Collaboration Blog

The latest news and views from BoardVantage. News includes product and customer updates, as well as timely industry coverage. We also write in depth on the real business value from social media as recorded by our customers.

Mary De Frenchi

Branded Pages

September 10th, 2010 by Mary De Frenchi

One of the most useful features of our NextGen Portal is branded pages. This lets you create custom pages at the click of the button. You can create your own combination of content and functionality, providing necessary context for clarity.

The corporate secretary office can use it to present board meeting information in an intuitive format, for example by highlighting new items. One layout that works well is to present the upcoming board book agenda front and center, with separate panels for a meeting calendar and links to minutes and committees. Adding your own corporate logo and colors creates a professional appearance that reassures your audience.

Executives can use it to package information for their own teams. In theory, staff ought to be able to find information using navigation and search. In practice, though, day-to-day pressures will crowd out anything that isn’t front and center. With a branded page I can put in one place, everything that I think is important. You can think of this as Intranet 2.0 – the crucial difference being that my assistant can update the content and I’m no longer dependent on support outside of my team.

Here’s an example that our VP Marketing, Tim Hampson, put up. The primary audience is Sales, and it’s purpose is to give everybody a heads up on what is coming as well as one-stop shop for materials that Tim thinks Sales should be using. Since Tim controls this directly, it’s always up to date. I love it, as I now know my sales teams have the best and most timely marketing content available at their fingertips.

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Joe Ruck

No Moving Parts

September 3rd, 2010 by Joe Ruck
In my opinion, one of the biggest benefits customers enjoy with a hosted solution is the reliability that ensues when you only have to support a single environment, one which you as a vendor, have total control over.

Having worked for a number of software companies, and helped them grow from start-up to IPO, I am struck by the change in the character of Engineering. In the early days of the start-up, the engineering team (say, less than 10 staff) spend their time building new functionality. Productivity is impressive, and extrapolating what 1000 engineers could do makes you think you can take on the world. But then, slowly but surely, a greater proportion of engineering time gets sucked up in bug fixes. As the number of customers grows, the number of bugs, rather than decreasing instead tends to increase, and before long you do indeed have 1000 engineers, but the majority are employed on maintenance.

I’ve seen this movie several times within my own companies, and dozens of times with other companies I’ve been familiar with. This is not down it any individual shortcomings, it’s a market dynamic, and one that cripples innovation in those companies.

The problem with Enterprise Software is that no one piece is an island. All software depends the operating system, and typically a database too. Usually there are important cross links to other systems such as email etc. Each of those components exists in many versions and with a variety of patches that can be applied in any combination. The result is that even for a company with 1000 customers, it’s likely that each installation is unique. The number of possible permutations of just 10 patches applied or not is 2048, and cross-dependencies can be both subtle and exponential.

No vendor can regression test 1000+ different combinations of software platform. So when your vendor tells you they haven’t come across your problem before, they are no doubt telling the truth. No customer can run on precisely the exact same software levels that are recommended, since other software will mandate other fixes, and in any event, the inevitable security updates render all such recommendations obsolete within weeks.

Given the complex nature of modern software, it can be hard pinpointing the precise cause of a failure – is it the application, the database, the operating system, or something else? The resultant finger-pointing increases the customer’s blood pressure and length of time taken to resolve as the customer has to take on the role of triage. When a hosted application experiences a failure, the accountability is clear.

A hosted service, with its single environment, takes all of that away at a stroke. Engineering can get back to its core job of innovating, not maintaining. Aside from making life easy for the customer with a more reliable system, the lack of maintenance costs flows directly to the hosted solution vendor’s bottom line and gives them a competitive advantage that enterprise software vendors cannot overcome.

Posted in BoardVantage News, Industry Comment | No Comments »

Tim Hampson

Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

September 2nd, 2010 by Tim Hampson

Whatever happened to Google’s Wave? Barely on the market a year and suddenly withdrawn by Google, it begs two questions.

1. Why did the world’s biggest and baddest Internet player, with the biggest and baddest engineering team (the guys that came up with Google Maps) fail so miserably?

