It has been interesting to see that SAP is working with Google Wave. SAP has been innovating but not all of the work has been publicized because it was difficult to find the correct format for publishing the research. Some of the results have probably been taken into SAP products, but it is probably very little. The release of Gravity for Wave SAP has showed to the public that they know how to innovate.
In the Demo Jam at SAP Teched 09 in Vienna, Lars Rasmussen (Google Wave Team) and Alexander Dreiling (SAP) did a demo. They had 6 minutes to do the demo in. They first introduced Wave to thee audience and then they showed off Gravity. They show an extension of Gravity, where it was possible to see the execution of the process model. This model was driven by Business Objects Live Enterprise and was a dashboard, which shows how each step performs.
On a wednesday presentation, Alexander showed the next steps for the Wave integration. SAP is working on a tool to design some Gui screens to be used in the process. With a combination of these two tools all the business users can define their processes, build the user interfaces, run the processes and monitor the status. This will be very powerful to be able to do. The tools will target business users with limited IT skills and make them able to develop and run their own processes.
I was lucky to talk to Alexander Dreiling from SAP Labs in Brisbane, one of the people responsible for the Gravity. He said that SAP was trying to figure out what the community meant about Wave and if it was something that businesses want. Being a large organization, it was difficult to get some ideas into the market, if it should follow the normal release procedures. He talked about if an open source model could be used. Releasing the tool under some open source license would make it possible to get the tool into the market much faster and solve some of the support problems. SAP would like to get much more feedback and a faster development cycle.
Before Gravity could be released it had to undergo a rewrite to fix some of the bugs and make the code more maintainable. Alexander also talked about porting Gravity into Flex to have a more stable foundation to use for Wave development. Google Web Tool kit had some limitations.
I was not sure about the status of two other tools was in the development process. A screen capture will be created soon, which demonstrates one or both of the tools. I’m looking forward to see what tools is cable of and it they will be interesting for organizations. It will also be interesting if SAP can create a business model for the tools.
I got my Asus Eee PC with a 10″ 1024×600 screen two weeks ago. It would be very useful to have Google Wave on this computer. The first thing I did was to attach the computer to a large external screen and then run the Wave. It worked pretty well because you could see everything.
The big advantage of a laptop computer is that it can be brought anywhere. Besides, its light and not bulky. Well, mine has a really long battery life that can last for a full working day if it set to standby mode when it is not being used. This also works well if you are going to write or note important points in meetings or events.
I used the notebook to tweet, write notes and work in wave.
If you don’t change any of the windows settings you cannot see much like shown on the following image.
It is fairly easy to work in wave with the Eee. The screen is not big, but it is possible to make the Wave panel larger to write well. There is still a large part in the window, which is taken by the header and form fields. The Eee has a mode where it is possible to mimic a larger screen and thereby roll the windows so you only see the wave.
Firefox also has to be in Full screen. This way you get more space to write on and it also removes the bar in the window screen.
The problem with the Wave exists if you start adding images or gadgets. They can often not fit into the small 600 pixels in height. I tried to use the Gravity Gadget on the computer and it was very difficult to get a full overview of the process because the screen was to small.
Typing on it is another problem I noticed in the beginning because I thought it will be slow. There was too much JavaScript for the Atom processor. It only seems to have been improved I can now write as fast as I want.
The off-line wave mode does also work pretty well. What you type will get synced in with the wave when you get back on-line. This is also interesting if you want to save the battery by stopping the Wifi connection or to any conference where the Internet connection is unstable.
I see it is possible to use wave also on small notebooks like mine. They can handle a much richer environment than mobile phones.
“There will always be two questions on something; is it good or bad? Opposite attracts as some people say it but the question always is: which is better?”
The internet world has been talking about the next big thing in the digital world since the start of its introduction to developers worldwide. What else would that be but Google Wave. The news about its first appearance to public were spread in seconds and many people felt the excitement to experience the newest way of real-time communication. Some said it is big, some said no, but will google wave become the next thing to replace traditional email? Who knows until everybody has got the feel of it.
In line with all of these, blogs, websites, forums, and even time magazine has spread the words about Google Wave. News have been coming in and out of the picture and in this post, thoughts from some individuals will be read.
