I alluded to this the other day, but the following from Jupiter Research sums up MSFT’s marketing positioning strategy for the new Office System, which will also include Longhorn and I suspect enterprise search.

Basically, they are not selling features or services, but “solutions” to very specific business processes.

“Microsoft is putting less emphasis on individual applications and product features and more emphasis on what people can do with Office System. The strategy also synchs with other products, such as development of Windows Longhorn. Earlier, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates discussed “scenarios” the company is using to develop Longhorn. One scenario might be a teenager interested in listening to music. Microsoft has taken a similar approach to Office System, looking at information scenarios Office users confront daily.”

“The distinction between features and scenarios seems subtle, but is actually more complex. The scenario focus means that Microsoft is shifting away from adding new features simply for the sake of adding new features to looking more seriously at how people use or would want to use the products.”

Building on the ubiquity of Office in the enterprise, I think Microsoft
is promoting a very compelling trend and something to seriously consider in
regard to delivering an enterprise user experience that feels
seamless or natural.

Essentially, it’s
an obvious goal: Give users an interface that they already know and use daily.

Specifically the key to
providing this enterprise utopia is with Microsoft’s soon-to-be released "Office
2003 System". IMHO and if all goes well, Microsoft will finally deliver a
malleable front-end framework that lets developers tap into the specific work-flow
processes that people accomplish everyday in each of the main Office
applications (Word, Excel, Outlook and perhaps PowerPoint and Access)

Long block-quote from
an article on CNET: Microsoft
buddies up with new Office

"…
back-end software makers want to buddy up to Microsoft. Partnering with the
software giant means they get to tap into those proprietary add-ons, which
means they can offer Office applications as a way to view and manipulate
back-end data. Given that no enterprise software maker can offer a user
interface as familiar as Microsoft Word, that’s a compelling advantage.

 

"It’s
a very usable user interface, and people spend a lot of time there," said
Susan Funke, an analyst for research firm IDC. "I think that’s a big part
of why–if you look at somebody like a J.D. Edwards–(enterprise software
companies are) definitely looking at Office 2003 in their strategy."

 

By giving workers a familiar interface, Office 2003 can
help remove a roadblock that has helped prevent wider adoption of CRM software
and other enterprise
technology, Microsoft’s Leach said. "One of the biggest challenges with
these back-end systems is the tremendous ramp-up people have to go through, to
get proficient at using it," he said.

 

Microsoft’s integration of XML offers even more benefits
for companies involved in the nascent Web services field, as it allows them to
insert those services into Office applications. Microsoft gets to promote new
whiz-bang services that make Office more useful, and service providers can
offer their wares in the environment where office workers spend most of their
day.

 

Factiva signed a partnership agreement with Microsoft last
year to enable its research and information services to be folded into Office
2003 applications. Customers could click on a company name in a Word
document, for instance, and quickly get basic corporate data from Factiva
sources.

 

"It slows people down if they have to open a browser
and start a search engine or launch some new application to get a piece of
information,"
Leach said. "If I can do that from within Word, I’m much more likely to
build that into my day-to-day routine. That’s a tremendous business advantage
for companies offering these kinds of services."

Also, this goes without saying, but I think this applies to Open Source solutions that are looking for better enterprise penetration. Personally I feel they would find a better footing with Office integration points that facilitate a specific pain, work-flow, or need within a business.

MSNBC has a decent post about
What is a Wiki? (scroll down the page a bit, because their perma-links don’t seem to be working properly)

Tim Bray quotes Sam Ruby’s observation of the tenaciousness of collaboration via a Wiki

“[Sam Ruby] speculated that this was like rugby, if we get enough people pushing in the same direction we’ll eventually move the ball in that direction.”

Indeed!

Today must be research Wednesday for me, because here’s another great article on search. This one, from the latest issue of DM Review,
is specifically talking about “Discovery Systems” in relation to BI:

“Leading enterprise search and classification vendors, including IBM, Verity, Inxight and Stratify, have recently introduced “discovery systems” designed to automatically identify important relationships and trends within documents and document collections.”

This sounds like a barebones version of Groove:

“WASTE is a software product and protocol that enables secure distributed communication for small (on the order of 10-50 nodes) trusted groups of users.”

However, it looks like perhaps AOL made Nullsoft dump WASTE from their site because the link went 404 yesterday afternoon.

Of course there’s already a mirror, which I found @ blueyonder.co.uk via the Slashdot Thread:

• Windows Installer
• Source

As a fan of Groove, I’ll need to set aside some time to check this out.

Audioscrobbler Browser — “[is] a visualisation tool for finding new music by exploring links between related artists”

Wow! I found relationships between artists that I never realized existed.

For example, Nina Simone and Portishead are releated via Radiohead.

According to researchers at the University of Washington which was referenced in this NY Times article

“…companies would benefit from encouraging richer social connections,”

The Times article also mentions …

“Google may be great, but people are greater. Paraphrased roughly, that is what researchers at the University of Washington found in a study released last week. People are more likely to seek information from other people than to search the Internet or an intranet, and they are three times more likely to go to people they know than to outside experts…”

Some good reads about the current state of web-based interfaces, keyboarding and where they all started…

• Future: Is there life after the browser?
• Who Needs a Mouse?
• Bruce Damer’s Personal Histories of the Desktop User Interface

(via Doc and Don)

Well said from McGee’s Musings about blogs and KM:

“Knowledge work, on the other hand, depends on extracting maximum advantage out of the unique characteristics and experiences of each knowledge worker. Knowledge management, from this perspective, has to be a decentralized, grassroots, activity. If you accept that premise, the promise of weblogs in knowledge management becomes clearer. Weblogs operate on grassroots assumptions by design.”