Yes! Infovark is…

And you can totally find it here.

Wait, wait!

We have a few important things to tell you before you get it.

The first is that the Beta works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and the Windows 7 release candidate. You’ll also need to have Office 2007, and particularly Microsoft Outlook, if you want to get the most out of the beta. You’ll also need to have the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installed. And that’s where the real wait comes in.

Seriously. Once you download the 137 MB Infovark installer, we’ll check for the latest version of the .NET Framework. If you don’t have it on your computer, we’ll install it for you, but it could take a good long while. So get yourself a cup of coffee. Or take a walk around the block. Or surf the Internet for a bit.

Once we’ve gotten the prerequisites out of the way, the rest of the Infovark installation is straightforward. We highly encourage you to click Next, Next, Next all the way to the Finish button. I mean, you could try some of the fancy settings, but… well, we’re not quite sure what will happen. If you try it, let us know how it goes.

Wait, wait wait!

We’re not done telling you about the Beta yet! I know you’re itching to check out Infovark, but there’s a few more things you need to know.

After the install finishes, Infovark will ask you a few questions. It’s basic stuff: Your name, email address, short bio, avatar. I’m sure you’re used to filling this stuff out from a dozen other web sites and applications. We just wanted to let you know that we don’t get a copy of that here at the Infovark Burrow. All that info will stay on your machine, where it belongs, unless you decide to share it.

When the interview finishes, Infovark will start digging through your files and email. Don’t worry — Infovark keeps everything it finds private, unless you tell it otherwise. You can also tell it to ignore certain folders on your computer or in your email. Check out this page to find out more about Infovark’s privacy and sharing settings.

This is where another wait might happen. Infovark does a good job of staying out of your way, but while it’s getting up to speed on all the fabulous work you’ve been doing lately, there won’t be much to see. This might be a good time for you to get lunch.

Once Infovark has gotten acquainted with your computer, you can start asking Infovark questions, using Infovark to take notes, sharing information with your coworkers, and lots of other neat stuff. Check out this page for a list of Infovark’s features.

One more thing

We want to hear from you! What were your first impressions? What confused you? What intrigued you?

We’re aware we’ve made something unusual. We have a hard time explaining it to ourselves sometimes, and we’ve spent two years working on it.

Mainly, we wanted to make a business application that helped people work with the information they use everyday. And we wanted to take a fresh approach to office software, combining some of the lessons of today’s Web 2.0 era to yesterday’s business tools.

So if it seems a bit weird, yeah, that’s totally our fault.

Just relax and play around with it a bit.

What are you waiting for?

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We’ll arrive at the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston Monday evening, after all the workshops end. We hope to talk with everyone we possibly can. We’ll have three Infovarkers in attendance: Gordon, Paula, and me (Dean). But how will you find us among all the other attendees?

Check out our shiny Infovark buttons flair!

And if you find us wearing one of these buttons and ask us about Infovark, we’ll give you one of these:

That’s right, it’s a copy of the Infovark Beta! Fresh code hot off the compiler!

Don’t feel left out

If you can’t attend the conference in Boston, or somehow miss catching up with us, don’t worry. We’ll make the Beta available here on our website as well. We’ll post links and details very soon. We promise.

We want as many people to try Infovark as possible. We need your feedback to tell us what features you like and what problems you find.

Infovark takes a different approach to gathering and sharing information with your peers. We want to make it as easy and fun to use as it possibly can. And it’s your suggestions that will let us do that. So get ready: the Beta is coming soon!

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I just caught the exciting announcement of Opera Unite on Read Write Web.

The Opera Unite vision video explains their take on the small cloud. Rather than our current two-tier system, with clients and servers occupying distinct roles, we can move to system that lets every computer fully participate in the web.

Clearly, Opera understands Small Cloud Theory.

Unite uses an architecture similar to the one we described in our series on Ending the Paper Shuffle last year. (See locating documents, versioning documents, and tracking documents for our thoughts on how to address common information handling problems in the enterprise.)

Coming soon: the future

Opera claims this approach “reinvents the web” but I think it simply delivers on the Internet’s original promise. The original HTTP drafts looked ahead to a more peer-centric approach to networking. You’ll rarely find the words “client” or “server” in W3C’s final recommendations; they prefer the terms “browser” and “host” — and implies that these roles are not exclusive.