2. Is there anything in this wreckage that could be salvaged?

My take-aways on the first point are as follows:

Value proposition. Wave was supposed to be an email replacement but nobody seemed to be able to articulate why exactly it was better and under what circumstances. I confess to never “getting it”, so it was somewhat reassuring that no one else did either. The analyst community, who sang Wave’s praises until recently, seems somewhat lost here. My take? Wave was too unstructured – letting people see what you type as you type might look cool in a demo, but it can be severely career-limiting if your boss is on the other end. If I know one thing about collaboration it’s that process is key. Wave was the opposite.

Performance – or the lack thereof. I’m not sure if this was architecture, Google’s addiction to perpetual betas, or simply them not putting enough oomph behind it. Still, while it’s not often discussed by vendors, performance is hyper-critical for product adoption. No one wants to wait around for a screen to paint. Rest assured at BoardVantage (and it’s one reason we’re not cheap) that we deliver a performance level commensurate with business critical systems.

Integration – or the lack thereof. If you can’t get your content in or out the system, whatever magic happens inside the box is irrelevant. In this context, the fact that Wave integrated with neither Gmail or Googledocs is particularly puzzling.

The second question is harder to answer. It’s easy to poke fun at giants when they trip up, but there is a lot to be said for maintaining context in any collaborative environment – a central feature of a “wave”. At BoardVantage we’ve taken a somewhat different approach with our “discussions” which are integrated both with email as well as the document repository, even to the level of recognizing which versions were relevant at a particular time. Perhaps not as hype-worthy, but similar in philosophy, and one I believe will match more corporate use cases, where you need broad access but without sacrificing process.

PS

I can’t finish this post without a nod to Joe’s article “Size Doesn’t Matter”. If Google can so unceremoniously discontinue Wave, it’s safe to say that company size and product market profile are no guarantees of longevity. Caveat emptor.

Posted in Industry Comment | 1 Comment »

Junaid Syed

Ethical Hacks

September 1st, 2010 by Junaid Syed

If you expect a system to perform when you need it most, you’d better test it. And it’s a fact of life that it will be a better test if it’s done by people who did not build that system in the first place. We’re not talking about manipulation here. It’s just that a fresh perspective will raise at least some areas of weakness that are otherwise inevitably overlooked. An ethical hack is such an independent test.

For a prospective customer, third party audits and a prestigious customer list will often suffice as adequate validation but in some cases there is simply no substitute for checking under the covers yourself. As CTO at BoardVantage, far from being a purely negative ‘cost-of-sale’, I welcome third party inspection. Different eyes might uncover overlooked details, and the hack itself serves as a process refresh which is difficult to accomplish with just internal staff

An ethical hack is usually performed either by the information security team of an F-100 or financial institution, the IT department of a smaller organization, or a third party specialist. Because in commercial SaaS environments, the production system is in use 24×7, the ethical hack is ALWAYS performed against a mirror system. That way you obviate the (slim) possibility of customer data being compromised or bring about potential performance deterioration during DoS (Denial of Service) testing.

It is much easier to talk the talk on security than walk the walk but an ethical hack will quickly separate the vendors who fall in the former group from the ones who have made the costly investments and who fall in the latter.  So, if a vendor is serious about security, ethical hacks are a wonderful source of customer feedback. Third parties, immune from internal politics, can make observations that might be difficult for internal QA departments and security teams. By subjecting oneself to a plethora of different tests by different teams, the vendor dramatically increases the coverage of possible exposures.

While an expensive investment for both customers and vendors, ethical hacks remain the most effective way to verify the security of any SaaS vendor. In addition ethical hacks remain one of the best ways for a vendor to assure that the systems meet the standards and that the vendor’s standards are in fact up-to-date.

Posted in Collaboration Benefits, Industry Comment | No Comments »

Mary De Frenchi

I Travel Therefore iPad

August 27th, 2010 by Mary De Frenchi

Tim Hampson posted an interesting snippet on our own executive collaboration portal about his new iPad and travelling through SFO.

Obviously worth checking directly given the variability in experiences, but for many, this could be sufficient reason alone to leave the laptop at home and pack the iPad instead.


Posted in Industry Comment | 1 Comment »

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