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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.
One of the most difficult tasks — no, perhaps the most difficult task you can face within an organization is convincing people to change the way they work.
“Yes, I know we used to put it in that system, but now we need to put it in this other system instead.”
Old habits do indeed die hard, and people will continue with the old ways, despite your best efforts to convince them otherwise. Among IT consultants, it’s called The Adoption Problem. It turns out that introducing a better system and better ideas alone aren’t enough to get people working in a more productive and rewarding way. That’s why a lot of the conversation regarding business systems is about change management and “Senior Executive Buy-In” and other such things.
Incidentally, this problem is really not helped by the fact that we appear to have chosen really stupid and embarrassing sounding names for our new systems. “I know we used to send mail, but now you need to post it to the blog.” “Don’t file that document! It belongs on the wiki.”
Ew… Sure, eventually these words will become part of the vernacular as generational change occurs, but there is a lot of work to be done before these Millennials (heaven forbid) will be running all the workplaces in the world.
But I digress – back to the problem. When we started Infovark, this was something Dean and I experienced first hand. We became convinced that the easiest way to get folks to contribute was to minimize the effort that they had to put in, ideally to the point where they didn’t have to adopt any new methods at all.
The system should work with you, rather than forcing you to work with the system.
This meant that Infovark needed to understand the basic information types that businesses use. So we built our system with template types that matched up with familiar everyday things that you already work with. Then we set about finding ways to capture and share them automatically.
In the end, we decided that the five most important sources of information for knowledge workers were these:
Infovark discovers this information by scanning your files and email, and then tries to put these items in context by watching how you work with them. If it guesses right, you’ll have a complete personal information database that can be shared with friends and coworkers — without having to change your work habits.
Over the next week, as we get prepared for the next beta release of Infovark, we’re going to explore these different templates in detail through a series of blog posts, and show how Infovark can help you get things done.