Missing Features in Outlook Calendar

Just like many other knowledge workers (aka office workers), I am pretty dependent on the Microsoft Outlook calendar which I use many times every day. I sync it with my laptop, my iPad and my iPhone and since this is one of my top applications, I have had enough time to think about what else I would like it to do. To be honest, I have not seen any new features in the calendar over the last 10+ years. And so I have decided to lend a hand to the Microsoft product team by listing the capabilities that would make the calendar more usable and worth the next upgrade.

While I realize that the calendar is part of Microsoft Outlook email application, I will focus just on the calendar to keep this post brief. And so, here are my top 10 innovation suggestions for the Outlook calendar:

1. Audit trail
The calendar is very secretive with any feedback about appointments I schedule. Who has received it? Who’s opened it? Who’s accepted or declined while using the baffling option “Don't send a response”? I don’t know. I do understand that the message back for every email and appointment adds traffic and complexity. But honestly, in the days of video streaming, I don’t care. Besides, the feature could be optional. BTW, Novell GroupWise did this 15 years ago.

2. Agenda
Every meeting needs an agenda and the agenda should be a data object attached to every calendar appointment. All invitees should be able to participate in the collaborative agenda creation if that’s the option I select.

3. Forwarding
Calendar events can be forwarded today by invitees whether I like it or not. As the meeting organizer, I want to be able to decide if I want to allow forwarding, if I want to encourage it, or even mandate a stand-in for invitees who can’t make it.

4. Finding time
This is a common problem - I need to meet with a group of people and the next possible time slot when they are all free is at 3 am two month from now. I need some options here and one possibility would be to pick a few likely time slots and let the people decide or vote on which one is going to work best.

5. Priorities
Given that being triple-booked is not an unusual occurrence, I need a way to prioritize my appointments. The prioritization has to be visible to the originator as in “the invitee wants to come, but has two conflicting meetings with a higher priority”. As the meeting originator, I should be able to see the conflicting priorities of the invitees so that I can see what my meeting is competing with.

6. Notes
I want to be able to attach a note to an appointment. These notes should be viewable via the calendar as well as via the note tool. I need to be able to sort the notes by different fields such as date, meeting organizer, topic, etc. and share them with others. Oh, and please give me some more formatting options for notes.

7. Response
I need more options for appointment response than “accept”, “decline” and “tentative”. I need to be able to say “can’t make it but please reschedule because I want this meeting to happen” and “no, I can’t make it but I will keep the appointment in case my other plans change” and “no, I am not interested in this meeting” and - as noted above - “yes, I want to attend but I have other conflicting appointments that are more important”. These are all real life situations. Also, I want to be able to recover an appointment that I have declined before.

8. Conference calls
I would like to have a separate data field for conference call dial-in information with a simple button to dial it - particularly on mobile devices. This field needs to allow attendees to automatically use their own local phone number for the company’s conference call service. The conference call service is almost always the same for the entire company worldwide and its local numbers can be pre-loaded. And, please integrate directly Skype, Webex and other communication software alternatives.

9. Time zones
Scheduling appointments for next week when I am going to be in a different time zone is way too cumbersome today. Time zone selection has to be included in the appointment set-up window.

10. Branding
Even after 10 years I still don’t understand why the email client is called Outlook. That would be a good name for a business intelligence or sales forecasting application. Why is the Outlook client called differently than Exchange, the server? And what’s the purpose of the Outlook Express client? I know I should have known all of this by now but this branding strategy is puzzling to a marketer like me.

These are some of the capabilities that would, in my opinion, make Outlook more valuable - Outlook, and likely any other group calendar application. I just happen to use the Outlook/Exchange as my calendar.

Apple Gets Away With Magic

Steve Jobs delivering a keynote
Source: creative commons

Apple must not have a legal department. No other company would allow its spokesperson to get away with calling a product “magical”. Even if it’s the CEO. But the usual rules don’t apply when it’s Steve Jobs and Apple. Technically, there is nothing magical about the iPad and the Apple legal team has clearly failed to prevent this glaring lawsuit-waiting-to-happen.

