I have been quiet on the enterprise collaboration front for the past few weeks. Lately I’ve been brushing up on public-facing web app development using PHP (and sometimes Ruby/Rails).

I’ve been blogging in quick spurts about the sort of tasks I’m putting myself through over on my Posterous mailblog.

Recent topics on the mailblog:

• Test driving Munin service statistics on a LAMP virtual machine
• Learning more about CakePHP and git rollbacks
• Get up and running with a Turnkey LAMP server

Image via Wikipedia

Reward programs gone horribly wrong

I think we’ve all seen examples of reward systems leading to counterproductive behavior.  My favorite example is working for a fast food joint when I was in college  and having a “seventy second drive-through time” contest.  Our goal was to keep the average time between customers leaving the drive-through menu (presumably having just placed an order) and customers leaving the drive through window (presumably having just received their food) below one minute and ten seconds – for an entire week.  The reward for meeting this goal was a week’s vacation in Hawaii for the GM and his wife.

We had a clock above the drive through window that let us know what our average drive through time was for the day.  That clock was the center of our world for a week, and we were led through some strange strategies to beat it.  The eye-popping cheats my team employed to meet this goal were as follows:

1. Assistant GM wearing headphones sets up an unsecured cash drawer on a makeshift table outside in front of the drive through menu.  Customers placed orders with her directly and paid.  She asked them to wait until she gave them the go ahead to drive forward to get their food.
2. AGM receives word via her headset that the customer’s order is nearly complete and she waves them through.  Customer drives over the sensor, starting the seventy second drive through clock at 0.
3. Customer arrives at the window seconds later, receives the food through the window, and drives off.   Total automatically measured drive through time: less than ten seconds.
4. In case of an unusual order, the customer was asked to pull all the way through and wait in the front parking lot to have the order delivered when it was finished.

Why people buy in to flawed reward systems

I can only really defend #4 as sound practice for operating a drive through.  If a customer’s complex order is going to slow up the rest of the business, it makes sense to pull them aside and let simpler orders keep going through.  Similarly, a table for two is always quicker to get at a restaurant than a table for ten.  The rest of these things were unsafe and dishonest and completely against the spirit of a program to minimize drive-through time, but I believe the GM received his trip to Hawaii all the same.  The only reason the rest of us were complicit in these ill-advised plans was because we wanted to keep our jobs.

So – make sure your employees’ individual incentives are aligned with your organizational goals.  If your new systems and processes (such as Enterprise 2.0) are going to require realignment of your employee’s daily work, be sure their goals and rewards are similarly recalibrated.

Current management theory on rewards and engagement

I had a conversation this morning with a coworker about career advancement in the form of promotions and raises and how (or if) they aligned with internal collaboration tools like SharePoint. I was thinking of Freakonomics when discussing this but I just got around to reading Venkatesh Rao’s review of “Drive” by Dan Pink (drive in this context appears to be mean employee engagement) and this part jumped out at me:

[W]e get a speculative list of reasons why carrots and sticks don’t work for creative work. The book calls this list the “Seven Deadly Flaws”

1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation
2. They can diminish performance
3. They can crush creativity
4. They can crowd out good behavior
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior
6. They can become addictive
7. They can foster short-term thinking

In-the-flow versus “sure we’ll get to it the day after we run out of real work”

This fits right in with the accepted idea that the way to make enterprise collaboration work is to use it “in the flow” of our everyday work rather than using it “above the flow”.  In the flow means you’re actually getting your job done by using these tools as opposed to doing your job once and then going to another platform to write about it.

At the end of the year when your corporation looks over its employees’ performance and decides who’s helping the company out to the degree they need to be reinforced and who isn’t, are your reward systems structured to account for team-wide successes or individual stars?  It is easy enough to compare one person’s productivity against another’s as long as you are only measuring their direct outputs and not those of the people they work with and facilitate on a daily basis.  If you want your collaborative systems to succeed, be sure employees are incentivized to share rather than hoard.

