| Into the MyST | Thoughts and ideas about MySmartChannels by Bill French and F. Andy Seidl, Co-founders of MyST Technology Partners. | |
| | | August 31, 2003 | | Perhaps a new term, this appropriately describes a new and emerging set of business and technical requirements. | |
As the use of
Weblogs begin to filter into businesses and enterprises in support of
km-related processes, new requirements will emerge.
The nature of a
Weblog Application Server indicates that there are some
interesting breakaway’s from traditional app servers that will likely create a
new segment. One simple distinction is that application servers
generally don’t prescribe a data model, whereas a Weblog Application Server
should.
Weblog’s (by
definition) imply that a data persistence model comes with the product. Storing
and retrieving blog posts is a basic requirement, but the architecture must
support more than a simple collection of data fields to participate in effective
and broad enterprise use. The MyST object
model represents the persistence store for the MySmartChannels Weblog
Application Server and provides an extremely abstract system for
storing and managing Weblog content.
What makes the
MyST platform suitable for enterprise use [and defining it as an
application server] is its high degree of abstractness.
Weblog products are limited in scope concerning the data types that they
can handle. We believe this is an important distinction if you are holding your
technology to the standards of “platform” or “application server”. The MyST
platform provides mechanisms for dealing with arbitrary data types and XML
document payloads. Although MySmartChannels provides a useful demonstration of
basic Weblog information, the platform is designed to provide much greater
depth so that it may participate in deeper enterprise integrations. | |
| | August 29, 2003 | | The writing is on the Weblog wall: e-mail marketing—and e-mail notification, in general—is poised for disruption. | I monitor dozens of RSS feeds every day. I can't imagine going back to the pre-newsreader days of trying to keep up with dozens of web sites (and now many dozens of weblogs) by manually visiting each site. Nor can I imagine preferring e-mail notification when a site is updated—for many reasons. But I'm just an early innovator, right? I used to think so. But recently, I'm running across like minded people more and more. RSS is on the threshold of disrupting the ultimate killer app: e-mail. I've been fascinated by the evolution of disruptive technologies ever since reading Clayton Christensen's excellent book on the subject, The Innovator's Dilemma. Recently, I've started a new commentary channel in klognews.com where I'll track the evolution of RSS as a disruptive force in the world of e-mail. If you have an interesting observation on the matter, drop me a note. | | |
| | August 13, 2003 | | I've recently had a number of conversations about the use of Weblogs (or channels) to mitigate the flow of enterprise knowledge into the inbox, and redirect it to a more manageble space where it doesn't die a quick death. | How can I use channels to better manage email? If a greater percentage of content (that should be persisted as knowledge artifacts) flowed through a medium where pub-sub dynamics were at play, the mail volume would naturally decrease. I can’t even get my group to document in anything except e-mail. This is an excellent point. Andy and I have already begun to see dramatic drops in e-mail correspondence to run our business. But, we’re very early adopters, and very biased. The bigger issue – the emergence of more ways to move content into channels, as well as more refined approaches for consuming them – will have a big impact on late and laggard adopters. A prominent CEO recently told me: "I'm continuing my on-going quest to figure out the right way to process in-bound information from a variety of sources ... for low-volume channels with high-impact information, I'd like it smack in my field of vision, without having to switch to another [application] or folder." I see this as additional evidence that any tilt away from e-mail will always have its exceptions, and I might also offer that there are other alternatives for low-incidence, high-importance items besides ad-hoc systems like the Web. Text-messaging on a GSM phone, or instant messaging are a few examples. But if that class of information truly needs to be in your field of vision, it had better be in a very agile form such that it can leveraged by the application that happens to be in front of you when you need it. NewsGator (an integrated tool for Outlook) represents a model where you can publish and subscribe to channels without fundamentally changing the working model of e-mail. Almost everything I read (from a channel) comes to me through Newsgator, and about 20% of what I write in channels is written in an Outlook form (through NewsGator). I think this ratio will increase to perhaps 40 to 60%. It will never reach 100% because there are so many places where channel items can be composed (e-mail, cell-phones, Word, voice). Channel authoring and RSS consumption models will be successful at the moment you realize that you are fundamentally not required to do anything different than you already do. ;-) | | |
| |
|
 |