Sure, the iPad is an awesome product. Fantastic. And it has taken the market by a storm, proving every doubter wrong. And Steve Jobs was rightfully proud when he claimed in his announcement that the product is “magical”. But it is pure technology, no magic. The legal department at every other company would have pointed out to the marketing team that calling it “magical” is not defensible and thus should be dropped or replaced by something generic and boring like “powerful” or “innovative”.

This is a frequent struggle today. Marketing is trying to do their job and market the product with an aggressive message that will stand out in the market place. They want to use terms such as “the leader”, “best-selling”, or “first”. But then, the legal team gets hold of the press release and checks for possible legal liabilities. And instead of “the leader”, we end up with “a leading provider”. Instead of “best-selling”, we end up with “popular”. And instead of “first”, we end up with “innovative”.

Because the legal team’s job is to reduce any risk of legal exposure from possible false advertising which such statements could represent. Unless you can prove that you actually are “the leader”, you cannot claim that. And unless you can prove that your product really is magical, your CEO should not be using such claim in his announcement. Right? That’s the way marketing teams often operate.

Of course all of this is just silly. Nobody really thinks that “the leader” and “a leader” make any real difference. Neither of these statements will make the product better nor will it justify the value of the solution. Marketing should be staying away from meaningless claims. And the legal industry around the world needs to take a chill-pill. Getting in the way of good business is not the purpose of the law.

Maybe this kind of defensive marketing is government’s making. Unlike Microsoft and now even Google, Apple has not been a target of a major government investigation yet. Apple is loved by customers and partners and rarely makes big, aggressive acquisitions. I can imagine that any experience with a legal challenge from the government changes the corporate DNA towards legal risk mitigation.

In the end, if Steve Jobs wants to call it magical, he should. And if we all believe him, we should buy 15 million iPads in a year. Which is what we did and that by itself is pretty magical.

The Social Disconnect

There is a developing crisis in the enterprise 2.0 world. With every vendor rushing to grab a piece of the enterprise social pie, I as a user am finding myself in a situation where I am expected to be social in too many environments. This picture tells the story:

Where should I update my status now?

The picture shows the different social applications on my iPhone. Each of these applications is expecting me to be social and active to help harness the collective wisdom of the organization. But the practicality gets in the way: in how many environments can I feasibly update my status regularly? In how many environments can I really socially interact with my friends? I’d argue, only in one.

I use Twitter as the primary environment for my status messages. They are automatically syndicated to LinkedIn and to Facebook via Selected Tweets. I also update my status on OpenText Pulse which is our internal, secure and compliant social tool. But because it is secure, compliant, and work-related, my activity here is less social and more professional than on Twitter where I let my free spirit show its true face. All the other social environments don’t get any interaction from me other than sharing documents or answering questions. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I use Yammer and Box.net through my association with AIIM because that’s what AIIM selected - both are free for our purpose (or pretty cheap). We are not really using Salesforce Chatter but since my company uses Salesforce.com, I wanted to check it out. Same for SAP StreamWork. None of these social environments get much activity from me - they are being used more as a traditional group collaboration tools than the “Facebook for the Enterprise”.

The bottom line is that enterprises will hardly succeed to convince users to be active in multiple disconnected social environments. There will be need for integration and there will be some winners and losers. And the likely winners will be the ones that touch the most users across the enterprise. In any case, it will be interesting to watch!

Struggles of a Professional iPhone User

A few weeks ago, I have made the switch from BlackBerry to iPhone. I’ve owned an iPad for almost a year now and there appeared to be no hope that most of the cool apps that iPad offers would ever appear on the BlackBerry OS. I was also getting increasingly disenchanted with the poor browser experience, with the lack of an iTunes-like tool to manage my content library (not that I am enamored with iTunes - a pretty poor program if you ask me) and with a variety of performance issues and freezes that plagued my BlackBerry lately. And so when the renewal time came up, I have made the switch into the promised land of Apple. 

iPhone Calendar

I should mention that I am at this point an all-in Apple user, having embraced at home everything from iMac, iPad, iPod, iTunes, AirPort, Time Capsule, AppleTV to now also the iPhone. I expected the iPhone to be inferior for making actual phone calls but who cares - the last thing I want to do with a smartphone is make phone calls. But actually, the iPhone makes phone calls just fine. I have, though, discovered numerous challenges that I honestly miss from my BlackBerry: 

1. Calendar
The calendar is pathetic which I knew from using it already on the iPhone. It does not not support the Exchange categories and so my iPhone calendar is monochromatic in contrast to the colorful experience in Outlook. That’s rather odd considering that this is an Apple calendar - as if the cool hip Mac guy swapped cloths with the chubby dull PC guy. I’m also having issues with the calendar not caching properly which means it always tries to rebuild itself by downloading all data from the server. Pretty annoying actually - even though this issue could have to do with our IT architecture rather than with my iPhone. 