Peer-to-peer technology is hardly new,although it’s been slow to shed its association with questionable file sharing practices. On the subject of P2P, Clay Shirky wrote in 2000:

The fusion of desktop and server… is turning the internet inside out.
The current network is built on a “content in the center” architecture.
However, the ability for a desktop machine to take on the work of a server increases annually.
…Add to these forces an increasing number of PCs in networked offices… and you have the outlines of a new “content at the edges” architecture … This is the future, and Microsoft knows it.

I’m not sure if Microsoft really “knew it” — although their efforts with acquiring Groove, and more recently LiveMesh might indicate that it’s possible that they did — but I do know this: The computer I’m writing this post on is about 22 times more powerful that the average web server in 1996. In addition, it has 285 times more available memory. And it’s not even a particularly fancy or fast computer — a mid-range Dell business laptop.

So although Shirky’s “Fusion” of the desktop and server isn’t quite here, 8 years later, Opera’s Unite might help bring it a step closer.

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Dean and I will be celebrating the impending release of Infovark’s first public beta this Thursday at Champ’s in Reston – and we want your help!

If you’re in the Northern Virginia area and you’d like to stop by for a drink, we’d love to see you – onwards from 5:30PM.

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I’ve developed a sixth sense for failed enterprise software deployments. Yes, it’s an odd superpower to have — I’d much prefer the ability to stop bullets in mid-air or to leap tall buildings — but it’s one that served me well when I was a consultant.

In previous jobs, I’d be the technical expert brought in to help at to crucial moments in the enterprise sales cycle: pre-sales and post-sales. These are the points immediately before and after the handshakes and the signing of the check. These are the moments when all eyes in an organization are focused on the new, shiny software and hardware. These are the make-or-break moments for a technology vendor.

But these moments of heightened attention don’t usually make or break a large-scale IT implementation. Those happen long before or long after the vendor has disappeared from the scene. Really, my job was to spot any additional opportunities during the pre-sales period — or to help identify ways we could stand apart from the competition. Or it was to clean up after the sales guy had deposited his commission.

But although I’m fluent in geek and can cut code with the best of them, the source of my super power rests in political science 101.

Yes, that’s right. I was a liberal arts major.

Soft science and hard facts

If you want to understand a physical system, it helps to understand the forces that affect it. If you want to understand a human system, you need to understand the groups at work.

There are four groups at work in any large enterprise software project. There’s the software vendor, the organization that bought the software, and the consultants that implement the software.

Whoops. I said four, didn’t I? That’s because within the organization there’s actually two main groups involved: those who use the software and those who provision the software.

The secret to sniffing out a rotten enterprise software implementation is recognizing these groups and identifying how well their interests are aligned. In successful implementations, all the key players have complimentary goals and objectives. In failed implementations, these groups are working at cross-purposes, if not actively trying to sabotage each other.

Sabotage is a harsh word, isn’t it? But what else would you call:

• A collaboration system that senior management burdens with so many security restrictions that it leaves departments more isolated than before?
• A consultant that buys cheaper, less capable software so that they bill extra hours for configuring, integrating and upgrading it?
• Employees that resent the influence consultants have with their bosses, and do their best to mislead and dis-inform them?
• Vendors that deliberately “leave out” key features so that their consulant partners have services to sell?

Even in cases where everyone agrees to the broad objectives and goals of a project, the competing interests of groups and individuals can slow or block an implementation. The old political science adage for this is “where you stand is where you sit”. Some examples:

• The IT group must justify their budgets for hardware and software, but they don’t have to worry about training costs. When evaluating a system, they’ll pick things that are cheap and easy to support, even if they’re hard to understand and use.
• Knowing roughly what a customer’s budget entails, consultants will favor cheap software so that they can have a large slice of the budget devoted to services.
• Software vendors will construct their products so that they demonstrate well, but will skimp on features that ease long-term maintenance.
• Line of business managers, happy that they finally get some slice of the capital budget, will splash out on the most comprehensive and most expensive tools they find, because who knows when they’ll get another opportunity to upgrade?

And if all that sounds dysfunctional, you should see what happens to the projects!

It’s not about the technology

Yes, technology is hard. Breaking old habits is difficult. Not everyone enjoys learning new stuff. But these things can be addressed with planning and communication.

But changing the way people work — changing the way that a company does business — that’s a wicked problem.

To address a wicked problem, you need more than fancy tools. You need leadership. You need pioneers. And you need a mission.

Because without those things, these competing groups — and the interests that drive them — will pull your project apart.

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