Discovering eDiscovery

Yesterday I attended a 1/2 day seminar on a new subject for me called eDiscovery. The event was located in the Westen Peachtree Plaza in downtown Atlanta. The speaker was Randy Kahn, an author and consultant specializing in legal and compliance issues of information technology. It wasn't a fun event but I did learn a couple of things in this area. Probably the most important was that unless you are a brokerage company then you have no legal requirement to retain email records of employees....which was news to me. Legal problems around email can arise if a lawsuit is filed against your company and past emails exist either in backups or retention systems. Lawyers can request access to those emails and if the old emails are subsequently deleted in the normal course of backup cycling for example the company can be charged with destruction of evidence.  So the key points here are that the emails EXIST and a lawsuit has started. If the emails don't exist then there's not a problem. Of course the company may loose a case where the emails would have provided evidence in it's favor. But my point is the IT manager isn't legally responsible for emails that have been deleted in the normal course of doing business. Good to know. Another thing I learned is it's important for a company to have a record retention policy in place the defines what kind of documents (contracts for example) will be retained for how long and making sure employees have read the policy. And finally one thing Mr Kahn stressed over and over so I think we all got it was that record retention is NOT backups...which is how most companies handle record retention. Hopefully I won't ever have to be involved in eDiscovery, which is going back through electronic records to recover information that pertains to a lawsuit. If I do then I hope my company employs a real record retention system versus relying on backup tapes. Next subject!  

Jive Software seminar on social media strategy

Today I attend the Jive seminar on social media strategy and thought I would try blogging live during the event...taking notes directly into my blog just to see how well the approach works. 

First the seminar  is packed with around 60 attendees. Just about every seat is taken so they managed a pretty good turnout for the event. The venue is Twelve Hotel on West Peachtree beside the Civic Center Marta station...a nice botique hotel that provides free wifi in the meeting rooms for a change. I'm so tired of those big downtown Atlanta hotels that do not provide free wifi. One observation...people are dressed very "upscale" compared to the typical IT event I'm used to attending. Not sure what this means just an observation. Also there are as many women attending as men...another difference from the typical IT event. Social media is not like traditional IT maybe? 

The presentation is being led by Barry Tallis. Starting off with a hilarious video of a couple spliting up because they don't communiate one on one but instead the guy uses traditional marketing communication channels like a web site and brochure.  Barry says social media is about taking your normal everyday social interactions and putting them online. He isn't talking specifically about Jive Software but instead is keeping the disucssion focused on how to build a social media strategy for your organization...off to a great start. 

I like the idea that people find your site via searches on content that is generated in conversations. It's all about the content and specifically content generated by site members NOT by the corporate marketing department. 

Here's one excellent reason to encourage your site visitor to become site members...survey shows members purchase twice as often and 5X more than the average visitor. So you want to turn those visitors into members ASAP.  

I like the case studies portion of the seminar especially when Premier Global Services discussed issues around creation of their new social media community, PGiConnect. Their biggest challenge is one I am faced with often, asking internal staff to began posting community content to the site. They gave a number of useful tips on how to get internal staff engaged such as using rewards based profiling with expertise searching. Results so far are the staff is posting and are even somewhat competitive about posting...who has highest number of posts for example. One of the major concerns they had to overcome was "we're gonna let people drive up and have conversations with us without controls" which is a major concern I hear from people considering implementing a social media site. The answer to the question, Why launch PGiConnect? is that it's going to make it easier for customers to do business with us. Something every business or government agency would aspire to I'm guessing. The biggest risk is "what if they don't show up?" (customers that is). 

One thing they did to help insure success is creation of an editorial calendar and tying mbo's to the internal core team with expectations for contributing content. They also identified other sites where core team members are expected to contribute content with expectations that these external sites will link back to pgiconnect. 

Some tips for success are (1) If operations becomes the primary creator of content then subtantial training is needed.  (2) If someone starts a discussion it is really important to engage that person to reward them.  (3) Mandated usage by internal staff and also rewarded them for using the site. 

One benefit discovered by internal staff is it allows them to speak directly with tech staff of customers thus bypassing marketing. How do you get non tech people to engage? By understanding your core business and putting the community right in the middle of the process stream. Have a very specific set of goals when you build your community. And you may have multiple communities. 

