In an experiment described on WaveOnBusiness, which deals with Wave in a publishing company. The idea of using Wave for publishers has apparently stretched even further. Why not use Google Wave as a news platform. It would be strange to use the term newspaper or newsletter, but newswave would be more appropriate term. Lets see if the term catches on.
Bjarne P Tveskov has started the first internet magazine, I have seen, called Bølgendk. The magazine is only in Danish, and you can find it hire. It is a summary of some news created for the last week and should be published weekly. The idea could also be relevant for any other niche marked you want to write about. It could be something in your local community or about your business passion.
Newswave could be used as a way to create/deliver local news for a small area. It would require some editors how could create and edit the initial comment, so you were sure to cover the most elementary. Then other users could create the missing pieces, so i could write about the project we are doing in the community or the result of the local football match.
The concept of having a place where all readers can comment on news is just interesting. Users can contribute to your news feeds to the ideas and get more feedback. Dependant of you readers/contributors you will be able to create a comprehensive newswave .
One of the important concepts with a paper is to get readers, because then you can also sell ads. It is the same for web sites, the more readers you have the more you can make.
At the moment there is not a lot of users on wave, but the users are quite passionate about Wave and try to use it for different things. At the moment of writing there are 50 users on the current edition, which is probably not enough to have much revenue. If you get more involved it could probably be possible to support the Wave with ads.
When the next edition is created you also want to have the same 50 subscribers. So there should be developed a way to make sure all subscribers get the new newswave. This could probably be done using a robot.
Business could form for editing the waves and organize the way users can contribute to the news stories. So we can contenue to have local news and create application to support the way users are creating the content.
I’m looking forward to see if newswave will take off, and be the place to go for news on current events.
I was amazed how Colayer had a virtual reception. Colayer is developing a collaboration product which work a bit like Google Wave for realtime collaboration. Colayers products adds more context to the conversation like if it is a question you are asking. When the conversation has more meta data, it is possible to make better selection of data.
By using a virtual reception it is possible to contact a person in Colayer with out knowing their address. I thought that it could also be possible to use a Wave robot to front your organization. It could be to find the relevant persons to get in contact with.
I implement a demo on how it could be possible to use a Wave robot for this. The result is published in this video.x
The demo show how some simple character based search is working to identify which results to show. When the user types something, which should like an employee or group name the robot returns the list of possible employees/groups. The user can then select which user to connect to. The robot connects the user to that employee by adding him to the Wave. After connecting the user to the selected employee the robot goes to standby.
There is a lot of possible improvements. The application should be more clear on when it can add any users. I have implemented the Soundex Java library for string comparison, but are not clear on who to implement it best and what the thresholds should be.
Also it would make a lot of sense to connect the data to the companies directory or Google Apps hosted application. If the user has Wave for his domain this would make a lot of sense, since they must have all the informations hire. It is fairly easy to extract data from the company directory and use this data together with the robot and redirect the user to the correct account. To have the full use it is required that you are using the same usernames on both wave and email.
Speaking of Wave for your domain, can you also create robots on your domain. So you have welcome@masteringwave.com or something similar as the robot you are connecting to.
Do you think this would be a solution, with some development could it be implemented in your organization? Why would it make sense for you to have such a solution?
I was speaking with a large company (LC) about around Google Wave. I talked around different areas of Google Wave and how it could relate to LC usage. The audience was very keen to help with their take on the different concepts presented in the document.
A large pain was that it was difficult to get approved new programs by IT. So it was not likely that they could get Firefox installed easy because it had to be tested on other applications. The same is true for new service. They had to be approved, before it could be implemented in the organization. I think that this will be valid in many organizations. IT doesn’t want to support too many features or services and want to consolidate on fewer services. Consolidation has been a mantra for many IT architects to get a environment, which is easier to understand. So there needs to be a lot of reasons to install a new implementation.
The company is currently using Microsoft Communicator and Sharepoint. It seems only to be really well used in some departments. The usage depends on if they have found it useful and their colleagues also are using it. Collaboration without anyone to collaborate with is not fun. It will probably also be true for how Wave can be implemented, the usage will vary much based on the departments. If you know that nobody in marketing is using Wave, then you don’t want to start a Wave with them because you will never get a response.
It could be difficult for find a single use case, where Wave will have a business case. There might be lots of smaller, but it was not easy to find. It would be easier to get wave implemented if it could help customer service with saving x minutes pr call.
They looked for a unified product for communication. If they had to continue to have Email, Skype, MS communicator, Facebook, Sharepoint and portals along with Google Wave, it will be to take some extra time for organizing. They would then have to check all inboxes at the same time.
We also talk around cloud computing and SaaS. LC is currently using offsite project management system to control their implementations. They feel confident in this tool and that their data are safe. It is a kind of interesting to see they are 100% secure in a product they have used for a long time, even it is run at remote hosting partner probably using a shared service. In general LC is not into SaaS, because of the potential security risks or lack of control.