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Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is still working on his own business collaboration startup, Asana

Today’s announcment of Salesforce “Chatter” as a SaaSy enterprise Facebook product adds another option to the red-hot market for enterprise social platforms modeled on Facebook.  Regular readers will remember that I called out  ”Internal Facebooks” as the #1 collaboration trend for 2009 in a post last month.

We’re still waiting to hear from Asana, the business collaboration company started by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz after he resigned from Facebook thirteen months ago.

Salesforce’s “Chatter” further validates the internal Facebook trend

The company, in a statement, says Chatter will “revolutionize the workplace” by leveraging social networking models that have become popular among the mainstream, notably Facebook, and bringing them to a secure and private cloud where people, content and applications will have profiles feeds and groups.

As you can probably imagine, Chatter incorporates things like status updates (I’m on a conference call now or maybe in a meeting), groups (which helps a project team stay updated), sharing (which allows users to determine who sees what) and, of course, Twitter, with the most relevant tweets being filtered into Chatter. – ZDNet

Cisco’s “Show and Share” video-based social network

Cisco’s announcement of a “Show and Share” platform came nine days ago via Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta (subscribe to his blog by the way, it’s excellent!).  There’s also a dryly named Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform:

Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is an enterprise-class social software portal that features a corporate directory with social networking capabilities. It allows users to create team spaces and community environments ‘on the fly’ and also offers a customizable framework for integration of legacy business applications and web 2.0 content. Unlike today’s document-centric portals, the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is people-centric, facilitating real-time voice and video communication to connect people, communities, and information to make faster business decisions. – Mike Gotta

Novell’s new Wave-enabled “Pulse” complements their more orthodox “Teaming“offering

Pulse (announced November 5) adds Google Wave capabilities to the existing group-based collaboration of Teaming: Pulse, announced November 5 shares some similar characteristics:

Pulse is among a new wave of enterprise collaboration suites that aim to bring features from popular consumer social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to the workplace, with the added security and IT management that organizations require.

Some players in this space include IBM’s Lotus, Socialtext, Jive Software and NewsGator, which provides an enterprise social networking component to Microsoft’s SharePoint. – Computer World

Who’s next in the enterprise Facebook market?

I fully expect to hear an announcement out of Asana in the next 6 to 9 months.  Newsgator is already making a niche for themselves by Facebookifying Microsoft’s comparatively slow-moving SharePoint product.  What else is out there? Please let me know with a comment or a tweet!

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@BlakePalmer presenting for @Lunaweb at last year's BarCamp Memphis

The second annual BarCamp Memphis is finally here!

Tomorrow I’ll be heading to the MASE building to listen in to soome good presentations, panels, and wide-open discussions (“core conversations”) about technology development, new media, and entrepreneurship.

My two scheduled sessions are:

• “Social Tools in the Enterprise” with Ryan Hinricher.  Ryan and I are going to get into the how and why of using collaborative software to improve team work.  Ryan’s perspective is that of a realtor using SaaS tools like Salesforce and Basecamp to connect with his associates across the country.  Mine is that of an enterprise software developer using collaboration platforms such as SharePoint and Jive to work with local teammates and with our branch offices.
• “It’s a Small URL After All” with Bob Hazlett.  Bob and I walk through the arguments for and installation of a personalized URL shortening service of your very own using  Yourls.

@skippytpe Macbooking at the barbecue lunch during BarCamp Memphis 2008

I’ve also got a few presentation ideas in mind for optional afternoon sessions if I can drum up some interest.  I’d be happy to review several of my recent blog topics in a discussion format, such as

• Get started building web apps with your own Ruby on Rails virtual development server
• Found: “What problems does Google Wave Solve?”
• Hot collaboration trends in 2009: Internal Facebooks, SharePoint microblogging, expert location, and homegrown wikis
• Presentation: New Wave Collaboration And Enterprise 2.0

Check out the full list of scheduled BarCamp Memphis topics.  Any topics you want to lead or suggest for discussion can be written on the flip chart tomorrow morning and voted on by your fellow attendees.  Proposals with the most votes will be slotted in for afternoon sessions! See you there!

Many thanks to platinum sponsors Social Media Expedition and MpactMemphis!

