I've been hearing that people think OneStop is dead! This is not the case. OneStop is simply better and runs on a more modern platform. I try and describe what OneStop is in the blog posting What is Onestop - next ?. In short, users can continue to go OneStop and find a set of pages that are:

1. owned and moderated.
2. adhere (loosely) to the OneStop format. The familiar categories are in the same order.
3. are up to date and accurate, or at least there is framework (people and tools) in place that tries to ensure this.
   
4. are there. In other words the breadth of OneStop space is complete and controlled. Products , Technologies, and Programs of interest to Sun CEs (Customer Facing Engineers) will be there.
5. are easy to find and navigate. It's a limited universe (~500) pages so we can make the menus, search, and a-z work well.
   

However, OneStop pages are now Wiki pages that support commenting and voting. There is also a WYSIWYG editor (albeit not a great one) that makes simple edits an order of magnitude easier.

SunSpace now has 200 communities and the number is growing rapidly. We're seeing a significant need for communities to have a OneStop page for "non community" members. No content redundancy is required thanks to macros like {include} and {simplelisting}.

We will take action very soon to ensure that a page looks like a OneStop page at a glance. Currently all SunSpace pages have a similar look.

I work primarily from home, connected to Sun via vpn or punchin. I have a Comcast (standard) cable modem link as well as Yahoo/ATT DSL. I've been happy with my Comcast link and have enjoyed speeds of 1-8 Mbits/sec download.

Over the last couple of weeks my Comcast link has gotten distressingly slow, varying from 300Kbps/sec to 900 Kbps. I thought maybe a few of my neighbors had become a video junkies and were hogging the local bandwidth.

I called Comcast and was told my signal was low. I was able to get a technician out to my house that same day, on a Sunday! The technician showed up an told me the signal was fine, but it looked like I might need a new modem. This sounded a little suspect to me as I thought the modems either worked, or didn't. The first one he swapped in didn't work at all, but the second one solved the problem, and more.

The technician left me his personel cell number as well as the number for this manager. Just ran a test and got 11.3 Mbps/sec download. Upload seems to be varying from 270 Kbps/sec to 1.5 Mbps, but I can live with that.

Great news! We are now live  with 5 OneStop pages on CE 2.0. Anyone on the SWAN can now, optionally edit a page, in place, using a WYSIWYG editor. We've maintained our model of the author owning a page, with the new ability to control access.

We envision 3 general categories on CE 2.0:

1. OneStop pages. These pages will live in the OneStop space, and each will have a primary author. The fact that it is branded a OneStop page means several things. The page:
1. has an owner and is a moderated.
2. adheres (loosely) to the OneStop format. The familiar categories are in the same order.
3. is up to date and accurate, or at least there is framework (people and tools) in place that tries to ensure this.
   
4. is there. In other words the breadth of OneStop space is complete and controlled. Products , Technologies, and Programs of interest to Sun CEs (Customer Facing Engineers) will be there.
2. CEpedia. This space will be very similar to the existing CEpedia, as anything goes. It is not controlled. Users can create or update any page in the CEpedia space, in any format, at their leisure.
3. Communities. The community area is really the thrust behind CE2.0. CE 2.0 communities have been described as a mashup -- Facebook meets LinkedIn with a content-management system thrown in for good measure. Historically email has been a primary communication vehicle inside Sun, so we offer the option to build a community, with membership and access control based on an email alias.
   

We're hoping for interesting synergy between OneStop and communities. A user might go to the OneStop space to find information on a product. While they are there they might notice there is a community built around that particular product or project, and actively engage in a discussion or forum. Finding the expert will turn into a non issue. We can do things like dynamically populate sections of a OneStop page based on how documents or pages are tagged in a particular forum.

Now, what do we call this new beast that we've been referring to as CE 2.0? (CE 2.0 has been our project name.) Onestop or Onestop2 doesn't seem to work as the OneStop brand implies all the stuff listed in section 1, but not social - web 2.0 community as we know it today. Users are tired of the new brand, or tool of the day. Maybe we should just stick with CE 2.0.

My colleague Peter Reiser has been making great strides forward with his notion of Community Equity. For a detailed write up see his blog post. He was even interviewed by Scoble on the subject!

(Heresy, heresy) but I have mixed feelings about Community Equity in the context of OneStop. I like the notion of community, and I really like the notion of encouraging participation. Having our users easily rate and comment on OneStop pages should prove invaluable. Ratings will supplement our current metrics of downloads and currency to give users a good solid indication of page value. Comments will evolve into discussions, where as we currently only offer page feedback. Discussions will then move into forums. All great stuff!

I'm a little more skeptical on the Community Equity front. I not sure our users will be motivated to participate (more) if their Personal Equity rises. Historically the lion's share of OneStop accesses has been from people looking for answers, and secondarily browsing for information. I don't expect that to change any time soon.

The big question is  "What's in it for me?". We're asking our users to spend their limited time, rating and commenting. In my experience people need a recognizable return on investment to participate. Is a high community equity rating, and being listed in the top 10 on the homepage enough? I don't know; I hope so. I do anticipate arguments about the formula in how CE is generated. Is it fair that a person who (perhaps without a lot of thought) rates 50 documents, gets a higher rating than someone who moderates a couple of OneStop pages that aren't popular products, or a person that has submitted one "white paper" or Technocrat article?

The results are in! If you are on the Sun Network check them out.

