The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

I had a great conversation today with one of my blog-heros, Jeff Nolan. Jeff recently finished a stint as the CEO of Teqlo, a pioneer in hosted tools for building Enterprise 2.0 applications. Others in this space include Coghead and Bungee Labs.

The nirvana we are all shooting for is a world where developers can assemble useful business applications with minimal coding or scripting. The idea is to take simplify certain tasks that are hard to do with code (e.g., visual assembly of page layouts, hooking controls to services) without making it harder than normal to do the things that will always have to be done with some sort of logic. The reality to date has fallen short of this nirvana.

We identified 5 reasons that Enterprise 2.0 apps today often fail to live up to the hype:

1. “Slowest man sets the pace.” Chaining together service calls to build applications creates bottlenecks where the slowest service call tanks the performance of the whole application.

2. Look but don’t touch widgets. Although this is changing (see here for the latest on Google’s pub/sub widgets), the vast majority of widgets can’t exchange data. This allows for an infinite variety of cute clock and horoscope widgets, but a paucity of useful business functionality in widget form.

3. Web service alphabet soup. There are a number of web service standards and even within a standard there are few rules for how the standard should be applied. This means that creating widgets to integrate web services is unexpectedly time consuming.

4. Still too darn hard. The world of widgets and building AJAX apps is still far too complicated for the typical end user developer. Current state of the art tools still require a knowledge of IDEs, standards and languages far beyond the grasp of casual developers.

5. Service throttling. At ActiveGrid, we have found that a number of web services like Google Maps are easy to mash-up for demo apps but much, much harder to use for doing real work. Given that Google has to pay for all the servers, it is easy to see why they would want to encourage people to use their web services in non-intensive ways.

Jeff believes a big market lies in creating “people, place, thing” applications like project management and time tracking. I would add that the killer app is tying Internet data presentation and collection with email workflow – sort of an updated Lotus Notes.

The market and the tools are evolving quickly, so in six months the landscape will look fundamentally different. For now, however, the vision of idiot-proof assembly of Enterprise 2.0 apps using rich business widgets has yet to be fully realized.

Labels: ActiveGrid, Bungee Labs, Coghead, Enterprise 2.0, Google Gadgets, Jeff Nolan, Teqlo, Web 2.0

My friend Lee Wilson just posted an entry on the impact of Web 2.0 technology on school software that you can read here. He spent some time talking to ActiveGrid partner Eljakim about their Carel Student Attendance System that we announced here.

He believes that Web 2.0 will give parents more control over their children's education and accelerate the trend towards statewide deployment of educational software. What he believes are needed are effective and easy-to-use tools for building Web 2.0 apps. Sounds like a job for Activegrid!

Labels: ActiveGrid, Education, Eljakim, Enterprise Web 2.0, Lee Wilson

Judith Hurwitz recently wrote a very interesting article comparing the Web 2.0 tools world today with the early days of client/server GUI builders. Her article is located here. Among other clever things, she says:

Just as PowerBuilder provided a way for the masses to create a graphical first
generation environment, so this next generation of development tools will bring
Web 2.0 to a broad audience.

This summarizes exactly the market opportunity we are seeing at ActiveGrid. The reality is that most corporations use internet for external, customer-facing apps but deploy old-fashioned client/server employee-facing apps behind the firewall. Observations about the cobbler’s children having the worst shoes definitely apply!

Our goal is to bring the web revolution to client/server developers who have been left behind by complex code frameworks like J2EE, .NET, even Rails. Mitchell Kertzman, who is on our board, is helping us undo the client/server revolution he started at PowerSoft. Our goal is to drive the pendulum from distributed, fat-client systems back to centralized, thin-client systems.

Labels: ActiveGrid, Cobbler's Children, Enterprise Web 2.0, Judith Hurwitz, Mitchell Kertzman, Web 2.0

Every software vendor dreams of having a vibrant user community to provide input, buzz and maybe even someday help make money! When I joined ActiveGrid six months ago, the user community on SourceForge was dead, with one to two posting per day. Now the community has over 15 posts a day, a more than ten-fold increase in less than six months.

This describes the steps we took to go from zero to somebody in the enterprise tools forum world. ActiveGrid is a visual tool for building web apps, sort of an MS Access for the Web. Our success as a tool is closely tied to the strength of our community.

