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Communications Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles Intranet

Intranet Browser of the Future

Funny really when you think about it, a lot of time, effort, blood, sweat and hard cash budget goes into the intranet itself, the CMS, the platform and portals, etc., etc., but little all goes into the browser. What of the Intranet Browser? A few searches on this shows not a lot being done, apart from one notable exception Shiv Singh at the AppGap Intranets are not just intranets anymore. Here Shiv rightly to my mind, talks about the core business functionality and says that:

Today, employees demand more consolidated interfaces where all the information, collaboration, self service and business application access needs are met.

This is certainly so, but for Shiv this is ‘post-browser’ issue and ultimately a question about ownership within the corporation and a need to realign to meet employee, not application or dept needs. Yes, indeed, this is an item I plan to write on shortly, but for the time being I think one needs to ask if this is really going to happen. I for one won’t be holding my breath here. There are possibilities – WebEx Connect for example, or Microsoft’s Surface Table technologies, but for the time being, let’s get tactical.

Getting Tactical

I think there’s a low hanger ready to be scrumped in terms of Shiv’s one stop consolidated interface, in terms of what we can do with the browser now. The model I believe is Flock. I’ve written before about the way that Flock so neatly integrates RSS into the browser experience and that if this was more widely adopted in the enterprise then tales of RSS’s death might certainly seem to be exaggerated (Kick my RSS – How to make Enterprise RSS work). But, and it’s a but as big as Galway Bay, why stop there? Why not use Mozilla technology to do what Flock has done for the average social media savvy punter and do the same for the enterprise?

Enterprise Social Network Browser

This is what I’d have in my Intranet Browser of the Future:

1) At the top left there would be a series of buttons to access the core built in functions. These button would provide access to function bars such as RSS

accounts

2) There would also be a direct hard wired button to Directory. The Directory would have full Tagging and self-personalisation functionality

3) This tagging would tie in to other social media tools, all accessible from the browser. One would be Favourites – my personal and social bookmarks that I could share with my colleagues

4) I would naturally also be able to connect a wide range of other enterprise social network tools, not only bookmarks, but also my internal corporate blog, my forums, my videos, etc etc. In the corporate example these would be Yammer or Jive, all or a mix. The key thing is the access to their functionality is hard-wired into the Browser, not the apps.

social-tools1
5) So continuing in the same logic, all the corporate video and streams would be available within the browser – these could be live IPTV shows, streamed Video on Demand (VoD), or user generated YouTube type video.

youtube1

And so on and so on. To reiterate, the Browser holds all this together to create the ‘consolidated interface’. It’s a Pareto fix I grant, but 80% consolidation in the near future would be better than waiting indefinitely for the full delivery.

Apologies for the duff formatting – I need to look at how WordPress is handling images.

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Enterprise 2.0 seaport.exe

Seaport.exe, a battle of the cloud

Noticed this morning after my PC ran to a crawl that a new app was running – seaport.exe. A quick Google (no I didn’t use Microsoft Live search) revealed that quite a few people thought is was spyware and even their tech advice advised so. However, it turns out that this thing lurking as seaport is actually a Microsoft app and more specifically a Search Enhancement one. 

Far from being one of those loathers of the Redmond lot I was nevertheless a bit put out to learn this. It was apparently installed along with Windows Live Writer, an app which I installed but have so far not got on with – I’m typing this directly into Chrome. Either way, I hadn’t asked for this app and didn’t have a perceived need for it either. So some further searching revealed the basics on how to remove seaport.exe – see below.

 

The author of the piece a certain Mr or Ms Improbulus I duly thank. But what is Microsoft’s motive here. Ms Improbulus is in no doubt:

I know Microsoft are trying to catch up on the “browser as desktop” / “cloud computing” front especially after the release of Google’s Chrome browser, but forcing Office Live Add-in etc onto Windows users really isn’t the way to do it.

I fully agree with the latter sentiment. Also, if Microsoft is to catch up here, let alone take the lead in this battle of the cloud, then these sort of subterfuges are not the best way forward. Far better to court our cooperation with transparency and not quasi secret bundles.

Update: How to stop seaport.exe

 

Here’s the basics on stopping seaport.exe

For Vista go to Start and Start Search and enter  “services.msc”

 

For XP go to Start Run 

run

and enter “services.msc”

services

Click OK. Next you’ll get this screen pop up:

services1

Scroll down do seaport.exe, right click and select Properties – a box like this will appear:

properties

Go to Startup Type and select Disabled

This should stop it hogging up your machine working.

See also for more details and Live Add-in too.