students.

The fascinating part about this is the students' and University's response on BBC News. The University said there were consequences for these comments as there would be "in a factory" (the fact Keele compares itself to a factory speaks volumes!). However, the President of the Student Union made the point that these sort of comments have always been made in pubs and the like. There's a key point - the University appears to want to live in blissful ignorance of any criticisms their students have, because all that will happen is the same criticisms will be voiced, merely in pubs or other domains where the University can't legally threaten them. What did Keele achieve, then, by these threats? Simply: that lecturer's name has been splashed about the media as being not very good, attention has been brought on the VC's pay, the university's reputation has taken a hit and they have put off people from applying there because they feel they will be treated like dirt there, and their freedom of speech undermined. Well done, Keele bosses!

Back in November I attended a Web 2.0 Conference and was struck by how much the students regard Facebook as an essential tool for their student life. Now, I am on Facebook (with a shocking lack of friends in comparison to many!), I can see why. We, at educational establishments, should not be talking about it as this threat, an external body only controllable with legal representation, but instead recognise how important this tool is, and how it improves the students' experiences of their life at the establishment and how that will lead to them recommending others or even becoming donors as alumni. As for criticism, be glad you saw that criticism because it gives you the chance to improve yourself and your service. I saw this only yesterday when browsing the University of Edinburgh network. Someone posted that they wished our email service had a Notifier like GMail does. Its now on my "things to look into". I wouldn't have found out about that desire, something which could really improve the quality of service, if it hadn't been for Facebook.

Now all I have to wonder is, where is Keele? Or is it a acronym from something like Keep Emerging E Learning Elsewhere?

Traditional Applications in a Web 2.0 World

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:22:26 GMT

In this series of posts loosely hinged around "IT Services 2.0", I have talked about how Web 2.0 is going to change the way users interact with systems, both internal and external. One of the earliest comments I had was to question whether Web 2.0 would have the impact that I suggested, and to point to the likes of virtualisation. The commentator was correct; I had talked pretty exclusively about Web 2.0 applications and almost completely discounted the traditional application.

First of all, we need to realise one thing: Web 2.0 applications will NEVER be as powerful as traditional applications. There are 2 key reasons for this: often for good reasons, traditional applications are simply too large to be downloaded as Web 2.0 apps and, secondly, if a Web 2.0 application can have the sort of access to the local system (and intranet/network) that traditional applications enjoy, there is something badly wrong with the security fundamentals of the browser that it is running on.

So, what is it? Do traditional applications have a place in this new world? Simple answer: very much YES. But with a twist...

In my eyes, there are two real challenges for the deployment of these applications in an enterprise environment - firstly, actually getting the applications onto machines in a timely fashion, and secondly, having them manageable from the user perspective, the IT Services perspective and, also, from the business perspective. Traditionally, applications would be added to machines either by being part of the build image, or added as part of some complex build script. This is simply no longer flexible or manageable enough. You need the configuration item to be at the individual package level. This means you need managed applications.

Managed applications have a different meaning to developers than they do to IT Professionals, but what I mean by this are applications which are deployable, removable, manageable and structured in such a way that you can have pretty much any mix of applications on the workstation. Currently, in the Windows world at least, there are 3 keys technological areas for this: managed installation packages (typically, Microsoft's MSI format), virtualised packages and applications served over some sort of terminal services. What you'll probably find is that no single solution will win out, but there will be a mix depending on various user or technical decisions. For example, if you deployed Office 2003 to all machines, but some users also need Access 2, you might deploy Office as an MSI but Access 2 as a virtualised app. I'll come back to this area in another post.