The IT Pro has given a four-page long review about Google Wave (GW). It included the idea that initially; the service offered by GW may seem a bit confusing, just as some doubted it is a replacement for any traditional email. However, IT pro has concluded that GW can provide great benefits to businesses. “It is easy to see how appealing the Google Wave can be, especially for those who work on projects with multiple people at different locations.”
Robert Scoble, a celebrity blogger on the other hand is somewhat more skeptical. He wrote at scobleizer.com that the services are “vastly over-hyped, and as people start using it, they will realize that it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductive (uproduktivitet). “ Scoble pointed out that it is totally confusing to see a number of people write to a real time page, he told new Wave users to add only their closest friends as contacts. He explains, “I do not know where I should start with, and keeping up with this real-time noise is not much like e-mail, which is like tennis (strike a ball at a time), but it is more like trying to dodge tennis balls from a machine gun.”
Another blogger named Adam Turner may not also have some positive notes about Google Wave. He wrote that he has already IM, email and Google Docs and having Google Wave may be difficult to fit into the picture. He included: “This is the classic example of a solution looking for a problem. This does not mean that it (the service ed.) are worthless, or that I dislike it, but it’s just because it will take time for people to get around the Wave on Google and find out the best way to spend it on among other things.”
The beta tester Sean Lew’s experience with Google Wave was “refreshing”, but he doubts that all the cool features is not enough to make the Wave a hit. He said: “Google is perhaps big and powerful, but I am not convinced that it is strong enough to change the traditional e-mail.” On the other hand, Zmogo blogger writes that although the wave may not be as impressive at the moment, particularly because of the limited number of users, Google Wave can still be the next big hit. Louis Gray, another blogger has also pointed out that the potentials are certainly there, although it also must turn to the new way of communication. “Wave is a very interesting platform, and I would bet that after the first wave of curiosity, will the normal form of conversations and information exchanges take over, so this first ‘point’ is perhaps the exception rather than the rule,” writes he.
The CTO and Co-Founder of Woobius who is Daniel Tenner has also given his ideas about Google Wave in his post about What Problem does Google Wave Solve? He said; “Many experts and tech gurus had described Google Wave as a disappointment. They end up comparing it as social media since they didn’t seem to know what Wave is actually for. Google wave is not the next Twitter nor the next facebook but possibly change Instant Messengers in some circumstances in the near future.”
The release of Google Wave to developers and other social media experts first is partly Google’s error since Wave is not mainly designed for them but for the world of business and corparation as a tool to solve work problems. Google Calls it an “online tool for real-time communication and collaboration”. Well, Daniel Tenner’s team at Woobius at first glance saw Google Wave as an awesome tool to get rid with the email problems at their work. And what are the email problems that google wave can solve? Tenner explained that the main problem is the “spams” that are caused by unnecessary signing up to many services (Google Docs, Etherpad, Skitch, screen sharing tools, or any number of collaborative whiteboard applications) that resulted to automated notifications and etc. Google Wave has resolved certain email issues such as “collaborating on a piece of text”, “adding new people to the conversation”, “keeping added people added”, “attaching Files over 10MB”, “lost attachments”, “multiple conversation branches”, “correcting small glitches in typos”, and “email-like platform turning into IM-like platform” (and vice-versa). Tenner has then concluded that Google Wave was basically created for corporate environment as a tool in getting things done easy and without mistakes. And as far as those go, it’s an excellent tool, even at this very early stage.
These are just few comments and news about Google’s Masterpiece –“Wave”. Well, many might have different opinions about Google Wave but what we can hope for is that, developers who first tried it can identify different areas of improvement so that Google Wave will manifest more benefits and will solve more problems in today’s digital world of communication.
I was recently a speaker at a librarian union, where persons brought up the tagging functionality as important for users. Some saw their own role with Wave as someone who had to perform work with helping users create ontologies or taxonomies for the data stored in the wave. This made me think a little more about how the tags in Wave can be applied and the reasons to do it.
Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. Tags can be found in almost any Web 2.0 application, and is a way to organize data into some more user friendly categories. Tagging can be done by the user who submitted the content or by anyone who has access to seeing the data.