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David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails

Digging deeper into Rails programming styles

The last Sharing at Work post showed how to set up a Rails development environment using a Ubuntu Linux virtual machine.  This week, I’m in the midst of developing my first ground-up public-facing web application using Ruby on Rails.

Learning a new way to dynamically generate HTML

My Rails development has already been aided in several places by kind folks in the #rubyonrails IRC channel on Freenode.  One interesting thing they’ve directed me to is an alternate templating language called Haml.  Rails uses something called “embedded Ruby” by default – .erb files that describe HTML output with some necessary Ruby interwoven to generate the dynamic parts of a page.  haml does much the same but it takes a minimalist approach to syntax.

Nesting is handled by indentation (two spaces per level of nesting).  Tags are not closed, the closer is simply inferred by the order in which they are used and the associated indentation.

To illustrate the goodness of haml I’ve borrowed some code snippets from a longer article on Hhaml at Rail Spikes.

Embedded Ruby example; 20 lines and 547 bytes:

This shows a stock offering div containing a name, a symbol, a the latest price and date of the latest trade, and some dynamically generated links to buy and sell the stock in question.

The same code using Haml; 13 lines and 365 bytes:

Click through to the original Sharing at Work post if these code snippets aren’t showing up on your screen.

What’s Haml doing for us?

You can see right away that the Haml code provides a lot less for the developer to read through and its appearance nicely dovetails with the CSS models we use to do page layout. To quote the Rail Spikes article linked above, “Hampton says he came up with Haml by starting with a fragment like this and seeing what he could take out without losing anything. I’ll follow his example.” I like it and I’m going to try to use this throughout my project. Maybe it will be useful to you too.

In the next post I’ll share what I’ve learned from Rails.  Consumer web app development seems to be evolving faster than the SAP/Business Objects toolset I’ve been using at work.

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Image via Wikipedia

Today we’re going to take a detour into web programming using Ruby on Rails.  The hardest part for me has been getting the development environment up and running.  Some guides will walk you through setting up Ruby and then Rails directly on your Windows machine, but I abandoned that pretty quickly.  You’ll soon grow tired of having to translate 99% of the Rails articles you read from Linux to Windows.  I’ve found that running a development server in a virtual machine (more on that later) is a better way to go.  It was a somewhat hairy process so we’ll walk through the steps it took to make it work.

What in the world is a “virtual development environment”?

Our goal today is to create our own web server to build and test web applications on.  We could go out and buy a web hosting package for $10/mo. somewhere and do our development directly against a public web site but that’s not necessary for introductory development.  Until you are ready to publish your application for all to see you can do just fine running a virtual server that looks and feels just like the public server you might pay someone else to set up for you.  Click through to see the basics of how this is going to work:

Fig. 1. When you see this welcome screen you'll know you've gotten Ruby on Rails running on your virtual server.

First you’ll set up a virtual machine (VM). This VM is a program that runs on your computer – that pretends to be another computer altogether.  This allows you to leverage the benefits of having multiple computers in the same room without actually having to buy extra machines and wire them up.  The two components of a virtual machine that you need to be concerned with are the VM software itself and the operating system you’ll be running inside the VM.  Once you get the operating system up and running in your VM it will act just like a second computer on your network.  You’ll be able to log into the VM, configure it, and run new programs on it that interact with your other computer(s).  Today we’re going to install a slimmed down Linux distribution with Ruby on Rails built in and ready for you to work on.  When it’s all finished you’ll be able to write Ruby code either on your real machine or on the virtual machine and then transfer it to the virtual Ubuntu system so that you can test it.  Testing will work just like any other web application – you’ll open a web browser on your host machine (Windows) and view the application at a URL like http://localhost:3000.

Get VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a free (GPL) virtualization tool from Sun that will allow you to run a “guest” operating system without having to mess with your computer’s existing “host” operating system.  For the purposes of this article we’ll be using Windows as the host and Ubuntu Linux as the guest.  Download the appropriate VirtualBox installer for your operating system here.  I installed VirtualBox using all of the defaults on both Windows Vista and XP laptops.

Fig. 2. Create a virtual machine named Rails. Select 'Linux' as your operating system.