Have a content plan...decide how to keep content coming in. When asking what and why are we building the first question is "what's in it for them (the customer)?" Why would they come and why would they come back? 2nd question and focus is on the type of visitor...are they technology or business types for example. What activities are they doing or expected to do? Which demographic is most willing to create content and share? 

There are five approaches to engaging the community. One approach is to sit back and lisetn. Another approach is where you are involved in the discussion. Third is energizing where you proactively push info to the community. 4th is where you provide learning and support. Last approach is embracing where you ask the question "what do you want us to do for you?"

 Last thing to think about is the technology. What characteristics are most valuable in helping you achieve your goals and plans.  

Different types of communities are Loyalty, Enthusiast, Innovation, and Partner. 

Plan user workflows. People need to understand what to do and where to go. Make sure it's clear and simple.  If a person comes in and they don't know what to do then they are gone. You need a content programming schedule. Create Polls maybe every day or week.  Other good ideas include tech talk,  seeding the conversations, and establishment of a 3rd party blog. 

Plan the lifecycle of a successful community by opening a step at a time to establish a certain tone and foundation up front.  You want people to understand the personality. Know that you will have peaks and valleys. Target the right people at the right time and constantly promote. Know that your community is going to evolve. 

Evangelist, manager, moderator are the three key roles necessary to create a successful community. Evangelist represents to internal members...creates a governance model for communities within the organization. Communication manager is inward facing into the community...keeps track of pulse of the community...knows what's going on. Moderator polices, removes inappropriate content, and contacts internal staff to respond to posts. The moderator should monitor content daily. 

Finally you want employees to be visible and real to the community with real names and faces. 

Web Master Jam Session 2008

Had a great time at Web Master Jam Session - a two day conference held this year in Atlanta on Oct 3-4. This was my first time attending this conference and I would definitely repeat. 

Speakers all seemed to be professional web developers and designers who were good at providing insights into issues and techniques for building world class professional web sites. 

Some of the sessions I attended were

The Bigness of Smallness - John Moore

Universal by Design - James Craig

Going Social - Chris Perry

The Web Planning Process - Jason Ford

Design Lessons in Chess - Rob Weychert

Web Application Interface Design - Garrett Dimon

Striking a Balance - Nathan Smith

There was a general session "Web site smackdown" where a panel of experts criquited submitted websites. Another general session was really interesting as Mike Culver, web services evangelist at Amazon Web Services, spoke about Amazon Mechanical Turk. 

The venue for the conference was pretty cool...a place I haven't been in Atlanta called the Loudermilk Center located on Courtland near the Georgia State campus. 

One of the best outcomes of the conference for me was starting to follow many of the speakers now on twitter so every day I'm picking up new tips and tricks from this group...kind of like the gift that keeps on giving. 

Since the main sponsor, Coffee Cup Software, has moved their headquarters from Dallas to Atlanta the conference will probably be held in Atlanta next year I'm guessing. Hope I get to attend.  

Atlanta Python Rocks

I attended Sept Atlanta Python meetup last night. As usual this meetup is packed with info on the latest and coolest in computing...Adobe Flex (as a front end to python of course), an intro to Amazon Web Services, and a Google App Engine app for an iphone. The AWS talk focused on EC2 and the new elastic block storage (think virtual hard drive). And the flex talk highlighted PyAMF which provides the integration between Adobe Flex/Flash and most popular python frameworks.

This meeting everyone introduced themselves...good to see many people were new to python. And I'm always encouraged when I see a bunch of old guys (like me) still hanging in there staying in the game. As a bonus I learned about a cool video training site for python and ruby called ShowMedo and a new blog to follow on cloud computing by a local (to Atlanta) guy, John Willis, who heads up the local Atlanta cloud computing meetup, AWSome.

.NET University comes to Atlanta

Today I had the opportunity to attend .NET University at the Microsoft offices in Alpharetta. .NET U is a free one day class on new and emerging Microsoft technologies like Biztalk, .NET 3.0, and Sharepoint. The class I attended today was on ASP.NET. I continue to be amazed at the quality of training available free of charge from Microsoft. The two instructors for today's class were both top of their field who you will see presenting in events that cost hundreds of dollars. Microsoft also provided a nice lunch free of charge. The concept of .NET University is to provide all the course materials, handouts, labs, and powerpoint and to encourage it's reuse by anybody willing to take th e time to present. So it's a great resource for internal training or user groups. I look forward to future offerings of .NET U in Atlanta.

