In line with the current trend to provide collaborative discovery & requirements analysis tools as hosted offerings (see Blueprint, BPM Blueworks, ARISalign), both M3 and the Smart Business Workspace (a general-purpose, role-based rich UI framework on which M3 is based) have been built on Microsoft’s Azure Platform. However Azure’s use of the .NET framework gives Metastorm some nice additional flexibility: it can offer the same tool capabilities in a public, shared hosted environment (hosted on Azure in Microsoft’s datacentres) or as on-premise customer-managed software. The same code can be deployed in either context. Right now, the tools are available free-of-charge to existing customers.

There are a couple of other very noteworthy features here.

First, this isn’t just a process modelling environment: Metastorm has taken its experience from the ProVision EA tooling to support 11 distinct types of enterprise and business architecture model (with process being just one of those). Furthermore the models aren’t just diagrams: they’re based on one common metamodel (which is compatible with ProVision’s) – which means that, for example, organisational elements you might describe in one model can be used to populate swimlane definitions in process models. Integration endpoints can be linked to system definitions from another model. Models can be exported from M3 in Metastorm’s own interchange format, for further elaboration either in the ProVision EA tool or in Metastorm BPM Designer.

Second, there’s an ability to set up collaborative edit/review sessions with multiple participants (though at the moment only one person can edit models during a session) – and during sessions, all participants can contribute comments via integrated chat. Sessions can be recorded, in which case both model changes, and any associated chat events, can be archived and  ‘played back’ in the sequence they occurred at a later date.

Metastorm positions M3 as being for companies that want to open up their EA and BPM efforts to broader communities – to individuals who already practice modelling in some sense today, but who don’t typically use specialised modelling tools (and this is most people, by the way: our research continues to indicate that the vast majority of people involved in modelling business improvements use Visio, PowerPoint, or pen and paper).

To deliver on this position, the company has tried to make M3 easy to use for the nonexpert – for example there’s a fair amount of help and best practice guidance embedded within the tool, and in the individual modelling environments selection of objects is context-sensitive – making it very difficult for someone to create semantically incorrect models.

These features are a great start, but Metastorm should think about going further if it’s really aiming to use M3 to support a ‘bazaar’-like (open, collaborative) approach to involvement in business improvement exercises, above and beyond the raw tooling. For people who aren’t used to the formality associated with ‘proper’ modelling (based on a formal metamodel), it would be really nice – for example – to see a set of integrated, friendly, interactive guides and wizards that take people step-by-step through the capabilities of M3 and the ways models can be created and combined, based on common business improvement scenarios.

Metastorm is delivering Smart Business Workbench as a standalone product to customers: right now, it’s a free of charge product option. In future EA, BPA and BPM product releases, the Smart Business Workbench will be delivered as an integral part – with the appropriate widgets bundled in. If/when customers purchase more products, the appropriate widgets for those products will be provided for integration into a common workbench installation. In this sense, Smart Business Workbench plays a role for Metastorm that’s similar to the role that Business Space plays for IBM.

It’s an interesting and surprising acquisition from Day’s perspective – the company has been growing strongly with increasing revenues and cash, largely thanks to a complete rewrite of its platform about 18 months ago, which brought in the social tools and social media monitoring capabilities that have no doubt been a significant contributing factor to Adobe’s decision to acquire. However, the standalone web content management market has been consolidating and contracting steadily for several years, while the market for social media and collaboration tools becomes increasingly competitive. So perhaps it is not surprising that the company wants to join forces with Adobe – not only for the financial stability and global reach it can provide, but also for the opportunities it presents in terms of Adobe’s Flash and rich media-friendly customer base as well as being part of a broader suite of applications.

Adobe of course is no stranger to the acquisitions process, notably its acquisition of Macromedia back in 2005, and of Omniture last year. Nevertheless the company has some serious work ahead in terms of pulling its technology and messaging together into a coherent package, once the deal is closed. In order to sell enterprise software effectively, the vendor’s overall story is at least as important as the individual technology components, and it is this messaging and strategy that the company will have to nail if it is to take maximum advantage of this acquisition (and all its previous acquisitions). The Day acquisition will bring new skills and ideas into Adobe – the question is whether this will be the catalyst it needs to finally get a handle on how to successfully sell enterprise solutions.

You can read our Vendor Capability Assessment of Adobe’s collaboration software offering here.

For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.

In a piece of news I missed last week, online communities vendor Telligent has strengthened its board with the addition of David Mitchell, who is currently CEO at BPM vendor Global 360. Mitchell has become known in recent years for his skills in preparing companies for either flotation or acquisition – having previously worked for webMethods and VYCOR Corporation in the lead up to their acquisitions by Software AG and McAfee, respectively.

