Posts Tagged ‘Infovark’
All Quiet on the Blogging Front
It’s been nearly two months since our last blog post; that’s far too long. But although things have been quiet on our website, the Infovark Burrow has been a hive of activity. So much so, that our source code hosting provider wrote us a few days ago to tell us to knock it off with all the check-ins, revisions, and changes to our code base.
So what have we been up to lately?
Based on the continuing feedback from our initial release of Infovark, we decided to forgo a 1.5 update and push ahead to Infovark 2.0. Our second release brings several major changes.
First, we’re focusing the core of the application on keeping things together. Whether you call it information management or knowledge management or content management, it all boils down to one key principle: having one place to look to find what you need. Infovark will help gather and organize your stuff so you can spend more time doing and less time searching.
Second, we’ve cut out many of the confusing parts of our application. This includes just about anything that caused us to get a bewildered look or blank stare when we tried to explain it. The cuts include one or two features that are dear to our hearts — and may resurface in later versions in different forms — but we think simplicity and ease of use is an important feature, too.
Third, the new focus and stripped-down feature set has allowed us to completely re-engineer the Infovark user interface. Where before we had a separate “Manager” application and a website for everyday use, we now have one consolidated view of your information.
We’re really excited about the new direction the product is taking. As we get closer to launch, we’ll share more details.
Until then, happy varking!
Ideas are Easy
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.
Acknowledgements
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!
Infovark Templates: Contacts
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 and Contacts
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.
Infovark Templates: Email
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.