Python Is Coming

Yesterday evening (7:30 til 10:00) I attended the Atlanta Python user's group meeting held at Georgia Tech's Food Processing Center. The main presentation was about Google's new App engine...a complete application development and hosting environment utilizing Google's infrastructure. Right now the only development language supported is Python and App engine is in beta limited to around 10,000 developers. Last week I received my app engine developers account from Google and so was excited to see a presentation on it at the python meeting. The most important insight I gained from the presentation is that the apps database engine supports flat tables only...no joins between tables (arrrrrgh). Although tables can be linked and there is good referential integrity between tables. So the take away is think lists not tables…denormalize your data structure…and put everything you need to deliver a record to the web into a single record. Well this is just the beta...wonder what Google's plans are moving forward? Hopefully we'll get a better db at some point. Wish I was attending Google's I/O conference in two weeks in San Fran...where all questions regarding the app engine will probably be answered. For more information on the Google App Engine here's a presentation on youtube on how to create and deploy an application using the app engine. And it's very interesting that Python is now number seven on the Tiobe programming index, one position ahead of C# and two positions up from Ruby. Python seems to be on the rise as the language of choice in the web 2.0 hacker community.

Microsoft Heros 2008 Launch Event

Today I attended Microsoft's launch event for Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 held at Georgia's International Convention Center in College Park. This event was completely sold out with thousands in attendance. It makes me realize just how large and dominant Microsoft really is. The keynote kicked things off in the morning. Followed up by breakout sessions on all three of the new products. I was excited to find the giveaway was free production copies of Windows Server 2008, Vista Ulitimate, and Visual Studio 2008...very cool. I also snagged a free video training DVD for Windows Server 2008 that should help me through the install. The big news on Windows Server 2008 is virtualization and a smaller attack surface...and built-in support for PHP...I suppose to make it easier to migrate from Linux to Windows. Visual Studio just keeps getting better...IMHO the best IDE on the market. (I've even heard James Gosling, father of Java, practically say this before). One nice new feature of 2008 is a split window when editing pages so the rendered view is available in one window while code is seen in the other. Now to see if Windows Server 2008 will even install on my old Dell (pre 2003) servers *sigh*

Clouds on the Horizon

Clouds aren't always a bad thing as often they bring a much needed resource to a thirsty environment. Today I attended the Tour de force roadshow by Salesforce.com, an all day event focused on their new "on demand" cloud (PaaS) solution Force.com. Force.com is a high end version of the new cloud application builders like Quickbase, DabbleDB, Google App Engine, and Coghead where the entire application runs on hosted services and is accessed completely inside your browser thus eliminating the cost of buying and maintaining on-premise technology stacks like servers, databases, etc.

I like the Force.com byline of "Innovation not infrastructure" which makes alot of sense nowadays in this world of "always on" network computing. One issue I'm always hearing with regard to the cloud model is that of data security. "How can I trust someone else to keep my data secure?" Salesforce addressed this concern extensively citing customers in financial and healthcare industries using force.com (which is SAS 70 certified).

I'm always struck by the large numbers of people drawn to these Salesforce events. They are always packed. As usual for a Salesforce event this one was first class. Held at the downtown Hyatt they provided real force.com development books for each attendee...hands on labs....partner booths....keynote...and three different breakout tracks (1) force.com basics, (2) apex language programming for experienced force.com developers, and (3) SaaS startups based on the force.com platform. This 3rd track for startups was of particular interest. They paraded several startup software companies across stage with testimonials of bringing new products to market in record time (months not years) with little risk all based on the Force.com platform. Innovation not Infrastructure.

And I can't forget to mention the nice lunch and post event reception with free drinks and yummy hors d'oeuvres.

Atlanta Code Camp

I just got home from the 4th Atlanta Code Camp attended by approximately 350 dedicated passionate IT professionals evidenced by giving up their entire Saturday to be there. The venue host was DeVry University Decatur campus just a few miles from my home.

I've attended all four Atlanta Codecamps and this was definitely the best yet. Codecamps tend to be a full day affair beginning at 8:30 and ending around 6pm. And you have to stay until the end to participate in the highlight...a grand giveaway of the best prizes and swag you will ever see at any technology event. At every past codecamp I've always been the "Charlie Brown" as one of the few there winning absoutely nothing (almost everybody wins something). But this year I won a 4 gig Zune and a 5lb book on ASP.Net 3.5 development. I couldn't believe how my luck has suddenly changed for the better.

