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Analysts Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles Intranet

Gartner Magic Quadrant; a dark horse closing up the outside fence…

Gartner Magic Quadrant: Social Software

Just been reading the Gartner Magic Quadrant: Social Software. Jive  come out as the clear leaders, closely followed by IBM and Microsoft (the latter featuring better on ability to execute). Other notables – Drupal, Telligent, SocialText and blueKiwi jostle with Google for the Visionary space. Gartner wonder if Google’s move into the enterprise is opportunistic. I think it’s strategic. Open Text and Atlassian feature as Challengers.

I think the horse racing up the outside fence as they close into the paddock will be Thought Farmer. Their biggest weakness is the fact they don’t have any big customers, a fact that their alliance with the Dachis group is bound to change! I enjoyed their latest blog too The Problem of the Intranet – so much so I actually read it on my iPod Touch! Touche to the Canadians!

n.b…Hmm, I wonder where WordPress will feature in future Magic Quadrants?

Categories
Communications Featured Articles

Google Internal Comms Machine?

Who noticed Google’s new ‘Google Internal Comms Machine’ announcement last week? No, we’re not talking about Wave this is far more fun. Google announced news of its Desktop Notifcations API.

Now for many many years I managed something ultimately very similar, (albeit with video) which needed very strong governance to work. Problem was these notifications could be bloody annoying. Net result was that around 20% of users switched them off (aka sabotaging their desktop image).

Nonetheless, around 50% saw the notifications we sent and about 35-40% watched the videos. This left a very grey areas of those not seeing the notifications. What was happening?

The word on the ground was system failure – or ‘sabotage’, the messages weren’t getting through. In reality thought they were. The truth was that people weren’t interested enough to watch the exec videos but were too wise or embarrassed to say so.

Which takes me back to Google. If their Desktop Notification isn’t going to go the way of Microsoft’s very helpful Mr Paperclip it will need very strong management from whoever uses it to send the notifications.

Who/How will that be managed? Have Google even thought about this? One wonders and waits…

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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.