A lot of organisations have either started or fully gone down the Managed Application approach since moving to Active Directory with Group Policies and/or SMS. The problem is, if you do have an image-based approach, moving to having Managed Applications is not a case of just throwing a switch - creating applications packages can be REALLY HARD, especially in the MSI format, and takes a lot of effort over a long period of time. For example, when my team launched our XP Managed Desktop, every application would be an MSI. We really underestimated the time it would take, because we now have hundreds of MSIs and only a handful of people knowledgeable in how to do them (we have mainly 2 people doing them! - me and my colleague in my team...). Of course, every time you accept a new Managed Application, you are also in effect agreeing to package up all updates, especially security ones, that come out for it. Fortunately, from what I've seen from the briefest of playing with it, moving to a mainly Virtualised solution such as SoftGrid makes application repackaging and deployment a lot quicker and more flexible (see the example described here: http://www.techworld.nl/idgns/2918/app-virtualization-paying-off-for-university.html). Sigh, I wish my University would get Softgrid licenses...

However, there is still one issue. With Web 2.0 services, when a user needs the web application, they go to the relevant URL and, maybe after registering, away they go. Typically, what happens with traditional applications is the user has to submit a call to the relevant support person/team, they go away and configure what they need to configure inside the Active Directory or SMS Server and then get back to the user some considerable time later. We need to eliminate, as much as possible, this second part.

When Microsoft released Windows Server 2003, they trumpeted a lot of the security features and the like. There was one feature, almost overseen, which has almost had as big an effect to many IT Services departments today - Volume Shadow Copy. After enabling this, it killed the vast majority of file restore support calls. How? Lose a file from a folder and all the user has to do is right click on the folder in question, go to properties, go to the Previous Versions tab and there are a catalogue of sometimes weeks of system snapshots. They open up those snapshots and bingo, there's their file to restore immediately. IMMEDIATELY. If you consider this in comparison to how some of these support calls used to be - often rattling on for days and weeks (especially if a user is trying to find a specific file from a specific timeframe) or if the tapes have been swapped out, Volume Shadow Copy is a proven winner for both users and the IT Services department.

I don't want to get into a discussion about this technology specifically, but there's a more fundamental point here - typically, we in IT think the best way to supply a service to users is to make everything as transparent as possible, yet by thinking how we can supply a user-oriented version of the service, we can often get greater benefits for both the IT Services department and for users.

So, how does this play out for applications?

Group Policy has had the ability to publish applications to users for years (publishing doesn't install the app, but the applications appear in the Add Programs part of the Add/Remove Programs control panel), but from all accounts its not been very good. In more recent times, the ever-excellent Altiris have added a activation control application to their SVS virtualisation product called Trinket which allows users to activate virtualised "layers" that have been deployed to them (again, not perfect by a long way, but I have high hopes for this), and Softricity were going a similar direction before Microsoft bought them. Citrix have been doing this sort of thing for ages, too.

Recently though, I have seen what really looks the BUSINESS, and it comes from Microsoft, their Service Desktop product (now renamed: Service Manager). See the screenshots here: http://bink.nu/Article9784.bink. Now, there are two things here: this could give the users a great deal of flexibility and that "Web 2.0 feeling", as happened with Volume Shadow Copy, in being able to get to the services/applications they need as soon as possible (albeit, maybe with clearence from a manager for appropriateness and/or license validity), and if self-service can REALLY work, then we could have a fundamental shift in the way we in IT Services deal with applications. And I reckon, all the better for it.

Pieces Of A IT Services 2.0 Puzzle

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 01:27:27 GMT

So, I announced the new world order of "IT Services 2.0" in a previous post. I should have followed it up sooner, especially as it caused a few comments, but with the problems with Firefox, a hectic personal life, and my PC being killed by my flat's dodgy power, I've not had a chance to go back to it.

Admission time: to be honest, I don't know if I would truthfully say my vision would equate to a "IT Services 2.0". However, it seemed a nice fit, especially with its relationship to Web 2.0 and also, my continuing desire to get my own 2.0! Ultimately, "IT Services 2.0" is just a nice keyword, a useful meme, to hang a few ideas off of.

