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A little over two years ago, Dean and I were two overworked ECM Consultants. We were flying all over North America every week in suits and ties, helping customers with their information management and technology problems, staying up late writing large and complex reports, drinking in random airport bars, and generally getting more and more frustrated.
The reasons for our frustration were that we felt that the customers we spoke to weren’t getting a very good deal. That the products that were being offered to them were expensive, complex, time-consuming, and in many cases, didn’t meet their actual needs. The very first post I ever wrote on this blog explains it all pretty clearly. Social systems are emergent in nature, and the systems that we have at work aren’t social enough.
One Labor day, we had an idea. We drew what came to be called “The Spiderweb Diagram” — a 7-page scrawled mindmap that detailed what we thought Enterprise Software should be delivering to its customers.
I’ve always said that the idea of a lifetime comes along once every two weeks. Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.
Man, ain’t that the truth.
Today, two years later, the first fragment of that spiderweb diagram made the enormous leap from idea to reality.
Infovark Personal Edition 1.0 is complete, and ready for the world. You can try a copy for free, and if you like it, you can buy one.
It’s taken a lot of hard work — long hours, more than 150 blog posts — and has been the single most frightening, exciting and perilous thing I have ever done.
But at the end of this release, as the build machine finally turned off its super-loud CPU fan for the last time compiling pre-release code, I felt proud of us.
Anyone can complain about things, and most people, when pressed, can think of a way to fix a problem.
We actually did it though. We built and shipped something.
I want to thank everyone who helped us get this far.
Warren Thrasher, Infovark’s primary investor. Warren has helped us keep the lights on, and keep everyone fed, as well as providing sage counsel and advice to both of us.
Amy Hoy, who helped us turn our horrible looking Windows application into a much more user friendly and fresh solution worthy of the illustrious ”2.0″ moniker.
Nate and Jay and our friends at Kapish, for taking early versions of Infovark for a spin.
Alison and Paula, who not only put up with having their spouses absent for so long, but also managed to offer support and advice.
You, for taking the time from your day to read our blog! Our blog readers and Twitter friends and the awesome people we’ve met in the Enterprise 2.0 community have been instrumental in helping us get this far. We couldn’t have possibly done it without you.
Thanks!
Personal information is everywhere in modern systems. Most people have multiple user profiles, duplicate friend information, redundant login details, and several address books. All of this personal data is scattered across many systems.
Sometimes this is done deliberately, to provide better security or privacy, but it’s most often done incidentally, because not all of our systems synchronize with each other. Different facets of our identity reside in different places.
We’ve gotten used to this situation in public spaces on the Internet. Most of us take for granted the hassle of having to re-enter our profile data and re-establish links with our friends and peers. It’s the price we pay for an Internet that preserves anonymity.
Inside the walls of an organization, it’s a different story. It’s crucial to know who’s who. It’s important to have accurate, up-to-date contact information. But most of today’s enterprise systems contribute to the identity management problem. And the new breed of Enterprise 2.0 systems are only likely to make things worse in the near future.
Dealing with this explosion of fractured contact information is a hard problem. Dean and I have spent loads of time discussing grandiose, world-changing ideas to fix it all.
Then we gave up and decided that two guys in a basement weren’t going to be able to resolve these corporate identity management problems any time soon.
But we figured that something we could do was collect existing data and help people share that with their peers. So we added a template to support contact information.
Infovark captures contact information from Microsoft Outlook Contacts and shares them with your colleagues. We use the hCard standard to mark up contact information, so as to make everything as interoperable as possible. hCard is itself based on the older vCard standard, implemented by virtually all modern email systems.
If you add your Outlook contacts folder to the list of mail folders Infovark monitors, you’ll see the contacts appear in your shared website:
Much like the way we handle files, if you update your contacts in Outlook, you’ll find they automatically update in Infovark, too. So while we haven’t figured out a way to solve the identity problem yet, we’re doing what we can to keep the problem from getting any worse.
Infovark will also automatically relate these contacts to the email and attachments you receive, helping to build a picture about what subjects your contacts know about. And because contact information is also tied to our user data, Infovark will notice which of your contacts interacts with your web site, and will learn about the things they care about too.
Infovark uses both sets of information to help you identify the right person to talk to about any particular subject. It’s an easy way to keep track of all your “go-to” people.
Ah, Email. Where would we be without the flood of email that greets us every morning? Email is one of the oldest protocols for communicating via the Internet — in fact, the first RFC for standardizing email headers was proposed in 1973. That’s older than me!
Email is the default method of collaboration for all knowledge workers. It’s a very flexible system, and that’s why it tends to fill the gaps where other collaboration systems fall down — you can always go back to sending email.