The day started off well when I attended my first session on how to setup 3rd party hosted ASP.Net sites and found the presenter is a fan of WebHost4Life the same hosting service I signed up for last week. He gave us a good set of tools like Filezilla and tips for 3rd party hosting that will save me much time and many headaches. Another good session was on the Community Kit for Sharepoint an open source initiative to "fill in" some needed sharepoint functionality around blogs, wikis, and forms based authentication. I can't wait to install the new enhanced blog solution on our sharepoint 2007 portal.

Codecamp is a wonderful learning event with a full money back guarantee (it's free). The only bad part is the lack of a wireless connection all day. This year they fed us grilled burgers and dogs with all the trimmings or veggie pizza for lunch.

Some of the new tools I gained from camp were Filezilla ftp client, WSPBuilder, Sharepoint Skinner, Sharepoint Manager 2007, .Net Reflector, and how to create a 12 hive toolbar. Guess I can't ask for a refund this year :)

Virtual Worlds are Getting Real

Virtual Worlds New Realities Conference was held Feb 11th at Emory University. Co-sponsored by The Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning, Goizueta Business School, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. This was an impressive event. Everything was well organized starting with free parking and a shuttle bus from the parking lot at Emory's Briarwood campus to the main campus at the Goizueta Business School where the conference was held. I knew I was on the right bus when I boarded and heard comments like “I’m used to teleporting” and “leave now you have 5 minutes until the region shuts down”.

It was a full day event starting at 8:30 ending at 4pm.

Topics covered were

(1) Virtual Worlds Evolving
(2) Emerging Virtual Institutions in Business and Politics
(3) Mirrored Influence of Virtual and Real-World Elements
(4) Possible Futures of Virtual Worlds and Society

by four outstanding panels throughout the day. The panel members were an impressive mix of both academic and business professionals. Most virtual world discussion centered on Second Life and the majority of attendees had experience in Second Life. A portion of the conference was broadcast live into multiple Second Life venues where it was viewed by groups of avatars including mine. It was fun and interesting being at the conference live while also watching as an avatar from inside Second Life.

Speakers included the new CFO for Linden labs, John Zdanowski and Chris Klaus, co-founder of the Atlanta based virtual world Kaneva. Intellagirl was in the audience along with other numerous high profile citizens from Second Life.

Some of the highlights for me included hearing a VP at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta talking about the recent Ginko banking scandal that occured in Second Life. The Federal Reserve is studying how new banking models emerge and evolve inside virtual worlds. IBM has 5000 employees working on virtual world technology to create a better way for IBM customers to work and collaborate inside the firewall. And I have to mention the lunch was fantastic with ceasar salad, stuffed turkey rolls, wonderful selection of grilled veggies, spagetti and meatballs, and amazing deserts.

Sun Tech Days in Atlanta

This was my 2nd Sun Tech Days in Atlanta on January 9-10 held at Cobb Galleria. Actually technically Jan 9th was Netbeans Day and Jan 10th was Tech Days. As usual Sun does a great job putting together an information packed day with plenty of sessions that go into some depth on new developments with both Netbeans and Java EE and Java SE. Netbeans is Sun's free open source IDE which has been dramatically improved in this latest release with version 6.0. Other new technologies hightlighted included JavaFx the Java equivilent of Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe Flash and JRuby which is a pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. Open Solaris is covered extensively as well but being a developer I tend to concentrate on Netbeans and Java technologies. One session I enjoyed was a basic intro to Ruby on Rails development. This year the highlight for me was hearing James Gosling (inventor of Java) speak and answer questions. Someone asked a question comparing Ruby and Python to Java and it was interesting from James response it seems to me he really likes both languages. Another interesting question was why .Net coders are so much more efficient than java coders. James answer was that many java coders don't use the new tools like Netbeans and so are unable to compete with developers using tools like Visual Studio. The most interesting question was "what is your favorite java application"? In response James described Brazil's national health care system which is written in Java. Amazing every citizen in Brazil is covered by this system including the indigent peoples living deep in the Amazon jungle. They all have bar coded ID cards and their medical records are all electronic available anytime anyplace. I thought about this as I visited my doctor this week and filled out the same piece of paper with the same information that I seem to do over and over again in the USA health care system. Maybe Java is the answer?