Strategic Technology Analytics

Enterprise Bookmarking: Tap the Power User

I just published an analysis of the enterprise bookmarking/tagging market. You can read it on EWeek here. I think I've hit everyone in the market, but if not drop me a line in the comments below and I'll add ém next time around.

My short take: Enterprise bookmarking is one cool technology that should help employees of already open, flat companies collaborate better and more effectively. Enterprise bookmarking and tagging though hinges on group collaboration, which requires enough individuals to achieve a network effort.  That means a large user base or or at least a small, but active user community, and all but requires removing the sorts of barriers you find in some financial institutions, for example. That's going to be a tough sell (more like a non-starter) in highly regulated industries.

But even in those organizations who aren't regulated or particularly hierarchical, getting user-participation will be a challenge to adoption.  Users don't bookmark or tag out of the goodness of their hearts. They do so because creating a log of important sites helps them. Only once that point is internalized will they feed an enterprise-wide bookmarking system.

What this says is that IT need to be exquisitely sensitive to the interface of these systems. "We're struggling with tagging even though there are some of us who think there's tremendous power [in the technology]," Clark Ritchie, director of Web development and information technology told me. Clark runs Jive Software's Clearspace, a tagging system, in his enterprise, which while not supporting bookmarking yet has similar human-interaction requirements. "We need the tooling to make it so stupidly easy that it takes off. "

Enterprise bookmarking systems are still far from making their systems so "stupidly easy" that they just take off. I list a number of the features in the story that are missing from today's systems, but suffice it say most have enough holes to make soliciting user participation a huge challenge. At the very least, users should be able to bookmark and tag site from the toolbar and not pop an additional screen to fill in the necessary details about a site.

Firefox's Enterprise Hangups

While Firefox offers scads of benefits there are lots of reasons why enterprises might think twice before deploying the platform. Here are some problems pointed out by  Mike Kaply, Yuriy Krylov, and friends. See the posts for suggestions as to how to address some of those issues. Much of this content will become a sort of working plan for the Enterprise Working Group

1. Release lifecycle is too short. Mozilla only supports previous Firefox version for six months after the next release is too short for many large enterprises. Most large organizations  only deploy new software once or twice a year, so half the support period could well be wasted if deployed at the wrong time of year. One year support after the release of the new version is critical.

2. Enterprise level phone support is missing

3. The business case for switching to Firefox is far from obvious.

4. Compatibility with many third-party applications remains a problem.

5. Intranet application  compatibility is its own challenge. Often internally developed applications will take years to write and then are incompatible with new  browsers.

6. Better Active Directory and Microsoft installer support is needed.

7. Better forms support. Mozilla this week was rumored to have cut off support for Xforms. (Can anybody verify?) 

8. No easy way to enforce corporate restrictions around information sharing between departments and yet share bookmarks.

9. No easy way to synchronizing bookmarks across multiple browsers.

And two others from a great post by Yuriy:

10. Enterprise Settings Management -

• How do we flip a setting on every Desktop in the event of a vulnerability?
• How do we prevent users from altering settings that are deemed risky?
• How can we enable and lock Security Zone-like implementation in Firefox

11. Granular Addon Management -

• How can we prevent a user from installing or uninstalling an extension without having to compile extensions into the browser itself?
• How do we internalize extension repositories so we can "Bless" extensions before our users get to them?
• How can we disable an extension or plugin on all desktops in the event of an emergency?

Group Adjusts Firefox for the Enterprise

Kudos to Michael Kaply and Yury Krylov for organizing the Enterprise Working Group. The first meeting will occur next week  The group goals to develop enterprise management and security for the Firefox. More specifically:

• To establish a unified governance body around Enterprise Firefox.
• To drive Enterprise requirements for the benefit of all Enterprise-scale firms and institutions
• To help each other succeed in deploying Firefox within our environments
• To recruit like-minded firms
• To share risk and cost
• To use industry influence to "raise the bar" on Web Browsers and push for WebDev best practices and open standards
• To offer perscriptive guidelines around Firefox to peers

The group's first phone call will take place on July 25th at 10:00am Pacific, 1:00pm Eastern. The meeting details are as follows:

• 650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x91 Conf# 280 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 280 (US)

Each call will be organized around a series of themes. The first call will be about "Experience" and Mike hopes to get folk talking about their experiences around Firefox and the importance to the organization.  Two weeks later the second call will be about "Wishlist"  where folk will have the opportunity to fill in what they think is missing from Firefox for enterprise deployment. Anonymous participation is possible and even encouraged.

'Eweek' and Enterprise 2.0

Next month, the good folks at eWEEK will run a feature of mine on enterprise bookmarking and tagging platforms.

it's very much a work in progress and would look forward to input you might have. Right now we'll examine the use cases for these platforms and share insights from major organizations who're in various stages of deploying them.

Got a use case, favorite vendor, or feature that you'd like to see covered? Drop me a line here or at dave@stanalytics.com and let me know.
Dave