2. Appointments
The most glaringly missed feature, one that suggests that Steve Jobs is secretly carrying a Blackberry under his black turtle-neck, is the inability to simply click on a phone number in a calendar appointment to dial it. Conference calls are apparently not something iPhone users are expected to do. This is such an appalling omission that I must suspect that Apple developers never actually used the iPhone 4 for anything but to track the performance of the Apple stock. 

3. Appointments (again)
The calendar does not allow some of the basic functions - I cannot forward an appointment, I cannot suggest an alternate time, the calendar message gets truncated and I don’t see a setting to prevent that. BlackBerry did these things and I need to use them daily. And while I’m complaining about the appointments, here are three requests I have for Microsoft: I want to be able to decline an appointment (saying clearly ‘no’) while keeping it in case my other engagement gets canceled which keeps happening all the time. I also want to see an ability to prioritize my appointments. And finally, I also want to have notes associated with calendar appointment before, during and after the appointment.  

4. Email Search
Where is the search button in email? Seriously? Is there some kind of magical four-finger flick motion I need to learn to evoke this basic function? C’mon, Apple! 

5. Contacts
My iPhone doesn’t allow me to look up people numbers in our corporate Exchange directory. Why not? Does Apple expect me to download the entire directory to the iPhone and maintain it by hand? Steve Jobs must apparently not be calling many people at Apple. Also,  phone numbers stored in incomplete format such as (519) 123-4567 cannot be dialed when roaming. Your number has to be in the complete format with a country code e.g. +1 (519) 123-4567. That limitation is regrettable and odd given that the OS knows when I am roaming and what my default country is and could thus easily complete the number automatically. 

6. No super-apps
I always thought that the super-app concept from BlackBerry was a little bogus - it touts cross-integration between apps that makes so much sense that I couldn’t imagine it would not be there. Well, I can imagine it now since the apps on my iPhone are completely isolated from each other. The concept is pretty straight forward - for example, every time I see a person in an app, I should be able to access that person’s profile straight from within the app - I should be able to call, email, IM, or whatever other means of communication I have. Similarly, I should be able to share (via email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) any content asset from within any application. These things are inherent to the BlackBerry OS and yet they don’t exist on the iPhone.

7. Multi-tasking
Apple’s claim that multi-tasking is supported since iPhone 4 - true, as long as one of the tasks is listening to music. Something as basic as checking the calendar while on the phone is not possible. This one threw me off as I always thought that all those teenage consumers - the primary target audience for Apple - are heavily into multi-tasking doing chats in 10 sessions at a time while talking on the phone, tweeting, facebooking, and doing homework all at the same time. They might but not on the iPhone. 

These are some of the examples of functionality I miss from my iPhone. They are basic level features used daily by every professional in business. My experience is re-affirming to me what I have already suspected - Apple does not care for nor understand the business user. They will keep piling up awesome features for playing music, movies, talking to friends, taking pictures and all the other things consumers do and love but the business users are not Apple’s priority. 

I still think that the iPhone is a superior device and I am going to stay with it for now. I am locked into my 2 year plan anyway - courtesy of my customer-loving wireless service provider. But the lack of support for business users is a huge opportunity for RIM which has a massive head start in this space. This is where they grew up and this is where they should dominate. Their marketing messages should be focused on the business user rather than chasing consumers (which I wrote about in December 2010). Business users like me should be told to keep their BlackBerry but nobody is telling them that.

