In a study and subsequent research report written by Doug Miles as the head of the AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) Market Intelligence Division in 2011, participants were asked to rank the benefits achieved through Enterprise Social solutions on the basis of positive impact made to their businesses.
Top
ranking benefits involving “more knowledge sharing between staff” and
“faster responses to queries and questions” come out on top. Posting to
bulletin boards and micro-blogs will also result in fewer multi-copy
emails, especially those to “all staff.”
Linking
to a single-copy shared document reduces the number of attachments
clogging up the email system. Better innovation and shorter project
timescales are also high on the list, reflecting more tangible benefits
as social business applications are more likely to be included in formal
workflows.
Figure 1: From AIIM Research Report, Ranking of key benefits attained
through Enterprise Social Software solutions
Of prime importance to Enterprise Businesses is
storing, searching and collaborating upon knowledge records, contrasted to
traditional methods of emailing attachments.
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Enterprise Decisions are made on how solutions are used, not features provided
Features and capabilities are just
one of the criteria used to evaluate alternatives, but arguably it is not
always the best. In respect to any tool sets that require people adopt and use
them for changes to occur and benefits to be realized, acceptance of the tools
as providing a better way of doing things is paramount.
The importance of this becomes
apparent when you compare and contrast how various cloud based solutions can be
seamlessly integrated in work activities, are readily adopted due to their simplicity
and support actual business process improvement.
In
this short post I will do this by focusing on the area that delivers
the greatest benefits to Enterprise's as per the study undertaken by
AIIM (and replicated by others since), and do a comparison between two
of the leading providers in the Enterprise cloud market today, viz IBM
Connections Cloud and Microsoft Office 365.
File Storage, Knowledge Capture and Sharing
Let’s examine this from the
perspective of the highest-ranking benefit of Enterprise Social Software
solutions, that of storing, searching and collaborating on knowledge records.
Microsoft Office 365’s Cloud Products
Microsoft
Office 365 provides numerous products to enable people to share files and
documents in the cloud.
Microsoft OneDrive for Business acts as
a personal file store for people in the cloud. Its 1TB capacity, although
appealing on the surface, is the same as that offered by other vendors. The
issue with providing personal storage of this capacity is that it does little
to encourage knowledge capture, sharing and collaboration and merely shifts
storage from a users PC or Inbox into yet another receptacle.
There are no
mechanisms to share files to groups but individual access can be made by
providing details on the persons username, or made public so everyone can
access. Sharing is still somewhat problematic
as files are always stored as ‘personal’ by default and require additional
later steps to share after uploading. These files can be tagged but some Tag
cloud issue persists and discoverability is limited. (http://gcoupe.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/onedrive-still-no-proper-support-for-tags/)
In being
predominately featured on the Office 365 tool bar, this leads to it being one
of the most often accepted and hence, used features within Microsoft Office 365
suite, which unfortunately may encourage hoarding, not sharing of knowledge.
Microsoft
SharePoint Online is Microsoft’s preferred product for the
sharing of Enterprise documents and files in the cloud at site level (via a
document library), and is yet another storage area. 
Figure 2: Uploading files into SharePoint Online
As Microsoft’s
preferred document storage mechanism SharePoint online has some interesting
limitations brought about because of its architectural design. Even though a
user may load up a single copy of a knowledge record (file or document) In
SharePoint, a single document instance must be replicated with any number of
team sites. So, which one is the reference document and which one is a copy? (https://community.jivesoftware.com/casethread/219316)
Figure 3: A single copy doesn't exist if shared with multiple team sites.
With
SharePoint online, users can be either readers or editors and files can be
shared externally by proving an e-mail address of the guest users, with or
without sign on being required for them to access. In addition, lightweight viewers (or editors) are
provided for anonymous users so that access to the latest Microsoft Office
editors (Excel, PowerPoint and Word) is not required.
The third manner
of sharing files in the Microsoft Cloud is via Yammer which provides the Social
Capabilities lacking in SharePoint and One Drive for Business that Office 365
needs for a complete feature set.
With
Yammer, any and all files upload are automatically publicly accessible and are
not private. There is no way to restrict access unless you create a group in
Yammer and upload files to that specific group file library which will lead to
a proliferation of groups and added complexities in use.
Figure 4: Uploading files into Yammer
In addition any comments made on the document are not available for
others to see, and the Share button whilst it will notify the recipient, does
not automatically grant them access.
Figure 5: Comments made on Yammer documents are invisible to others
Summary on Microsoft’s Approach
With
Microsoft’s cloud product set, the capabilities required are split across 3
separate products; One Drive for Business, SharePoint On-line and Yammer.
Whilst fulfilling the requirements in providing the feature sets requested in
Enterprises, the use of three separate products, each with their own
considerations towards their use, makes acceptance and use difficult for
people.
There
are multiple, overlapping file repositories with Office 365: personal files go
into OneDrive, team files either go into document libraries in SharePoint team
sites or Yammer.
Each
repository has its own search mechanism that makes locating a document a
complicated affair. Users waste time figuring out where a file is located.
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| Figure 6: Microsoft Office 365 Products provide 3 seperate ways of storing documents and files |
Contrast Microsoft’s approach and
architectural limitations in having to use three separate, disparate products,
to that of IBM in this area.
IBM Connections Cloud Platform
In IBM Connections Cloud, a single instance of
a document/file is stored. When it is uploaded to a single central location,
the user decides at the time whether the knowledge record can be private,
public or shared with any number of individuals (internal & external if
permitted) and communities (internal & external if permitted). These
permissions can be easily changed later to provide access to more or less
people, communities or groups as business requirements evolve.
Similarly,
a user is prompted on uploading to decide on whether Editor or Read Only access
is provided.
As in
Microsoft’s One Drive for Business up to 1TB of data can be stored in this one
location. However, the major difference being that IBM provides one source for
a person to go to which holds all their files, including those that have been
shared with them (which don’t contribute to their file storage capacity).
Figure 7: IBM Connections private, shared or public & editor or read
access is created when uploading
Unlike
Microsoft’s product set, comments and feedback made on the knowledge record (document/file)
are stored and available for viewing by everyone with access to collaborate.
Also
unlike in Microsoft tagging is available for each sharing scenario with search
capabilities through a single search site guaranteed.
How do Microsoft and IBM Cloud compare?
So this raises the questions, whilst
both provide essentially similar features, which platform or product set is;
- easier to use, Microsoft Office 365 or IBM Connections Cloud?
- more likely to be used and integrated into people’s work practices,
- more likely to drive the change required away from eMail as a traditional method of distributing files and collaboration, towards more productive knowledge capture, management and collaboration?
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