A couple of commenters have pointed out that this is all part of the bigger picture, and I couldn't agree more. Some aspects which could be part of it, I have blogged about before...such as Virtualisation, Software On A Stick, more use of terminal services provided applications and the more "traditional" aspects of IT Services. How far IT Services goes towards this "IT Services 2.0" world is dependant on both how much we in IT Services can re-invent ourselves, and just what happens to all these external services. For the latter, the obvious problem comes when people start to build services within an organisation that relies upon a third-party startup which then goes under when the Web 2.0 bubble bursts. The difference between this bubble and the previous one is a lot less people relied on these services, and its not really a contingency plan to hope the triumvirate of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google will buy every startup eventually.

I suspect we will see greater and greater adoption of these online services but at the same time, it will increase demand for many of these services to be hosted locally. For example, many Web 2.0 evangelists talk about Web 2.0 being anti-centralisation and that people can use services without it being sanctioned or provided from the centre. That is true. However, what often happens is that the user signs up for an online service and gradually finds problems with it (such as flexibility, reliance, tie in with other services) and this leads to that user either hosting it themselves or requesting IT Services to host it (and if they host it themselves, they find they don't have the skill to set it up or time to administer it and then put in the call to IT Services). I've already seen this quite a lot with wikis. So, the tradition aspect of hosting and provision of core services is DEFINITELY not going to go away.

Also, often, through the natural evolution of IT Services, these online services become useful as pathfinder but superceded when deployed extensively. A great example of this is Google Docs and the whole collaboration aspect. Google Docs is a great way to examine how to use collaboration but, should users come to use this aspect of it extensively, an IT Services organisation would be better looking at rolling out tools that allow very powerful collaboration such as Microsoft's Sharepoint, as opposed to paying Google for a relatively weak tool.

These are all parts of a complicated puzzle, which I'll (and I know I say this a lot on this blog) come back to in later entries.

IT Services 2.0

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 02:19:49 GMT

Here's a bold prediction: In 5 years time, IT Services will be almost completely unrecognisable to how they are now.

Where does this prediction come from? Well, there's not a single source of this, but many areas are coming together, to offer new questions and big new challenges to IT Services and these can only be met via major changes to both the way IT Services work, and those currently served by them.

Let's take the average user of the last 5 years - they come into their office, log onto the machine at their desk, get their managed set of applications and services and if they have any issues, phone Support with their issue. All services directly provided by IT Services.

However, all areas I have just described are changing. Massively.

Increasingly, for the average employee, the computer is not on their desk, but in their laptop bag, with far less enforcable management than a fixed desktop. Hell, they might not even be coming into the office. The applications and services, especially with the advent of Web 2.0, are increasingly unmanaged and web-based. What's worse, is that users expect far more services to be provided than are now. If they have issues, they tend to ask a neighbour or be e-literate enough to be able to figure it out, often moreso in specific applications so than IT Support. Who hasn't come across the secretary or administrator who has effectively coded a small application inside their Excel spreadsheet or the like?

In this new world, the role that IT Services can be described as either one of two things - redundant, or to be reinvented.

Maybe its because I am an IT Professional myself, but I see a great opportunity with this new world, this "IT Services 2.0". Why 2.0? This is not an iterative change, but a massive change that effectively completely changes the relationship between IT Services, the users and the business/organisation as a whole, more so than has been seen before. IT Services will need to be increasingly seen as producing value-added product, new services which aid the user in their work, and not just as supporting existing services. In essence, IT Services will become more of a proactive service provider (a provider of service to end users) than a reactive service provider (a provider of services to when the use needs support). On top of that, there is more and more of a move to formalise IT practises with ITIL, PRINCE2, MOF and the ilk. With these, comes more judgement on value for money, more judgment in what an IT Services department gives to the organisation as a whole.

The real challenge therefore, will be for IT Services to adapt, to provide services to help end users collaborate or communicate and help each other, and to offer more value to the organisation. Of course, there will be casualties such as support staff who can't learn to develop new services will be increasingly marginalised, will be increasingly redundant, but in many ways, it is exciting - the chance to move from an environment of being reactive to providing increasingly rich new services is much more interesting (to me, at least).

