I should be blogging about all the conversations I've had with folks pre and post EMC World right now (to which I did not go for
numerous reasons: (a) Staffing Documentum and eCTD related gigs (b)
Staffing a BRAND NEW Documentum installation (c) writing about Twitter
for the mainstream media (here's a link to one of the articles that's already published) (d) other)), but someone just told me about Google Wave; I want to blog about it instead. (The other stuff will come soon.)
If you haven't heard about Wave yet, here's the skinny.
Google says:
What is a wave?
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.
I know that many of you will want to know a lot more about Wave, so I've done the googling, reading, and rating for you, in case you don't want to do it for yourself. Here's the developer demo (WARNING: It's 90 minutes long) If you don't want to sit through it, here's a summary from TechCrunch's MG Seigler.
If you're wondering why I think Google Wave has anything to do with Enterprise Content Management, Document Management, Information Management, Workflow...(I'll stop short of collaboration because I hope that's obvious), consider how the look, the feel, the functionality and the overall Wave-experience might potentially and eventually impact the way people work or might want to work. While CenterStage does a great job on delivering Web 2.0 functionalities within the enterprise, Google Wave could change the way we interface with the web. If it delivers on its promises, then it will, as W. Edwards Deming used to say, "delight the customer" rather than simply give workers an interface that they already use as consumers (which is, in a sense what technologies like Yammer, and dare I say, Centerstage seem to do.)
On a more ECM-related note, Thomas Claburn of Information Week says that:
Wave also has the potential to blunt the success of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s SharePoint. While Google isn't positioning Wave as a SharePoint competitor, Gundotra at a press conference following the Wave demonstration highlighted Wave's openness as something lacking in SharePoint. Within a year or two, businesses considering SharePoint but worried about vendor lock-in may have an attractive lightweight alternative.
The other thing that I can't ignore is that Google says it will open-source a "lion's share" of Wave's code. Gundotra has already released the preview product to over 4000 developers. You can find the developer preview here, the APIs here, and the protocol draft here.
Why do I think this matters? Think iPhone. How much less cool would it be if there weren't all those independently developed downloadable toys.
The other thing to think about, and I know this from my reporting rather than recruiting career, is that Gen Y and Millennial workers demand that their interface experiences on the job be at least as good as their interfaces off-the-job. So if Wave becomes widely adopted, it changes the game everywhere. True, this could cause compliance headaches, but Google has been more enterprise- considerate than usual in Wave's design (this from the Register)
While waves are relatively self-contained and use their own types of servers and data formats, they are easy to embed elsewhere or to build extensions for, enabling virtually infinite options for distribution over the Web or within the firewall, as well as rapid integration with existing applications and data. In fact, a wave is almost a form of social glue between people and the information they care about. And as we’ll see, this has implications for the enterprise world, not only with SOA but also with social communication in general as well as Enterprise 2.0 specifically.
Enough from me, go have at it yourself. A few short years from now, you'll be able to comment on my blog as I post it. We (you plus me) will be smarter than I alone. I'm off to recruit, I'll need brilliant folks to engage with.
Tags: Documentum, EMC, Sharepoint, Google, Wave, Sharepoint, Web 2.0