Create a virtual Linux machine with VirtualBox

Once VirtualBox is up and running you’ll be prompted to create your first virtual machine.  Name it ‘Rails’ or whatever you’d like to remember your machine as and be sure to tell it you’ll be using Ubuntu as your guest operating system.  See Figure 2 to make sure you’re going down the right path.  Click through all the defaults on the rest of the pages until the machine is configured.  Now we’ve got to download Linux and install it into our currently empty virtual machine named Rails.

Fig. 3. Tell VirtualBox to let your virtual machine access this Turnkey Rails image you just downloaded.

Head over to Turnkey Linux to pick up a preinstalled Linux server running Ruby on Rails.  Click on the Download link and you’ll get a ~170MB .iso file containing the entire preconfigured Rails environment.  You’re going to wind up with a file on your hard drive named something like turnkey-rails-2009.03-hardy-x86.iso.  Once the file finishes downloading go back to VirtualBox, select your Rails virtual machine, and then click Settings.  Click on Network on the side panel and then change the Attached To dropdown from its default of NAT over to Bridged Adapter.  This will cause the virtual machine to connect to your local network’s router and demand its own unique IP address.  If you’ve got a consumer network (e.g. a Linksys router or anything you’d find at an electronics store) then this should work first try.  If that doesn’t work, you can go back to the default of NAT but there will be some extra configuration required to make the virtual server accessible to your host computer.

Click over to CD/DVD-ROM on the VirtualBox settings sidebar and make sure Mount CD/DVD-Rom is checked.  Select the ISO image file radio button and then browse to the Turnkey Rails .iso file you downloaded earlier.  Once you’re done it will look something like Figure 3.

Install Turnkey Rails

Now your Linux machine should be all “wired” up and ready to start up.  Click on the Start button in VirtualBox and you’ll see the “first run wizard” asking you where to find the installation media for your guest OS.  Select Image File at the bottom and be sure it’s pointing to the Turnkey Rails iso you’ve just downloaded.  Click Next and Finish and then you’ll see the Turnkey setup screen.  Select the second option “Install to Hard Disk” and then wait for your Ubuntu Linux installer to load.  Select all of the defaults :

• Guided – use entire disk
• Yes, write the changes to disks.
• Create passwords for your Linux and MySQL root users.
• Yes, restart now.

Fig 4. These are the Web and SSH ports you'll need to access your new Rails environment

When the machine reboots you’ll want to choose “Boot from First Hard Disk” at the boot menu (You can also go to the VirtualBox settings and disconnect your Turnkey Linux .iso file whenever you get tired of having to manually choose the local disk at boot time).  Your Turnkey Linux box will now boot up and you’ll see a blue configuration screen showing you the server’s IP address and the ports you’ll need to use to connect to the server.  You’re going to want to do all you can to work across the network so you can get practice using this as a remote development server rather than a second computer sitting right next to you.

If you can’t connect via a web browser using the address shown in the blue Turnkey console (see Figure 4), you’ve probably got something wrong with your VirtualBox network settings.  Close the window containing your virtual machine and then get to work on fixing the settings.  If you’re in a hurry, try the Bridged network as it should be the easiest to make work in a home / small office environment.  If you really must use NAT, yofu’ll need to open up a windows shell (cmd.exe) and set up port forwarding so that your virtual Rails box will be accessible through forwarded ports on your host machine.  Follow the steps in this quick  guide I wrote up on port forwarding using VirtualBox.

The nitty gritty: final setup from the Linux command line

Hopefully at this point you’ve gotten Turnkey Rails installed using all of the defaults and you’re able to connect to it across the network.  Now all that’s left is to update our Linux, Ruby, and Rails software packages to the latest versions and then add a few more pieces that the Turnkey .iso image doesn’t include.  Connect to your new machine using an SSH terminal (port 22 if you’re using network bridging; port 2222 if you used the port forwarding guide linked in the previous section).  Log in using the root password you specified in the Linux installation step above.

