The vision - Part II

So it was a nice vision - connecting people to people and leveraging their collective knowledge to help you work smarter. But there were some challenges. One around technology and the other around processes (for you can have the best technology in the world but if no one used it effectively ...).

Regarding the technology issue we feIt that there was already lots of good collaboration technology out there so we didn't want Ensemble to be in the business of writing collaboration software. But what was missing was a way to start linking all these technologies created by different companies together to create a connected, user-centric experience. This is especially important for companies who may already be using some collaboration technologies and are looking to enhance, not replace, what they have.

One thing I liked from my years at SmartForce was the eLearning industry model of assembling courses from content objects. It was powerful in that it allowed you to take content created by different people and link it together in a linear fashion. The result was a variety of solutions that allowed you to easily create content and courses in a scalable and repeatable way.

But for collaboration there was no such scalable and repeatable process. Anyone who has tried to add collaboration realizes that it is not an easy task. To help fill the gap companies emerged that offer collaboration suites but then you are stuck using their proprietary technologies. We wanted something that would be much more flexible to tie together all these technologies and able to take advantage of new technologies as they emerged.

So we built a Collaboration Management Framework. It can encapsulate existing third party collaboration technologies into 'collaboration objects' that you can then assemble together create dynamic collaboration workspaces. Think of it as a hosted gateway to these other technologies.

So this allows for some interesting stuff to happen:
(1) the collaboration objects can share the same end user interface even though the underlying technologies may come from different vendors
(2) you can create collaboration workspaces by selecting the objects you want. For example:
[chat room] + [discussion group] + [knowledge base] + [global search]
(3) you can also create collaboration workflows that link objects together. For example click on Chat and the flow could be:
- "please type in your question" (question object)
- the question text string is used to search the related knowledgebase and present possible answers (knowledgebase object)
- if you didn't find your answer proceed into the chat (chat object)
- at the end of the chat the transcript is emailed to you and added to your collaboration record (email object)
- the person at the other end of the chat has the option of going back into the knowledgebase and updating it with the resulting refined question/answer pair so that next time the user will find the answer faster.
(4) collaboration objects can be reused so instead of creating a new discussion group you may want to reuse an existing one (like Technical Support discussion group).




Of course it took Mike LeBlanc's team almost two years to build the framework (making collaboration simple is a complex task [smile]).

So that helped to solve the technology challenge. The other issue was more of a people issue, i.e. the need to develop processes to help people interact much more effectively than is currently possible. This fundamentally revolved around the issue of adding context to collaboration. The context is critical especially when delivering collaboration on a large scale:
- who is the user?
- where did he come from?
- how did he enter?

This is more than simple personalization ("Hello Ben"), this is about creating a collaboration workspace that dynamically changes according to all facets of the person.
- who is the user?
To place interactions into context you need to know his name, when he joined, what is his peer rating, how many interactions has he been involved with etc. Supplemental information to help you weigh his comments. Think about eBay - what makes you trust the guy on the other end of an auction? His eBay profile certainly helps.
- where did he come from?
If I come in from a link in a course versus clicking on Community on my company's intranet I should be shown different collaboration options. Maybe one has a Live Help chat and the other doesn't.
- how did he enter?
Ben@Office is different than Ben@Home - I'm still Ben but my ability to interact are defined by my access device. My office computer may have a faster Internet connection but my computer at home has a videoconferencing camera. My workspace needs to adapt accordingly.

So we also created a set of global services within the framework that sits on top of the workspace:
- presence awareness
- environment detection
- rating and ranking
etc.
The global services were designed to be independent of the underlying collaboration objects and are used to enhance and extend their functionality (as not all technologies have these functions and if they do they are all implemented differently).

So hopefully this gives you a glimpse as to what Ensemble is creating. Now that you have our background however in future posts I will be focusing on changes in the collaboration industry and pointing out trends that I think are important to creating effective collaboration experiences!