What this should tell you? That large companies at the forefront of enterprise social computing — like Intel, Dell, and others — routinely turn to multiple suppliers for different types of internal and external communities. This may have something to do with inter-departmental politics and silos, but I think it actually makes sense: different vendors in this marketplace target different scenarios and will therefore be better suited to different business objectives

While I certainly agree that different vendors target different scenarios, I’m not sure I’d so easily accept the notion that multiple internal and external platforms make sense. He continues:

For example, Telligent sees some internal implementations, but is known mostly for its external-facing community implementations, while Jive’s Clearspace can and does get implemented externally, but is mostly known for its behind-the-firewall implementations. You the buyer should not assume that one size fits all.

Of course there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to community building. But does that necessarily mean the answer is to license multiple competing proprietary platforms for a single enterprise?

How well integrated are an internal implementation of Java-based Clearspace and an external implementation of .NET-based Telligent ever going to be, given that both are proprietary?

• What happens when Intel’s business needs suggest sharing content from the internal Clearspace community with users in the external Telligent community? How difficult is it to migrate content from one to the other?
• What happens when the internal community realizes it might benefit from external input, or the external community starts to involve internal users?
• Do users who have a presence in both maintain separate usernames and passwords? How easily can both be pointed at a shared user repository?
• How efficient is it from an IT management point of view to have ongoing enterprise license agreements with two vendors? Do users joining both communities essentially increase the license fees for both vendors?

Of course, imposing one monolithic solution may not be possible either. I regularly deal with clients who have not just two core content management systems but as many as five or six: due to the “inter-departmental politics and silos” Tony mentioned above, or due to corporate acquisitions which bring their own legacy systems, or due to serial leadership changes and different IT strategies over time.

How do you enable the right balance of “fit-to-purpose” (which might identify different platforms for different social scenarios) against “fit-to-enterprise” (which would explore the impact of platform proliferation and silos)? What happens when the community you expected to be purely internal suddenly realizes that it would benefit from external input?

Leveraging mature open source platforms- and customizing them to fit the specific scenarios of the community being served- will better preserve long term business agility and ensure that those silos don’t become islands, but can share data and functionality with each other.

See also: CMIS, ECM Interoperability, and Services-Oriented Content Management

The way the feature should work is that the Alfresco Share application takes the PDF a user uploads into the document library, converts it to an SWF using swftools (one frame of the SWF per each page of the PDF), and then uses the YUI framework to “play” the resulting SWF.

The problem is that for me, depending on the version of Flash installed, the preview SWF cannot be displayed. (Short version: Flash 9.0.45-47 works fine, later Flash versions just result in a spinning cursor which never resolves. The problem is Flash 9.0.45 breaks file upload, which works in later Flash versions).

Good Flash

Bad Flash

Just finding this out required a lengthy exercise including full uninstalls of Flash (using Flash uninstaller for Mac OS X, which takes forever since it is a PowerPC binary running on an Intel machine) along with installs of various versions of Flash from the 9.x archive.

It was in this context that I was so happy to see the dialogue Dion Almaer and Brad Neuberg posted at Ajaxian today: How Flash Can Join The Open Web.

The conversation began on Dion’s techno.blog(“Dion”) with The Flash Platform: How Adobe could join the Open Web to take on . . . in which he argues:

With Silverlight making a huge charge I worry about a world where you have “Best viewed in Silverlight and IE” (which in fact is “only viewed in…”) and people often ask: “But isn’t Flash just as bad?”

Adobe has an opportunity here. They can move to the right and Flash could become strongly in the Open Web camp. Then we would all be stronger as we come up against Silverlight :)

Indeed, Dion’s image, which he used to show the developer perception of Flash and Silverlight together in contrast to the Open Web isn’t that much different than this image I’ve used in previous blog posts here:

Brad responded over at coding in paradise with How Flash Can Integrate With The Open Web, in which he argues that:

Adobe (and Macromedia before it) has always been good about evolving Flash forward, including making ActionScript more like JavaScript, embracing markup language development, open sourcing Flex, and more. I’d like to see Flash continue to evolve into being a core part of the Open Web. This would be good for Flash and good for the Open Web.

As Dion points out open sourcing Flash is one big part of making this happen, but another huge aspect would be to have Flash and Flex integrate better into the web stack and be less of a ‘black box’ on the screen.

He goes on to list a number of ways that “Flash should start working like the web itself”:

• Directly push Flex and ActionScript to the browser and Embrace View Source
• Integrate with Bookmarking and History
• Don’t Be Afraid of the Browser
• Hyperlinks Are Your Friend
• Embrace REST and Readable Remoting Protocols
• Embrace SVG
• Integrate With HTML and CSS
• Make Friends With HTML 5 Video
• Support Both Documents and Applications
• Start Working with the W3C and IETF (and/or the Open Web Foundation)

Now, of course it’s not fair to blame Adobe for my troubleshooting woes of the last week – more likely something about the SWFs produced by SWFTools or the way Alfresco Share is trying to pass them through the YUI Components is to blame, and it’s just that some versions of the Flash player are more forgiving than others.

But how much easier would it be to debug such an application if the Flash plugin didn’t create such a “black box” in the middle of my web application? What if I could dive into the running Flash application the way I can dive into the document object model in firebug, and determine the states of objects and content of variables?

Like Brad and Dion, I like what Flash is capable of, but so much more great innovation could be built with Flash if it were more integrated with the rest of the evolving web stack – whether that means open sourcing all of Flash or just finding ways t work with browser makers (commercial and open source) to make the content and interactivity in SWFs more accessible to the end user.

The panelists were:

• Bob Bickel, from Ringside Networks
• John Newton, from Alfresco
• Jeff Whatcott, from Acquia

Although the conference doesn’t audio tape or videotape the breakout sessions in the smaller rooms – only the keynote – they were nice enough to allow us to record the panel’s audio.

You can download the MP3 (43MB, 128 bit rate) or listen in the player below:

The panel was covered a few places:

• On Jeff’s blog: “Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Drupal Perspective“
• By Kathleen Reidy on the 451 Group blog: “Open source at Enterprise 2.0“
• By Dennis Byron at ebizQ: “Open source, including open source Sharepoint tool, in/at Enterprise 2.0“

Let me know if I missed any.

From my blog at Optaros.com: “Enterprise 2.0 Free Conference Pass”

At the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this June, I will be moderating a panel on Open Source Platforms.

The panel will be Thursday, June 12th, at 8:30am.

Here’s the session description:

Community and collaboration pervade open source. It’s no surprise therefore that there are a number of open source platforms which are not only capable of delivering Enterprise 2.0, but are delivering it with innovation, flexibility, and agility. This session covers several, including (but not limited to) Alfresco, Drupal, and Ringside Networks.

Participating on the panel with me will be:

• Bob Bickel, Founder and CEO of Ringside Networks
• Dr. Ian Howells, CMO of Alfresco
• Jeff Whatcott, VP of Marketing at Acquia

Thanks to the conference organizers, I have one free full conference pass to give away. (Full conference pass is $1895 currently and $2095 if you register on site).

To get the pass, contact me. I will choose at random from those who contact me by the end of day Sunday, 5/11.

I also have a number of discount codes which you can use to get a free demo pavillion pass – which gets you in to the demo pavillion as well as “selected keynotes and sponsored sessions” – or $100 off a full registration.