First stop: Update Linux and Ruby using package handlers apt and gem.  Enter in the following commands to update all of your Linux and Ruby packages to the latest available versions:

apt-get update
gem update --system
gem update

Once these complete there are two optional steps that will probably help you out.  First is to install sqlite.   sqlite is the database that Rails uses by default.  While you can use the MySQL server that Turnkey Rails supplies you will find yourself having to mentally translate a lot of the Rails guides you read from the default sqlite commands to equivalent MySQL commands.  It’s easy to install sqlite alongside MySQL, so that’s what we’re going to do:

apt-get install libsqlite3-dev sqlite3
gem install sqlite3-ruby

The final optional component is a WYSIWYG text editor. Turnkey Rails comes with Linuxy text editors like vim that require some reading to jump into.  If you’re anything like me and you’d rather jump right into coding without having to learn a new text editor UI then you will want to try diakonos (or joe for that matter). Install diakonos using apt:

apt-get install diakonos

Now if you find yourself needing to tweak a config file on your Turnkey Rails server you won’t have to open it up in a file transfer client – you can just fix it on the server.

Next step: Write a Rails application!

Fig. 5. My first Rails app - created using the "First Rails App Walkthrough".

Now you’ve got your system all set up and you’ll want to test it by building a simple Rails application.  I recommend the First Rails App Walkthrough on the official Rails wiki.  Remember, if the walkthrough mentions URLs like http://localhost:3000/users you may need to translate those to the name and port number of your new Turnkey Rails  server.

Good luck! I’m sure there are a few gaps and inaccuracies in this writeup and I’d love to hear your feedback and corrections in the comments below.

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Image by nauj27 via Flickr

I‘ve not really had much to say about Google Wave yet aside from my initial roundup of Wave articles.  So far it looks like early adopters are disappointed and collaboration enthusiasts are still optimistic.  Early adopter tech blogger Louis Gray shared a really interesting post on the topic by Daniel Tenner that you really ought to read.  I’ve included a few choice quotes to whet your interest:

What problems does Google Wave solve? A matter of perspective

Being Robert Scoble probably doesn’t require you to spend days working on a specification document for some finicky aspect of project X, or at least not very often, and he’s probably not the one collating everyone’s suggested changes and resubmitting the document for further review.

In your average corporate environment, though, this happens all the time. People work on documents, presentations, etc. They have lengthy discussions over email. Pieces of work bounce back and forth across one or multiple organisations for weeks before they’re finalised. People are brought on to the conversation late in the day. Attachments get lost. Inboxes fill up and emails bounce. It’s a major pain.

So what are the problems with email in a corporate environment, and what does Wave do to address them?   - Daniel Tenner, CTO at Woobius

Tenner goes on to describe some of the classic problems with email-based document collaboration: Adding new people to an existing conversation, adding and losing attachments, splintering conversations, minor edits, and transitions back and forth to email. It’s all good, and it really outlines the problems between jumping from Word to Outlook to Messenger (or whichever clients you use)  and back again in the course of a work day.  Each is a great tool in and of itself but there’s just not enough tying them all together right now.

If you have a Wave account and you’re looking to chat, hit me up at dpritchett@googlewave.com.

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Today’s recap is an effort to escape the blogging echo chamber of hot new posts on hot new topics and instead revisit the resonant themes that have come up again and again throughout the year. Below are the biggest draws to this site for September along with explanations and links to the relevant posts.

Hot topic #1: Internal Facebooks

Sharing at Work post: Setting up an internal Facebook might just solve your company’s communications and engagement problems

Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

Facebook is the most successful social network on the market, so it’s natural that users would want to try something like it at work and that admins would be looking at ways to provide it. There’s a great reason to do so – expert location. We’ll get to that later, but for right now you want to consider Mark Trapp’s caveat that attempting to mimic the Facebook interface might actually confuse users:

… don’t try to shoehorn one service to do something it’s not designed to because it’s “more familiar.” When you start comparing things to well-known analogues, you get smacked with the uncanny valley problem, where the hinderance to adoption is not ease of use or solving a workflow problem, but people thinking there’s a problem because it’s not 100% like the tool it’s being compared to. – Mark Trapp via Friendfeed

Despite Mark’s warnings, there’s still great value in the idea of bringing a Facebook-style platform to your organization. The two most common themes I’ve observed when profiling other companies’ enterprise collaboration efforts are the internal facebook (Wachovia, Lockheed, Deloitte, and more) and the definitions wiki (Wachovia again, development teams everywhere).