Blogging On The Intranet - The Real "Killer App" of Blogging?

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 01:55:18 GMT

I recently got into a discussion about the deployment of Firefox with Brian Kelly from the UK Web Focus blog. The discussion was quite interesting in that me and him were coming at the topic of Firefox from totally different angle - but it was interesting because we both listened to the others' viewpoint, understanding where and what our areas of expertise in this field were. However, what interested me is that this sort of issue that is raised within the University where I work yet the conversation isn't happening.

One of the most significant barriers that I see is that blogging is very transparent, very outward-looking, all posts are in the public domain. This seems an ideal scope for the conversation but the reality is, people will temper their language if talking to people outside of the organisation, temper their views to more "official" viewpoints. This does not match the ideals of what blogging was mean't to be. I wonder if blogging confined to people on the intranet might be its real "killer app".

Moreover, I wonder if such public blogs about parts of institutions or companies is really what its customers want. For example, my role is not very support-facing - I tend to provide services closer to the infrastructure of the University. So, if I have blog, students, for example, could read about my job and comment. This raises two questions: firstly, do they care what I do? Maybe some are intrigued by the inner workings of the University, but interested...I doubt it. Secondly, why would they contact me? There is one word and one word alone to answer that: support. My answer to that second query would be "contact <whichever support team>" (as I wouldn't be the right person to answer the query, when there are others whose job it is). This seems to me to hardly be the best - for many years organisations have changed it so, ideally, you have one point of contact and are not passed around an organisation. Therefore, I would be going against this. My blog could equal a net liability to the organisation.

A bigger issue is that a chaotic open blogging strategy where everyone is encouraged to blog can lead to a little too much transparency, a little too much of a window into an organisation's less-than-perfect processes. The obvious and major candidate for this is Microsoft and its own blogging sites, be that http://blogs.technet.com/, http://blogs.msdn.com/, http://thespoke.net/blogs/default.aspx or http://spaces.live.com or god knows where else. The fact there are so many sites is one of the problems, but its as you pick through them, that you see the complete lack of strategy, contradictions and can spot a mile off the general problems Microsoft has (the fact they have this religious boundary between TechNet and MSDN being one major one). Again, I'm not sure if such an openness to blog publically is so useful. However, it is clear there is not the corporate culture at Microsoft to do anything about the problems that can be spotted via these blogs about their processes. If, say, there was a culture of openness internally, people could see overlaps, see silos, see the massive duplications and then do something about it. Something that could be done WITHOUT it ever getting beyond the walls of the intranet.

Look Who's Talking 2

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 01:35:30 GMT

A good 4 months ago, I was scathing at Microsoft and their stupid ideas of community, and I marked out 3: Channel 9, SolShare and Talking Microsoft.

I got thinking about these the other night whilst clearing out some of my IE and Firefox bookmarks. Although I hardly go there, I still had a bookmark to Channel 9. I went for a final look around, only to discover its still full of the same old idiots and their avatars of their ugly, ugly babies. It got deleted and I don't recommend anyone ever goes there apart from the occasional video (time as in "Halley's Comet makes an occasional visit to earth"). This led me to hunt out the other 2 sites.

SolShare has, not changed much - still that one guy posting article after article after article, with very little response. I did notice on the About page that there is a "Exclusive Area for Members Only" but that really seems to defeat the purpose of a community site. Still, Jonny at SolShare keeps on going and God loves a trier!

Then, Talking Microsoft... ITS BEEN UPDATED! It only took 6 months but they've posted a new video. And quite an interesting one too. Now, let's not have the next one take 6 months (oh, and get rid of the SoapBox logo). How about videos with some of the Softgrid people, the Hypervisor people, Mark Russinovich, the Scripting Guys (and Gals!). And the people who designed Group Policy, because its always best to know the faces of your mortal enemies...

