Managing Automation - February 2009 - (Page 22) DEEPDIVE collaboration not only to product development teams, but to planning teams and technical and administrative groups.’ It’s enabling the people that previously didn’t have the knowledge.” In a recent Managing Automation reader poll on collaboration, 57.5% of respondents said they expect their company’s focus on collaboration to increase over the next 12 months due mainly to cost pressures, global competitive pressures, and increasing customer demands. As a result, 65.1% of respondents said LEARNING THE LINGO: The New Social Circle Trying to sort through Web 2.0 terminology? Here’s a guide. log: a contraction of the term weblog; a website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Cloud computing: Internet-based (“cloud”) development and use of computer technology (“computing”). The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet, based on how it is depicted in computer network diagrams, and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals. It is a style of computing in which IT-related capabilities are provided as a service, allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet (“in the cloud”) without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. Folksonomy: also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging; the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Folksonomy describes the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging. In contrast with traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts, but also by creators and consumers of content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary. Folksonomy (folk + taxonomy) is a user-generated taxonomy. Instant messaging (IM): a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text conveyed via devices connected over a network, such as the Internet. Mashup: a Web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. The term implies easy, fast integration, frequently done by access to open APIs and data sources to produce results data owners had no idea could be produced. An example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct Web service that was not originally provided by either source. Podcast: a series of audio or video digital media files distributed over the Internet by syndicated download, through Web feeds, to portable media players and PCs. Though the same content may also be available by direct download or streaming, a podcast is distinguished from other digital media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added. Twitter: a free social networking and micro-blogging service that lets its users send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Web 2.0: describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and Web design that aim to enhance the creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration, and functionality of the Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of Web culture communities and hosted services, such as social networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. Wiki: a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia B they are looking at ways to collaborate with external partners and customers (see charts starting on p. 23). More and more companies are turning to Web-based technology, such as services-oriented architectures (SOA), and B2B or B2C hubs. But, industry observers say, they can’t ignore Web 2.0. This new generation of technology takes the form of wikis, blogs, and social networks as well as cloud computing, which taps the Internet as an IT architecture, and mashups, which use an open application programming interface (API) to take data from multiple sources to create a completely new Web service. In the Web 2.0 world, crafting the collaborative enterprise comes down to four things: Creating content and being able to easily upload and search files, documents, and spreadsheets; creating shared workspaces using wikis; connecting people through a social networking platform; and enabling conversations through discussion threads and blogs. “The general trend is moving from a machine-based industry to a process, peopledriven industry,” says Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, which makes a Web-based social technology platform for businesses. SOCIAL SERVICES Equipois, Inc., is a 2-year old start-up that has a proprietar y technology — basically a mechanical arm — that makes heavy tools or equipment seem weightless to the people using them, without sacrificing range or performance. Originating in the film industry where holding heavy movie cameras can not only be exhausting, but also cause injury, Equipois used a concept of zero gravity and applied it to an industrial setting. The company, with 22 employees, is based in Los Angeles and has an R&D lab in Philadelphia. Its sales representatives and distributors serve customers in the aerospace, automotive, government, and heavy machining sectors. “Being able to collaborate was a key challenge,” says Eric Golden, president and CEO of Equipois. The company investigated using Microsoft applications, which, Golden says, for a start-up were “ridiculously expensive and had a tremendous learning curve.” Instead, Equipois started using Google g-mail as its e-mail ser ver and leveraged Google Docs for sharing spreadsheets and Word documents. The company also deployed Salesforce.com as a customer relationship tool. Equipois had bits and pieces of technology, but what it really wanted was a complete software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that could ma February 22 2009 http://www.Salesforce.com
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