Hot topic #2: SharePoint microblogging

Sharing at Work post: Streamline your team’s updates with microblogs

Image via CrunchBase

Not yet as large as Facebook, Twitter is undeniably the hottest social network going right now. People around the world are flocking to this microblogging platform to share personal stories, keep up with current events, and connect with other professionals in their respective industries. Couple that with the Microsoft’s SharePoint rolling out across the enterprise collaboration landscape and you’ve got a lot of users and admins looking to integrate Twitter-style tools into their not-quite-realtime SharePoint platforms.

My two recommendations for this particular problem are Newsgator Social Sites and Yammer. Newsgator hypersocializes the entire SharePoint/ MOSS experience by adding in microblog-style activity streams to each user’s dashboard (screenshot) along with the ability for coworkers to comment and reshare the updates. Yammer takes a standalone private microblogging network that can be integrated with your SharePoint site using RSS widgets and MS Outlook integration. Power microbloggers are going to want to run a desktop microblogging client such as TweetDeck or an internal enterprise equivalent in order to stay on top of every single conversation on the company’s network.

Hot topic #3: Expert location

Sharing at Work post: Presentation: New Wave Collaboration And Enterprise 2.0

This trend is sure to grow as analysts continue to dig into it. This is the true power behind the “internal Facebook” model mentioned above: just in time knowledge management. We’ll keep doing our best to capture knowledge as it’s typed out (see SharePoint microblogging above) but we’ll never be able to replace experts when it comes to solving critical problems with no time to spare. When in doubt, call in the experts. A robust internal directory with up to date work histories and project histories makes it easier to find out who knows the answers you need… RIGHT NOW. For a great dive into expert location, check out this amazing presentation (hat tip @ITSInsider) from T Systems in Germany. Skip to slide 8 if you’re impatient:

Hot topic #4: Django wikis

Sharing at Work post: Building a Wiki using Django – Excellent #bcmem presentation by @bkmontgomery

Image by hoerner_brett via Flickr

This trend combines two growing movements: Wikis are a powerful way for groups to share information and work together. Django is a Python-based web programming framework that is growing in popularity. To learn more about wikis I have to recommend consultant Stewart Mader. If you want your dev team to look into building their own wiki via Django, you’d do well to start with Brad Montgomery’s examples from the article linked above.

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What's the coolest thing you've see on Wave today?

Google Wave was released to 100,000 or so beta testers today. I’ve put all of these together through the use of Twitter favorites and Friendfeed searches. Please let me know if the collection is useful, confusing, or anywhere in between.

RSS and other offsite readers will likely have to click through to Sharing at Work to see these embedded links:

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Socialtext's "Signals" collaboration platform features team microblogging, a contact list, and a wiki.

Keeping up with your teammates has never been easier thanks to the advent of some free and private team microblogging tools.  One such tool is enterprise wiki pioneer Socialtext’s new “Free 50” offering.

If you’re curious about how to best leverage these tools – or those of competitors Yammer and Socialcast – then you owe it to yourself to tune in to tomorrow’s free webinar.

These are the same folks who brought us the excellent #twitterprise webinar series earlier this year.   Highly recommended.

I have tested Socialtext, Yammer, Socialcast, and Friendfeed for team microblogging purposes and I’m still currently active on two Yammer groups and a few Friendfeed rooms.  They’re all great – just getting a team microblogging platform up and running is a huge benefit.  Shoot me a message on Twitter @dpritchett if you’d like to talk about them further.

Here’s Alan Lepofsky’s overview of tomorrow’s session:

• How Signals can be used for Q&A, status updates, sharing links, providing a back channel during meetings, and other use cases
• How you can access Signals from a browser, your desktop, or from your mobile device
• How Signal’s secure microblogging differs from public tools such as Twitter, or other standalone microblogging only vendors

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