Source: http://www.google-success.com/
While people use tags, it just takes up extra time when browsing. According to Gene Smith in Taxonomy of tagging systems , tags are used to help with:
1. Future Retrieval – marking something so it can found later (aka refindability)
2. Contribution and sharing – adding tags for the “value of known or unkown audiences”
3. Attract Attention – “to get people to look one’s own resources”
4. Play and Competition – formally in the ESP Game, informally in tags like squaredcircle (over 40,000 photos!) and sometaithurts
5. Self Presentation – “to write a user’s own identity into the system as a way of leaving their mark on a particular resource”
6. Opinion Expression – making value judgements, e.g. bullshit
All these points make sense from a business perspective, where we want more structure of the data.
If the user cannot find the document fast, it actually does not make a lot of sense in to create it in the first place. Then the information will only stay within the person(s) head, who created the content in the first place. This might be correct in some instance where you just want to create some feedback and create a decision on something. If the content is something, which needs to be published, it does make sense to organize it, so it is easier to find for other people.
I also think attracting attention is interesting, and something which underline the statement above. If you can get people attention and show you have created something useful, you will be seen more as a person who is useful for the organization. This has also something to do with self presentation, where the individual has the power to learn information.
There are some content where tags are unnecessary, because it does not fulfill the properties above. That will be a natural behavior, it also says something about that the content is not worth anything for someone else. Content without any tags can then be prioritized lowest for the voting principle.
A problem with tags is:
“Two people choose the same main key word for a single well known object less than 20% of the time.” Study from 1983 quote by Joseph A. Busch from www.taxonomystrategies.com.
This is an old study, but I don’t think that much have changed in the field. So I would guess this still to be valid. But it shows that we need to use more than just one tag, to make it much easier for people to see the same information.
It would be useful for organizations to teach about how they want to use tags. Much of the tagging should be self explanatory, so new employees can use it. I think it can be allowed to use a more specific organization taxonomy. I also think that giving people some education in how they can best create tags will make it much easier for them to find the content.
The problem without strict control of the tagging, will mean that people are less inclined to use the ideas and just skip tagging.
For organizations it will make sense to use some of the knowledge that the libaryans already has learned the hard way. They should just somehow be able to teach the other on how we can implement tags our self. It will probably be different to use tagging in Wave than in other applications, but the systems can be adopted.
At the SAP Teched in Phoenix there event BPX process slam, we worked with SAP NetWeaver Collaborative Business Process Modelling (formerly Gravity) to create a process model. In the SAP community a BPX is a Business Process Expert, a person with technical and business experience. BPX process slam is an event, where different people from the SAP community were working with different tools to create a common process. All was focusing on creating some tools for a community driven power plant. The event was covered by Sandy Kemsly
My group’s goal was to test how collaboration can be done with Wave and Gravity. We were on 7 people of which 2 were in Europe, so we had to do some offline work. Our result is on the SAP wiki.
We first started to get used to the Gravity tool. It took some time to figure out how it could be used. There were people who were new to Wave, which need to see Wave and Gravity. This was not difficult with a small introduction. They seemed to pick up the usage really fast sand found it interesting.
We started to work on the process. We had to figure out what the business process it was that we were going to design on. There where multiply different process ideas that we was working on and how the models should be created. It will probably require some thoughts to figure out what the process vision is, and how the process is suppose to work. There should probably be written something about this before a collaboration can take place. If all participants know what the process should be around the collaboration will be easier.
After we started collaborating it went pretty smooth. It was possible to see each other changes and make corrections to the process. So Gravity did work well for the collaboration.
I found that the process model took up most of the screen, also on larger computers than my 10″. This means that people have to scroll around to find the collaboration area of the text. That was probably not an ideal place to work with process modeling.
When modeling the process it is required that the users has some modeling experience. The models can be quite difficult to use if you are not familiar with process models. The annotations to describe the process worked really well, they gave an overview of what was going on.
The resulting process is in this image, a larger can be seen on the wiki.
Since it is a demo version of Gravity there are some features which would make the tool more useful. The layout of the functions gets pretty messy; it would be nice if there was an auto layout feature. The shadow around the elements can be difficult to see how made them. The actions could only have around 15 characters, so you need to describe your process shortly. Lastly the modeling should be easier for users to do, so business users can use it.
Gravity has some great features and could be a really interesting application, if it was developed to a fully fledged product. It would promote Wave as a place where business value could be created easily. I hope there will be more tools, which can achieve the same level of collaboration with the users.