This flexibility has led to the emergence of all kinds of proprietary and non-proprietary extensions to email. For example, although they look different, Microsoft Outlook implements Messages, Calendar Items, Meetings, and Tasks on an underlying email template. The Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, or MIME, originally created for email, has grown to become the predominant way that all content is described on the internet.
There’s a lot of conversation in the Enterprise 2.0 community about where email fits in this new puzzle. Luis Suarez talks about how he managed to kill his inbox and kick the email habit altogether, whereas Sam Driessen suggests the complete opposite — that any effective 2.0 tool has to start with the inbox.
Well, here at Infovark, we decided that we would have to make a decision on this one way or the other. Both Dean and I are really not fans of email. There should definitely be a better default. And yet, if we wanted to help people share their information, we would have to go where the information lives. So we added a template to support email.
In keeping with Infovark’s philosophy of sharing your work without any work, Infovark scans your Outlook inbox in much the same way as it does with files – you tell your Infovark which folders in Outlook you want to share:
Infovark takes care of the rest. As emails arrive, (or as you move them into folders), the Infovark Outlook Crawler will pick them up, read them, tag them, and share them with your colleagues on your Infovark website on your local machine:
Unlike our file template, the Infovark web site displays the complete text of an email. It also indexes them, so you can search for them outside of Outlook, and if you happen to have one of those evil quotas on your inbox, Infovark can take snapshots of your mail, so you can keep stuff that your sysadmin won’t let you keep. Attachments are automatically stored as local files and related to the original email.
Just like our file template, you can add tags and rate the email, but in keeping with the email paradigm, you can’t edit the text of a sent email itself.
We also offer the option to access this information within Outlook itself, through our outlook utility, that we call “Outvark”. (You can read more about that here.)
So, that’s how your Infovark can help turn your idle forgotten emails into an interactive website that you can share with your colleagues. Next stop on our whirlwind tour: the contact template.
The file is the basic unit of computer information. From a collaboration perspective, there are plenty of file-centric tools designed for sharing files — network drives, SharePoint, box.net — even the Internet itself isn’t much more than a collection of files, shared through various protocols.
For a knowledge worker, the files they work with daily usually map directly to a particular work task — for example, minutes of a meeting, or a document detailing a deliverable. They can also contain knowledge sourced from other people or places, like news reports or policy documents.
Regardless of what’s in them, Files are also the primary unit of plagiarism. I don’t mean plagiarism in a bad way; if these files can be said to “belong” to anyone, they belong to the Enterprise as a whole. It’s common for a valuable file within the organization to be re-purposed multiple times. Making key documents available to other people in your organization can be a huge productivity enabler.
By default, these files nearly always end up on your local machine. People mail them to you, they leave them lying around on network drives for you to copy. You download them from the web and read them locally. Despite all our efforts to try to centralize file storage, my computer is full of all kinds of files collected through my work. And as much as I can appreciate the benefits of cloud-based storage, I don’t think that this is going to change anytime soon.
And although files are traditionally thought of as unstructured data, it turns out there’s a lot of indexable and valuable information that can be collected from them. It’s just takes a bit more work for us software developers than accessing data that’s already been put into a database or some other structured format.
Infovark and Files
Infovark will process any file you give it, but it has best results with files that contain meaningful text. By default, Infovark scans all Microsoft Office files, PDFs, and plain text files, but you can include other file formats if you like. Infovark will do the best job it can.
To have your Infovark process a file, you need to tell it where to look. You can do this from the Infovark Manager, on the Files tab:
You just need to specify the folder that the document is in – that’s it. From here, your Infovark will keep an eye on the directory, and when you save or update a document, your Infovark it will capture it, and make it available on your local Infovark website. When it’s done, the web page it produces looks like this:
More than Tags
If you click on the picture above (opens in a new window),You can see that your Infovark has provided a text summary of the document, and also tagged the document with what it thinks are relevant keywords.
Infovark’s tags are a bit special, though. You can search for documents by tag, just like a Delicious or Technorati search. But Infovark also uses these tags to develop concepts it associates with your information and contacts. These concepts are used to suggest people you know or other useful email and documents.
You can see this in action with the related content panel, down the right hand side of the screen. So tagging is not just useful for you, but also improves the recommendations that Infovark makes.
You can edit the document summary, and provide more information about the document on this screen. You can add headers, pictures, links to other web pages within your Infovark site as well as on external sites using a friendly WYSIWYG editor. There’s no need to learn confusing wiki markup.
Visitors to this page can leave comments, download the file for themselves, or follow links to other relevant content. They can also rate the file or add tags to the page.
As you can see, Files are a hugely important part of how Infovark determines what you know. In our next post, we’ll look at email, and how it’s captured and shared.
Yes! Infovark is…
And you can totally find it here.
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.
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.
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?