Acquisitions and Product Rationalization

It is not a surprise that most of us in the high technology industry are geeks at heart. Just remembering all the acronyms we use every day requires a brain that resembles a pivot table. And so it is logical that we like to look at acquisitions first and foremost from the technology point of view. “How will the acquired company’s technology add to your existing technology?”, “What holes has this acquisition filled in your existing portfolio?” - those are the typical questions I get from journalists and analysts after we acquire a company.

That’s of course not the complete view of acquisitions. Acquisitions are always about big money and as such they are not decided by software architects but by business people. And business people look at many objectives when they acquire a company - customer base, market share, market presence, strategic partnerships, access to new channels, source of new revenue, margins boost, etc. - all those reasons may be more important than the technology itself.

With all these reasons in mind, it is inevitable that in times of industry consolidation, companies acquire other companies with overlapping or even duplicate products. And this is when our natural instinct immediately kicks in and the geek way of thinking comes back. “How will you rationalize your portfolio?” is the immediate question I get. Or, more explicitly, “Which of the products are you going to kill?”. The industry pundits seem to immediately forget anything but the technology.

With no regards to product line’s profitability and other business rationale, the industry seems to struggle with the idea that a single vendor could have two distinct offerings in one space. There can only be one answer: “rationalization” - which is a fancy word for killing one product and migrating all customers to the other one, right?

As if all those customers wanted nothing more than to be forced to move to another architecture... In reality, customers want that both offerings remain strategic and that whatever innovation the vendor comes up with finds its place in both offerings.

Of course there is one challenge. The vendor needs to avoid having two sales teams calling on the same customer and pitching their respective products against each other. This kind of internal competition is against the overall interests of the company and tends to confuse the customers. But fortunately there is a solution for that problem.

The solution is segmentation - the two products need to focus on solving either different problems, targeting different markets or employing different channels. As long as the segmentation is clear, the vendor can very well market two or more distinct offerings in the same product category. If the segmentation and the respective channel strategy are in place, the respective sales teams will not compete with each other.

There is nothing wrong with having multiple offerings in the same space. Just look at Oracle and their many products. In the ERP category, they have offerings from PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and the in-house-built Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle seems to be doing very well as it is. That’s because the products have existing customers depending on these products who don’t want the products to go away. And because the products address different market segments and because they are - probably - quite profitable.

In the end, two profitable products are better than none.

Who Will Own Enterprise Social Media?

I was at info360 last week which is the new name for what used to be the AIIM conference and trade show - the annual gathering for the content management industry. After seeing what’s exhibited and listening to some of the keynotes, it was apparent that social media was the big buzz at the show. The emphasis was of course on enterprise social media - those systems of engagement that demand the same user appeal and viral adoption as Facebook or Twitter but with the underlying security, compliance, and legal risk mitigation needed by organizations.

Most software vendors have some sort of enterprise social media story to tell. Pretty much every vendor at the show from OpenText to Microsoft, Oracle, and even Box.net did. And many of the vendors who don’t go to content management shows are now players too - from Jive to Salesforce.com. Everybody wants a piece of the social pie.

Now that begs the question - what will the future landscape of enterprise social networking look like? Are we going to end up with multiple systems of engagement deployed across the enterprise? Is Sales going to talk to each other via the Salesforce.com social offering Chatter, while Finance will use the social capabilities in the ERP and Support will use whatever their service management tool provides? Is the future of social networking relegated to groupware? Is the corporate memory going to be contained in a dozen disjointed systems?

Hopefully not. The value of public social media lies in its openness - anybody has access to Facebook and Twitter. Facebook became big only after it was open beyond the relatively small communities of Harvard and Stanford. For social media to deliver on its expected value, it has to be deployed across the enterprise - and beyond.

That would seem to disqualify the vendors that by their nature address only a particular function of the enterprise. Only sales people have Salesforce.com licenses and even they need to be forced to use it. While Chatter might help the adoption, enterprises are not likely buy SF.com licenses for every employee. Same is true for any other function-specific software such as CRM, marketing automation, product lifecycle management, service management, or ERP.

That would suggest that social media solutions stand a greater chance to succeed across the enterprise if they are provided as part of the infrastructure - communication infrastructure, office infrastructure, process infrastructure, middleware infrastructure or content infrastructure. This is the kind of software that can and often does span the entire organization and adding social media capabilities makes sense not only technically but also from the point of view of my argument. And indeed, most vendors such as Cisco, Microsoft, TIBCO, Oracle, or OpenText have a social media strategy.