The question inevitably follows as to “where next” for Telligent – while they are a relatively small player in a highly competitive and growing market, they are one of the more established startups with over 100 staff and 3000 customers, as well as a strong technology platform including some interesting analytics capabilities which are a major differentiator for them. From an acquisition perspective, I would have thought (not being a financial analyst) that they would be a very appealing proposition for a larger company looking to enter or strengthen their existing capabilities in this market – so let’s take a punt…. Microsoft maybe? It would complement the predominantly internally-focused and project-centric collaborative capabilities of SharePoint.. Perhaps Oracle? This is an area where the applications giant has so far failed to gain any traction or profile..

It is no doubt too early to say – but I wouldn’t have thought that a public flotation is the principal focus – at least not from a long term perspective. While there hasn’t been much in the way of consolidation among the online communities players yet (except Newsgator’s acquisition of Tomoye in January), I’d expect some activity in this area in the near future. I’ll be watching their progress with interest over the coming months!

For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.

With the latest version of Mind Manager, in order to extend the potential audience of the product, the company has drawn inspiration from its existing client base, of whom 60-70% use the tool for project-related activities, such as building or launching new products. Mind Manager 9 adds some impressive capabilities to support task management and project planning, automatically generating Gantt chart-style project schedules from the list of tasks and dependencies, and enabling users to identify utilisation rates for team members. The company positions these capabilities as “project planning for the rest of us” – i.e. targeting the non-specialists, for whom tools like Microsoft Project are overly complex.

Other areas of focus in the new version (which is due for release in August) include tight integration with Microsoft Outlook to support the import of Outlook content such as emails and tasks into a mind map, retaining a dynamic link between the two tools so that the content remains current, as well as a new presentation mode which allows users to create multiple slide decks from a single mind map to support interactive presentations, enabling the content to be edited during the presentation as required.

Overall, this is a positive direction for Mindjet, and is another example of the creativity that the company is employing in order to maximise its opportunities and long term stability in the software market. There remain challenges to overcome – not least the wealth of competition in the collaboration software market as a whole, as well as the shift in mindset required by many users before they can understand the benefits of mind mapping tools – but this is clearly a company which is determined to adapt and survive, while leveraging its greatest differentiator – the mind map.

See our On The Radar report on Mindjet.

For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.

Specifically there’s now a capability that allows any user to ‘follow’ any object in Blueprint. That could be a project, a process, an activity, a piece of data… any changes made to that object will then be highlighted in your own activity stream so you can keep track of everything you’re interested in. This mirrors one of the most interesting aspects of Chatter, which allows Salesforce users to receive notifications from applications, data sources, documents and so on – all integrated into one activity feed with notifications from team-mates.

This is one further small sign that convergence between collaboration tools, social software and BPM is gathering pace: expect to see more and more of this kind of thing in the coming months.

Advisory clients can read our in-depth analysis of the Lombardi BPM offering  here.

For more analysis of BPM trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium BPM advisory service.

In the new MWD Strategic Insights report (which you can find here) we explain in detail how aspects of collaborative and social software can add value to BPM – to what is, at its heart, an inherently collaborative activity – to make BPM more open and inclusive. We also show how collaboration technology is being woven into the operational platforms that come with many BPM toolsets, enabling operating process instances themselves to unfold in more collaborative, dynamic ways (we call these ‘Social Processes’).

Lastly, we look at how many of the capabilities that BPM platforms deliver – for example the ability to audit and monitor activity as it unfolds – are adding value to scenarios where formal processes and BPM platforms aren’t the best fit as the ‘front end’ to be used by workers, where less formal collaboration technologies hold sway.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the historically separate technology stovepipes that grew up around interpersonal collaboration and process management / workflow are merging, and the result is actually very positive for both ’sides’. We’re seeing organisations take advantage of the blurring of technology boundaries to deliver more concrete results more quickly.

As I said over at CIO UK (As BPM goes mainstream, so the bazaar overtakes the cathedral):

“To me, the biggest value of the former [BPM] philosophy [one which favours openness and inclusivity over formality] over the latter [one which is very structured and scientific] is the way that where the latter approach to process change tends to focus everyone’s minds on the quality of the design of an improvement, the natural outcome of the former philosophy is improved quality of the ultimate outcome – that is, the acceptance of the change or improvement by those people it impacts on a day-to-day basis. A beautifully-designed process improvement is one thing, but if it’s not accepted then you’re screwed. And in knowledge work and service improvement scenarios, where people are the product, acceptance is all.”

As we move beyond the early adopter phase we’re starting to see trends and best practices emerge. So too the technology marketplace is maturing, as vendors recognise the bigger picture and the potential of online communities within a broader enterprise collaboration strategy.