Gravity
The Wave modelling tool created by SAP.
LC is a large SAP shop and have implemented SAP for all their businesses. LC have not selected any BPM suite at the moment, but was looking into different options. I showed a short demo of how the Gravity gadget works; they were impressed with the collaboration part. LC is currently using Ids Sheers ARIS for processes modeling, which is a modeling tool with a lot of integrations to SAP.
Use of Gravity requires a lot of process knowledge. Currently the business uses cannot define the processes them self. To define the processes business users are meeting with the process architects and trying to agree on a process model.
Aris is currently standard for modeling in the company. The problem is that Aris models are used in different ways across the organization. So it is difficult to use a common model. Gravity or an easy collaboration tool could be interesting for having a single place for documenting the model.
Gravity and Wave can be a place where process documentation is made. If the correct meta data is create it easier for the users to find the relevant process information.
Gravity should be easier for the business users to use, so they have a fair chance of drawing processes. With Aris it is a bit difficult to get started with modeling. It was unclear, if the business could draw the whole process them self or if they needed help. The business was able to make changes to the process already created.
There was a focus on creating the process model as a collaborative process. After the model was complete, the model should be handed over the development department. Development should do the implementation of the processes. That way it will be possible for all parties to be involved.
It would be nice with two way import/export features, but it did not seem like the most relevant. Especially not since they have not selected a BPM tool.
It could assist over telephone or other ways to help the business remote with designing their processes.
I did talk with a medical firm about their needs for sign their processes model. They need to be sure the process was reviewed by somebody to pass the requirements in various medical laws. Currently this is not possible using Gravity, but it could be possible to make some steps and a place to have your processes.
Using wave in an organization can be a little challenging, when you don’t have Google Wave for your domain. Or if you would like to arrange a party or just be a group together. There are no problems if you only need to use one Wave, then you don’t need to invite all other participants to the new wave.
Google as implemented a group features in Google Wave. The function is build on top of Google Groups, so you have to create a Google group for each group you have. I would guess that this structure will create many new Google Groups with out any content in, since they will just be used for provision.
Add the Google email of the users you want to add to the group.
Add the samplegroup@googlegroups.com to the contacts. Click the + sign and enter the group email. Just ignore the errors and press enter.
Add the group to the current wave.
I have created a video showing how this works.
To see content from the group, just search for group:demogroup@googlegroups.com. This will give all waves containing the group, so you can see what is going on in the group. When you are added to any of the waves, you will see the content in your inbox. This way it is much easier to find the Waves you have commented on.
A small issue is the wave username does not always correspond to the gmail username. So you need to find the users gmail account instead of their wave accounts.
I would also hope there will be an easier way to manage the groups from inside Wave, so you could just drag the users up to to the place they are using.
Using Groups is defiantly a thing, which needs to be improved for enterprise users. It could be a feature of Wave for my domain. On Wave for my domain it would make sense to be able to uses the groups you can define in the administration. These groups are your mailing lists or organization structures, so it will be a much more interesting place to administrate the groups. That way you don’t need to provision any other place.
For more information on Groups check out this Wave where the solutions is described in more details with a good FAQ.
Novell engineers was excited about the Federation protocol and had been working on the product for a while. According to the eWeek article they worked on an internal project (Codename cockpit), but found that Google Wave was on the same path as they wanted to go. Google and Novell has been working together on making the protocol work, so Pulse will work with Wave. (Question will there be a Wave client certification?). At first glance Pulse just look like an ordinary group wave solution, but is has the Wavelets/blips and real time editing. It was a really smart move for Novell to use the hybe from Wave instead of creating their own protocol. It will defiantly get more attention that way.
Screen shot from the video. They have not rebranded the product on the video.
Pulse will be avaible in first half of next year as a SaaS solution and then in the second half it should be available to a on premise solution. It will be intersting for companies to have alternatives to using Googles Wave.
Novell has been making groupware for ages, so they know how users interact and groups. When you start pulse for the first time it has all the persons or groups you need to talk with. This is done by using the identify and user administrative systems Novell has. It will be more interesting to have a list of all the people, you are going to start conversations with from the first day you use the tool.
You are able to subscribe to a list of persons groups and get their status. This is much like twitter or the Esme project. If people write their problems then it will be easier for other to interact with them and help solve the problems. Wave has the option of saving searches, but it is not feasble to search for 10 people easy. Google Wave group functionality is currenly not very good, hopefully Google will be inspired by the content of wave.
To see a demo of pulse see this video, that gives a really nice view of how Pulse works.
The video does not show anything on how Robots or Gadget will work. It will be interesting to see if they will work. It can be one of the features which currently have not been developed, but they will also need to at least support the gadgets. If not it will be strange to collaborate from Wave to Pulse, if the gadgets cannot be seen from Pulse. Robots can have a seperate API since they can be developed inside the Enterprise.