This Web 2.0 Thing...

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 01:51:55 GMT

Just over a month ago, I attended a 1-day conference at the University of Edinburgh regarding approaches the institution was taking towards Web 2.0. It was, in has to be said, a very good conference, and would be of interest to people both internal and external to the University and to both people in and outside of education. Fortunately, the University recorded the whole thing and put it online (WMV format):

http://www.itfutures.ed.ac.uk/agenda.shtml

The first thing I'd like to say, for both those who watch it online and those of us who attended, is that most of the talks are no more than 20 minutes long. And, by heck, the conference was much the better for it - forcing people to fit more information into 20 minutes is infinitely better than hour long talks where its obvious the speakers are stretching out their slides (or go over the same thing as other speakers did). I would give you a review of the speakers of the day but one of the speakers there, Brian Kelly, already did this far better than I could: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2006/11/26/star-gazing-conference-2006. There were very few weak presentations and some really excellent ones, especially from Sian Bayne (who is lecturing an eLearning course), Charlotte Waelde (who is very much an internationally reknowned expert on IP Law) and Robert Muetzelfeldt.

Now, I know about Web 2.0 and have written about it a number of times on this blog, usually from a technical and IT angle. This conference was more focused with Web 2.0 concepts, with more emphasis on the teaching and research angle than usage in line-of-business, such as usage in support, service delivery and making the likes of my job more transparent to our "customers" (students and staff). I went to the conference more to hear from University people to hear about what directions we were heading in. I didn't expect any revelations about Web 2.0 or "Social Technologies".

But, you know what, after attending the conference, I started to ask myself the most fundamental of questions: "what REALLY is Web 2.0?".

There seems to be two summaries to conference sessions at something like this, either "Web 2.0 is a social thing, we can't control it, so we won't try to" or a chase mentality of "woah, look at that Web 2.0 thing like blogging/wikis/whatever, let's have our own blogging/wiki/whatever service". My opinion is that ultimately, neither strategy is correct, mainly because you are taking a choice between a head-in-the-sand approach where your only Web 2.0 strategy is what is currently the most hyped Web tool, and a futile strategy of "we'll try and keep up with an entire industry".

There is, though, a third option - the web service approach. As I demonstrated with previous entries, a lot of these Web 2.0 sites now have extremely mature APIs which allow you to potentially mix and match different services from different sites on the same page. In my opinion, this is the most exciting thing that can come out of Web 2.0. The potential is that you could have a Google Map where clicking on the map will bring up flickr photos of the different parts of the campus. This could be extended in many, and exciting, ways with the multitude of web services out there interacting. The problem is, at a conference like this, people WEREN'T extending it in that direction.

And you know what? That wasn't a problem of this conference - all over the web, this war between what too many people define as Web 2.0 and what it could be, is raging. What is the common way out? You've guessed it...Web 3.0! Or maybe...Software as a Service (AGAIN!)! Or maybe...Enterprise Web 2.0! Well, whatever, but that, in my own opinion, is the way forward - Web 2.0 as it stands now is more Web 1.1 in comparison.

Having said all this, I am really impressed that the University I work for had the guts to have this discussion in public - it could have been a discussion in some anonymous managerial committee, and it could have just not been looked at in any way. It has understood that Web 2.0 and its offspring technologies will have a major impact and are trying to see where that fits. Above anything else, I have been impressed by the pioneers in the University who have tried these technologies - sure, some are not used in the way I'd like and some ideas are doomed to fail. But, hey, isn't that what pioneers are for?

Mashing Up Maps (Part 2)

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 22:35:58 GMT

I've added the screenshots to this post.

In order, you see the map of the central area, what happens when you select Main Library, what happens when you select George Square Theatre, a view of the way Virtual Earth automatically pans out to show the directions from Pollock Halls, and thrown in for good measure, the user can see a part-by-part view of the directions between Pollock and the Central Area