This is an area that we’re doing a lot of research on at the moment. Last month we published two reports: Building online communities for business and Implementing online communities for business. Today we published the first in a series of case studies, looking at how Swiss Re was able to improve their internal collaboration and knowledge sharing capabilities using online community software. We’re going to follow this up soon with a series of assessments reports that focus on the leading technology vendors, along with a companion technology guide. Stay tuned for more information on that.

We’re also really excited to start telling you about a free online event we’ll be launching in September. It’s in the early stages of development today, but it’s going to look a lot like this event we’re running on Reinventing customer experiences with BPM and this one on Time to define your Cloud strategy. For our online communities event we’d love to include some interviews with organisations that have already got started with either internally- or externally-facing online communities. We’ve already got several lined up, but we’re always on the lookout for great stories. If you’ve already implemented online community technology in your organisation and you’d like to share your experiences and best practices with others and shine a light on your successes, drop us a line and we’ll let you know what’s involved. We’ll also tell you what we’d like to offer you in return for your time and participation.

If this is an area you’re exploring yourself take a look at our reports and make sure you’re signed up for a free Guest Pass account so we can keep you updated about the event and let you know when it’s been launched (tick the box to say you’re happy to receive news and updates from us by email).

• Jive What Matters – a new dashboard which aggregates relevant information from a variety of sources including Jive Social Business Software and social sources such as Twitter – is a new release designed to help users get to grips with the vast amount of information that continues to flow towards them, particularly in the social world of realtime notifications and alerts.
• Jive Apps Market - an applications market place (as the name suggests) which enables third-party developers to build and sell applications on top of the Jive Social Business Software platform, to support specific industry needs or business functions.

Other announcements included a partnership with CSC in conjunction with the Jive Apps Market launch (under which CSC has agreed to resell Jive’s solutions as well as committing to develop mobile applications based on the Jive SBS platform), Jive’s licensing of Twitter Firehose (Twitter’s unrestricted data streaming API) to support Jive What Matters, and the availability of the SaaS-based, hosted version of Jive SBS on the Google Apps Marketplace.

It is clear from these announcements – and the fast-paced momentum at the company at present – that Jive Software is determined to carve out a leadership position in the social software market, making it the first choice independent vendor for organisations looking at how they can leverage this technology, and lifting it beyond the realms of the small start-up towards the serious enterprise deals usually reserved for the likes of Microsoft and IBM. As I’ve discussed in previous posts (e.g. Jive Software announces $12 million in new funding and Starting 2010 with a flourish: Jive acquires Filtrbox), the company has achieved significant revenue growth over the last couple of years, and appears to be comfortably on course for an IPO – which is widely expected for early 2011, although there has been no official confirmation as yet. In particular, it is reassuring to see a company that is able to balance its enthusiasm for a new wave of technology like social software with an understanding of the practical requirements and expectations within a large enterprise – and it is this, fundamentally, which is fuelling its success in such a highly competitive, fragmented, and poorly understood marketplace.

See our On The Radar report on Jive.

For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.

And so it was against this backdrop that I attended this year’s Novell Brainshare conference in Amsterdam in May – with relatively low expectations from a collaboration perspective, prepared to have to pluck snippets of collaboration strategy from a vast sea of security and systems management information (which, frankly, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to). However, while I was, I think, the only analyst in attendance with a specific collaboration focus (which I took as a bad sign!), in fact I was pleasantly surprised by the event. There was indeed a significant focus on what the company terms “Intelligent Workload Management” – which incorporates Novell’s security, systems management and SuSe Linux business in a convincing strategy designed to help organisations manage and optimise their IT infrastructure both on premise and in the cloud – but there was also a major emphasis on collaboration and how Novell intends to pull these two sides of its business together while reinvigorating its collaboration software business.

I will be looking at Novell’s collaboration software strategy in detail in a forthcoming Vendor Insight report, but at a high level there are two central pieces to the strategy:

• Novell Pulse – this is a real-time, social collaboration platform which is due for release later this year. Built using the Google Wave protocol, Novell sees solutions like Pulse becoming the heart of future collaboration strategy, with other tools including email, team workspaces and web conferencing acting as services which feed into or out of this central hub.
• Collaboration Data Management – this is an evolving strategy which aims to apply Novell’s expertise in security and systems management to enterprises’ collaboration environments, enabling data from multiple collaborative sources to be managed and secured centrally, synchronising internal and external data sources, and supporting both on-premise and cloud-based services, as well as a combination of the two environments.

Overall, the strategy from a product perspective seems strong, although there are still significant questions around how well the company can communicate and sell its vision to the right people within enterprises, particularly given its IT-centric background and its parallel focus on Intelligent Workload Management.

You can read our Capability Summary and Overview of Novell’s collaboration software offering here.

For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.