It is becoming apparent that social media is not likely going to be a separate category of software but rather a component of the overall software infrastructure - part of the information fabric as someone called it at info360. Even with the infrastructure vendors, there is a lot of candidates vying for a piece of the action. Thus, we are likely to see some consolidation of the technologies, some degree of integration and interoperability and eventually perhaps even some standards. No matter what, it will be a fun ride over the next couple of years as social media becomes part of everything we do - just like the Internet did over a decade ago!

One Year as a Blogger

March 22 marks the one year anniversary since I have started my blog. That's a good opportunity to revisit the experience and share it via a blog post (of course).

The Why
Why did I start a blog? Not a simple answer really. Yes, I’ve had some vague idea about my thought leadership mojo. Also, being in marketing, I have this inherent urge to share my opinions with the world and a blog is a good outlet for that. But mostly, I wanted to lead by example and motivate others around me to join in. That strategy is working today as more and more of my co-workers are joining in. I am not the first OpenText blogger, not the most read one and certainly not the most prominent one. But I am the one willing to contribute and to make any mistakes to help pave the way for others.

The How
I knew that to make a blog successful, I would have to blog regularly. I see a lot of bloggers who write a post once every two or three months and while that is still a blog, I wanted to do something more active. I was resolved to write at least one post each week. I have ended up writing 68 posts in the 52 weeks - well ahead of my goal.

My biggest concern was finding enough topics to write about. I was worried that I’d just be sitting there, 7 days since the last post without any idea what to write about. What an agony! But in reality, the ideas have never been an issue. They are popping up every day and I have several blog posts started at most times. 

The Focus
One of the questions every blogger needs to answer is the scope and focus of the blog. The name of the blog ought to reflect that. I knew I wanted to keep my blog fairly broad because that's what my interests are. There are some bloggers who can be interesting writing about the impact of social media on the enterprise every week but that wasn’t particularly appealing to me. Instead, I wanted a fairly broad set of topics that interest me. They are of course all focused on technology and my topics usually fall into one of my key areas of interest - content management, mobility, social media, security and lately also copyrights.

The Job
Another issue was whether or not to write about my job and my employer. That was not my original intent. In fact, I have initially tried to keep some distance and even today I don’t syndicate my blog through OpenText’s web site, I still like the idea of being independent. I have, however, broken this self-imposed rule with the G20 Summit report which immediately became my most successful post at the time. Since then, I am selectively covering other major milestones such as major product launches and acquisitions. They scored all very well - among the top 10 most read posts, five are on OpenText related topics.

I am trying hard the to keep the OpenText coverage personal by adding some insight. That’s not always easy since I am often the guy who’s behind the messaging that you see in press releases and other communication. But I’m doing my best. My post What Was Not In the Press Release about the ECM Suite 2010 launch was a huge hit and I was really able to say many things we wouldn’t normally say in the release.

The Promotion
Nothing is more disheartening than a great post that I have worked on for a couple of weeks with dismal results. Promoting my blog posts is a challenge though. I mostly rely on Twitter, forcing myself not to tweet about a particular post more than 2-3 times to avoid being a turn-off. I have experimented with all sorts of times of the week and times of the day but best appear to be posts at the beginning of the week with the first tweet early in the morning.

I am syndicating my tweets automatically to LinkedIn which generates a decent volume of traffic and I am also posting my blog post links on Facebook with more modest results. I have experimented with Xing, Reddit, and other sources of traffic but the results were dismal. Finally, I post the links to my blog posts on our internal social network based on OpenText Pulse which does generate some percentage of traffic, particularly for OpenText related topics.

The Outcome
Looking back after one year, my blog has been visited by visitors from 80 countries and even though I know that some were better than others, I am proud of pretty much every single article I’ve posted. Several articles received many comments either directly on the blog or per Twitter and Facebook. I am also proud of those articles that got quoted by other blogs or publications. And I am very excited when journalists or industry analysts mention that they read something on my blog.