1. Crown a community czar

Taking care of the community had been an ad hoc activity at ActiveGrid. As usual, whenever something is everybody’s job, it ends up at the end of everybody’s todo list.

The most important step we took to kick-start our community was to assign a full-time employee to manage the health and well-being of the community. The skills required for success include good technical and writing abilities combined with a genuine interest in open source communities.

2. Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket!

For historical reasons, ActiveGrid had several different forums. There was even an abandoned community started by an ActiveGrid fan. It was thriving, but only because spammers had loaded all the forums with postings that were off topic to say the least. It took over a month to get all the forum traffic funneled into just one community board.

3. Use best of breed forum tools

We found that the ActiveGrid SourceForge forums were hard to navigate and didn’t allow attachments. Our community czar moved the community to Drupal and rehosted it at dev.activegrid.com. The new Drupal site helped make it easier to post content, helping to drive a flood of new posts. In addition, the Drupal forum software handles attachments and graphics, making it much more valuable for sharing information.

4. Connect with your base

The first thing our community czar did was to reach out to the people who were actively posting (even though many of their postings had to do with how un-loved they were feeling). He contacted them directly through email and built personal relationships with what we called the “Fab 4” – the top 4 posters who became the foundation for the rebirth of our community. One important lesson is that a small core of active posters is the soul of a healthy community.

5. Turn off the spin

At the risk of sounding cluetrain manifesto-ish, we made an early decision to err on the side of transparency in communicating with our community. We admitted that we had been lax in our support of the community and asked for their help. We also kept the community strictly separate from the commercial side of the house. Using community to flog commercial ideas will go nowhere. It’s like the joke about why you shouldn’t teach a pig to whistle – it doesn’t work and it annoys the pig.

6. Coddle early adopters

In a new community, one active poster is worth 1,000 lurkers. Given this, anything you can do to help incubate people with the gift of gab is worthwhile. We gave away ipods, bought lunches, but most importantly built personal relationships with our community champions.

7. Foster healthy competition

Each posting at dev.activegrid.com earns the poster points, that aren’t redeemable in any way except in our rankings. Anyone in the community who wants to be seen by their peers as an ActiveGrid expert has to work pretty hard just to stay at the top of the rankings.

8. Find work for your users

Many of the posters in the ActiveGrid community are consultants. Every chance we get, we put our corporate customers in touch with community experts. This is classic win-win – our customers get their jobs done and our community champions have even more reasons to be enthusiastic about our products.

9. Take your lumps

Not all postings are positive. Not all community members are polite. Having a community manager actively working to address issues as they arise has proven the most effective way of keeping the overall tone of the community constructive.

10. Explore the boundaries

We are now at the fun stage in working with the community, where we are exploring the boundaries of what you can do with a passionate and committed group of people, all of whom are focused on helping you deliver a great product to market.

For example, the community has provided invaluable beta testing on our last three releases. Top community members have also had one-on-one meetings with our engineering team to help us engineer our next generation product. On the business side, we have asked the community for help in devising our pricing and licensing.

We have not yet fully tapped the potential of the community, but have absolutely turned the community into a powerful driver of momentum. It has been extraordinary how quickly the gains in the community have been reflected by increased business activity and enthusiasm among our commercial customers. Success is infectious!

Labels: ActiveGrid, Cluetrain, Community, social media, Web 2.0

What with the short winter days and getting up early to go swimming, I have been getting dressed in the dark frequently. So there I am, with minimal lights so I don’t wake anyone, trying to figure out whether my pants will match my shirt when everything looks grey. Mostly I go by texture and after fumbling for awhile just make my best guess.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have started as CEO of ActiveGrid. Again, I find myself with partial information, trying to make important decisions without too much time. I have met 1 on 1 with each employee, trying to understand everyone’s skills, how they look at their job and what they think could be done to make the team more effective.

With limited information and limited time, I am trying to make decisions about how to get everything working well together. The more I see of management, the more I believe that it is often important to trust your gut and move forward even if you don’t have the full picture.

Thus it was a bit disconcerting to get to work last Wednesday and discover that I had picked out navy blue pants to go with my brown shirt.

Labels: ActiveGrid, Color Blindness