Webworld Technologies

Went to a good track today at the SharePoint 2009 Conference with Chris Pendleton, the Tech Evangelist for Bing Maps, and author of the Bing Maps Blog.  His post rounded out some other good solutions I saw today from other vendors – most notably of which was IDV Solutions.

Chris started off with some fun facts on Bing Maps – ones I didn’t know, like:

• Bing maps is 2 petabytes of tile & vector data.  I thought that was impressive – especially since the first satellite imaging product I ever saw (waaaay before Google Maps) was the old Microsoft Terraserver demo, which originally (back in 1998) showed that you could actually store a whopping FULL TERABYTE in the “new SQL server 7 beta”.  Now, Bing Maps is over 2 thousand times larger. 
• 3D cities are created by flyovers & lidar – totally created from software.  Nearly zero of the 3D buildings you see in Bing Maps were created with 3Dvia – most were created by aircraft flying over the cities, doing 3D lidar imaging of the city, and then making models of that which textures can be draped over.

  Also, related to that, I asked Chris afterwards how to get 3D buildings in Washington, D.C. Metro, as they’re conspicuously missing.  The answer there is that apparently the government does not want detailed 3D models of the capitol area created.  (??) So, the 3D data is created, and is also available from 3rd-party ISV’s, but will not be posted on the public Bing Maps site.

  So, that’s your answer why DC is flat, when even places like Nashville are fully-rendered in 3D.
   

• Microsoft does Parcel-centroid geocoding – able to put a pushpin in the middle of a land parcel

Now, in terms of integrating this with SharePoint data – I talked with some folks at IDV Solutions at the expo, who had the sexiest SharePoint visualization product.  Here’s a video of that here:

NOTE:  Flickr is currently down right now, so I’ll post more photos of this event once Flickr comes back up.

Just attended a great breakout session at the Sharepoint 2009 Conference on Social Media, and the business case for social media in the enterprise.  The person presenting at the conference was a Daniel Rasmus, Director of Business Insights at Microsoft.  Per him, his job is to utilize advanced crystal ball methodology to give as best an insight on the future as possible, and as such he had some great things to say on the place of social media in the workplace.

First off, he noted that you can’t stop social media in the enterprise – if nothing else, smartphones make such a thing impossible.  So, firewalling off Twitter and Facebook and such is a silly exercise. 

I’ll go down some other bullets from his talk, and insert some of his slides as well:

84% of people don’t / can’t measure ROI from social computing.  Why?  The probably don’t know how, as it’s a bit different than the traditional ROI calculation.

What is ROI for Soc Computing?

• Quality of dialog
• Reduced storage costs due to centralized /de-duplicated storage
• Communal information – tap in to corporate knowledge better
• More rapid peer-to-peer computing
• Collaborative problem solving
• There’s a lot of BI that you can’t easily abstract with a chart or a spreadsheet – it’s a question that gets answered by SOMEBODY and that’s social networking to solve that
• Decreased time-to-value for new employees

Note: Click-throughs are not enough from viral video, need to give the visitor value.

Things that get placed in social media can have a long tail – i.e. a magazine ad goes away when the mag dies, but some things that are placed in the social media space keep delivering after even years.

Posts in the social media space are usually “small atoms”.  I.e. you don’t usually see someone pop up on Facebook and say, “here is the 67 page strategic plan for my company, what do you think?”  Usually more like, “OMG WTF??”

Differences between Enterprise & Personal Social Media:

No problem with “migrating from MySpace to Facebook”, but migrating from legacy systems is a big deal in the enterprise.  Also, enterprise is very document-centric, so one then does have much more of a hump to cross to implement in the business space.

Also, you need to manage how social media is treated in the corporate culture, as there will be a fear that if in corporate knowledge management, if you share all you know, then you are either “not doing your job” as you’re ‘not working’, or you won’t share all you know because then you won’t be necessary anymore.

Social Media:  Be strategic about it.  Don’t just do silly & random experiments, work out a strategy and do it.

And if you don’t build it, they will go someplace else.

Risks of not adopting social computing:

I just attended the opening Expo night of SharePoint 2009 Conference in Las Vegas.   It’s going to be quite a chore to keep up everything and extract every bit of data I can while I’m here! 

Now, as I haven’t been one of the lucky ones that have had preview access to SharePoint 2010, putting all of the new vendor offerings at the Expo into perspective has been a bit difficult.  SharePoint 2010 promises to solve so many of the problems we’ve faced in SharePoint deployments, that the zoo of amazing workflow and content management solutions, business process automation and document scanning & retrieval solutions, and other pieces of the IT puzzle that the SharePoint ecosystem has to offer, it makes me all the more ready for Steve Ballmers’s big keynote speech tomorrow morning.

Can’t wait!

Thankfully enough, I decided to take off from my hotel at 9am and get down to the SharePoint 2009 conference and sign in early.   After getting past the video wall (which if you look, moves the little SharePoint logos out of the way as you walk your shadow past them), I snaked my way up to sign in.

The sign-in process was actually remarkably streamlined.  Even though there was a good bit of foot traffic, I was in and out of the sign-in process in 3 minutes flat, including getting my nifty sign-in swag:

Probably the best thing I can point out in their workflow, though, was the line of people that they had briefing you about the sign-in process along the way.  As anyone who’s been to Vegas knows, hotels are designed to lead you to the Casino, and then if you try to escape, they lead you back to the casino.  So, having some people all along the way to show you where to go, guide you to where you need to get to, and get you through, was most helpful.

Looking forward now to the Reception, which is the first official event on the agenda – which is about to begin!

Last-Minute Uploads, originally uploaded by Webworld Technologies.

Firing off some last-minute files before getting on a plane for SharePoint Conference 2009. That’s why what iPhone tethering is all about!  Luckily the plane was boarding early, so I convinced the gate attendant to give me until the last minute so I could upload some files & finish some work before getting cut off.

Can’t wait for SharePoint 2009 to get underway.