Interestingly, my blog has received some degree of notoriety inside of OpenText. Many of my co-workers read it and the posts featuring some of them have made certain internal splash (e.g. Yes, They Could Be Models or Mobile Device as a Primary Interface). Several of our senior executives mentioned that they read my blog and a few of them even said they enjoy it. I got a tad nervous when independently our CFO, CMO, and our head of HR all mentioned my blog. But so far, I have not been called into anyone's office because of a blog post. 

Finally, having written a blog post on a particular subject makes me much better prepared and more articulate when discussing the subject with others - whether that's customers, journalists, analysts, or co-workers. I have never anticipated this benefit but I often refer to my recent blog posts when talking to others - sometimes directly but mostly just in my mind.


And so I guess I’ll just keep on blogging.


PS: Here are the top 10 posts on my blog from last 12 months:
1. Content Management Predictions for 2011
2. OpenText Acquires StreamServe
3. Corus Entertainment and the High Priesthood of Content Management
4. What Was Not in the Press Release
5. Geoffrey Moore, AIIM, and the Future of ECM
6. Yes, They Could Be Models
7. OpenText and Oracle - the Secret of Ecosystem Strategy
8. To SaaS or Not To SaaS?
9. The Fallacy of Twitter
10. EMC Content Management Family Tree

Call to Arms: Bring Down the Tyranny of Excessive Copyrights!

E. Delacroix: Liberty leading the People

I am re-reading Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture which I consider one of the best business books of all times. Professor Lessig very eloquently explains the idiosyncrasy and – yes – idiocy of the current copyright laws. This is an area of great interest to me as it directly impacts the use of content which is what I do for a living. I also feel very strongly about the freedom of speech, uncensored culture, free enterprise, and consumer rights. And all those things are being mangled by the current copyrights and content distribution rights.

The book isn’t old but it was published in 2004 which was the pre-Facebook era. Reading the book in the times of social media has put the copyright problems discussed in the book into a new perspective. In short, social media adds a new dimension to the copyright problems today. Let me give you an example.

The LEGO Group, the Danish toy powerhouse, is very interested in having their users share their ideas about how to build various toys out of their blocks. The users are kids and kids have no idea about copyrights. Kids want to build spaceships and structures that they draw upon from popular culture that they are exposed to. Star Wars and Star Trek are a big hit in the popular culture of 6-10 year old boys and so they build Star Wars and Star Trek space ships and characters made from the Lego blocks. So far so good.

Lego encourages its users (remember they are kids) to share their creations via digital models and pictures on their social media site MyLego Network. Lego is of course keenly interested in this kind of engagement since it indirectly stimulates brand loyalty, usage and incremental purchases of their products. But here comes the conundrum.

Lego has signed an agreement with Lucasfilm Ltd. and so discussions about Star Wars space ships and characters are licensed use of copyrighted material. In fact, Lego sells a galore of toys under the Star Wars brand and everybody is happy. But, as far as I know, Lego does not have any agreement with CBS Studios which owns the copyrights for Star Trek. That means that when my son posts a picture of his rendition of Luke Skywalker’s Starfighter in the Lego network, it is perfectly legal.

However, if he posts a picture of his take on Starship Enterprise, he technically violates the CBC copyrights for non-authorized creation and distribution of derivative work. Yes, the copyrights today no longer allow free creation of derivative work based on copyrighted material. And in fact, Lego can be held liable if the picture is shared on a community they sponsor because they effectively profit from it. 

Well, I say, this is nonsense. Like it or not, dear Lucasfilm and CBS, your work is part of our cultural heritage and as such, the use of cultural good has to be accessible to people and serve as source of learning, inspiration, and criticism. I agree that the creator of content should get paid and I agree that a copyright should protect the creation for a reasonable time. But 95 years [basically indefinite] is not a reasonable time - patents are being granted for max 20 years! I also know that the Internet has made it easier for your content to be distributed without a payment. But the excessively paranoid copyright protection you and the rest of Big Media have put in place is not only becoming absurd, it is damaging our culture.

It is a great privilege to become part of any culture. Almost all authors wish they would make it. Most of them create – at least initially – for idealistic reasons such as inspiration or the need to share a story. They don’t start with the need to protect their copyrights. That comes when the money becomes a topic - a topic that you, Big Media, introduce to the artists. You have used your position of strength to make Congress modify the copyright laws to serve your profits and not the interest of the society which the copyrights were originally created for. And you did it out of denial and fear because the world around you has evolved. 

The new technology is threatening your old business models and you have enacted laws that deprecate and ignore that technology. Today, you are the dinosaurs and if you don’t evolve you might become extinct. If you produce content, you need to be part of the culture with everything that distinction carries with it. You have to adapt to the environmental changes and embrace the technology because if you don’t, WE WILL do it for you.

We, the People, have now a new weapon that didn’t exist a few years ago. A weapon that has proven to be so powerful that it can not only put the most powerful man in the world into his office but also overthrow dictators who lost the touch with their people. That weapon is social media – Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and Slideshare. And this weapon will soon be aimed at you, Big Media. Millions of people around the world will organize, coordinate, and speak out jointly their will to overthrow the laws that so conveniently protect you.

The copyright and distribution laws have been enacted out of your position of strength because until now, it was you - multi-billion dollar corporations - against the little man. Soon, it will be you against the will of the People. And People have the power to change the laws or even the lawmakers if they are unhappy. No amount of lobby dollars will help you stem this revolution. Don’t wait for that to happen because there is no country of exile for overthrown Big Media dictators.

OpenText to Acquire weComm

Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the OpenText acquisition of Metastorm and now there is another one. OpenText just announced an agreement to acquire weComm, a UK-based vendor focused on the mobile application space.

OpenText has been rapidly innovating in the mobile space by releasing two new versions of its flagship mobility product OpenText Everywhere last year. With weComm, that innovation is quickly reaching another level. We at OpenText understand that mobile devices are quickly taking over the desktops as the primary user interface. In fact, many of our customers and prospects are telling us that.

It's a heterogeneous world out there!

Just recently, we got engaged in some government related opportunities in the sub-Saharan Africa. What’s amazing is that in those countries, the PC based infrastructure has never been developed. The people simply can’t afford PCs and yet they all have their mobile phones and so the government is exclusively targeting mobile users with their online services.

Online mobile services are bifurcating into two distinct approaches: mobile web and mobile apps. I just wrote about the mobile web in my previous post – this has been a big part of our focus on the Web experience management site for a while. The idea here is to leverage XML to easily create an optimized experience for users accessing web-based services through a mobile browser.

OpenText’s mobile apps strategy has been so far focused on OpenText Everywhere which is basically a mobile extension of all key ECM functionality such as document management, collaboration, and workflow. This is an application that OpenText built for its customers who can use it out of the box with their existing OpenText ECM Suite deployments. But with weComm, OpenText Everywhere really is everywhere.

What many customers need is to build their own mobile content applications (MCA). Such apps can be focused on anything from entertainment and gaming to publishing, experience, computing, commerce, etc.  – these apps typically use the Web to access some type of information updates from public or private sources. OpenText can’t create all of these apps – each customer will likely want to create their own app; distinct from its competitors. In fact, many customers I have spoken to want to create a multitude of apps each providing different, distinct industry specific functionality.

All types of apps have one thing in common. They need to be optimized for each respective mobile device to provide the best user experience. And optimal experience is the key to success; particularly in the consumer space. The problem, however, is the number of permutations of mobile operating systems (MOS), screen sizes, and technical capabilities such as bandwidth, Flash support, etc. that need to be supported by these apps. And the devices and their MOS keep evolving as well which makes the creation and maintenance of such apps very costly.

This is the exactly where weComm can help. It provides what is called a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) – a platform that enables customers and vendors to build, manage, and maintain mobile applications easily and cost effectively. Many our competitors don’t have a clear mobile strategy today and even those that do, don’t have an answer for the problem of creating, managing and maintaining mobile apps for all the different devices. OpenText embarked on its mobility strategy early on and today, we are a leader in this space. Just see for yourself what Stephen Powers from Forrester wrote in his November 2010 report titled Mobilize Your ECM Strategy: “Open Text has been at the forefront of ECM-related mobile strategy, offering Blackberry access to many components of its ECM line, with plans to extend support to other mobile devices in the near future. Others have jumped on the mobile bandwagon as well…” 

With this acquisition, OpenText is further extending its leadership in content mobility.