We got 776 responses, an incredible number. Users feel very strongly about OneStop. We asked the question "How would you feel if we pulled the plug on OneStop?. (We don't plan to do this, but the question elicits great comments.) The results were:

I'd be totally irate!	538
I'd get by	153
Don't care	11
It's about time	10

 

A typical comment was "That would treble my workload and response time".

We contrasted OneStop to other sites the SEs generally use and found that people almost always look to OneStop first, and give very high ratings (4.3/5) when asked "How useful is OneStop to doing your job? (1 low -> 5 high)".

A primary motivator for the survey, aside from understanding utility, is getting a feel for user priorities. Are social networking features important? Should we accelerate our move to an enterprise wiki?

Our users were very clear in expressing that the top priority, by far, is accurate, complete, and up to date content. They like the fact that content is easy to find on Onestop, and that the site is simple and consistent.

My conclusion is that moving forward with CE 2.0 we need to not break what's working. We need to be careful about adding complexity. Social networking features that enable community are cool, and will hopefully help us deliver even better content, but not at the expense of expedient access to information.

My feeling is that the majority of the users are not planning on being direct contributers, so we need to make sure we optimize that path. The browse experience needs to be robust, search needs to work, response time needs to be fast. Information should be no more than 3 clicks away.

Make sure you watch this space (follow on posts) for a discussion on how we hope to leverage Community Equity to help raise the bar on content quality.

 

We are planning on moving OneStop on to a new Confluence based platform, called OneStop2, by the end of our fiscal year. (June 30.) The Confluence platform is being extended with many new features including:

• Contribution Equity, measured from contributing and rating content.
• Robust, integrated document repository
• Tagging Services
• Expanded XML feeds (ATOM, RSS)

The Confluence platform (an enterprise wiki) is exciting in it's own right and will provide us functionality to move OneStop into the world of Web 2.0. The integrated features I am most excited about are WYSIWYG, access control, and a commenting service. This will enable a OneStop page to be easily updated (via WYSIWYG) by  either anyone, or people specified on an access control list. Our model of primary page ownership (or perhaps moderation) will continue.

The conundrum is the mapping of OneStop pages into Confluence. Confluence supports the notion of spaces. Each space has a home page and child pages.

Should each OneStop page be a space, or should OneStop pages all exist in a OneStop space? Unfortunately Confluence doesn't support the notion of space hierarchy, so for example, we can't set up a hierarchy on the order of OneStop -> HPC -> ClusterTools.

We also intend to move CEpedia on to this new platform. Should there be one CEpedia space, or several?

Currently the 5 most accessed OneStop pages are

1. Sun Secure Global Desktop Enterprise Edition
2. Sun Fire T2000 Server
3. Sun Ray appliances
4. Sun Fire X4100/X4200
5. Solaris 10

I don't think many of these should be spaces in their own right, but perhaps should be children in other spaces. If you have thoughts on this, please comment.

Sun holds a conference every year called the Sun Customer Engineering Conference (CEC). There's a new twist this year - any Sun employee can participate in the conference via Second Life!

Second Life provides an exciting and interactive way for all Sun customer engineers to participate in this year's CEC conference, which is physically (and virtually) being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Sun is encourging all customer engineers - and any Sun employee interested in the CEC event - that are not able to attend in person to attend virtually. Employees will feel like they are right in Las Vegas!

Employees will be able to attend the keynote sessions live in Second Life, a few select breakout sessions, receive information about the conference pavillion floor and explore a virutal world as a way to network with other Sun engineers and have some fun!

The theme at this year's conference is SHIFT - Our Universe. Our World. Your Move (more information here for Sun Employees). So, in Vegas, it's all about Sun employees and THEIR MOVES to help Sun to make the shift. The shift to red. The shift to green. The shifts needed to grow. CEC in Second Life will enable this theme to reach far more employees and make this SHIFT a global Sun effort.

It's going to be an amazing conference for those in person in real life (rl) and those virtually in Second Life (sl) - complemented with social networking opportunities before, during and after the event. These include the CEC 2007 Ning environment and the CEC 2007 Group created in Facebook. The goal is allowing anyone and everyone at Sun to participate, network, grow and learn!

We encourage Sun employees to provide feedback to the team on your experience! This is an experiment with virtual worlds and how we can reach out globally across Sun for these events - be sure to let us know what you think and what you'd like to see next year as we consider expanding this offering. More information for Sun employees on registering your Sun avatar, training on Second Life and specifics on how to access the CEC event in Second Life can be found on the OneStop CEC 2007 internal website More for Sun employees.

Christy Confetti Higgins
christy.confetti@sun.com
IM: confetti@sun.com or AIM: christyconfetti
http://blogs.sun.com/library

There are @3200 CEpedia users, @2500 OneStop users and many of them (you?) want to know what's happening with those 2 systems and what is CE 2.0.

Right about now most non-Sun employees may have tuned out, but just bear with me for a moment here and it might be worth your while (and if it isn't, what a wonderful opportunity to flame me, or whatever the current term is!)

Basically CEpedia and OneStop are 2 different systems we use at Sun to try and improve the information sharing within our customer-facing technical community. There's alot of information in most of their heads and/or laptops, and we are constantly trying to help them share it with each other so that our customers benefit - better answers to their questions such as "how would I..." or "have you ever...?"

OneStop today is a typical website - a collection of html pages which are editable by their owners. Terrific content because of the passion and knowledge of their owners/authors, but sometimes a little out of date because those authors are either busy solving customer challenges or else working on new Sun products/services/solutions.

CEpedia is a wiki we established a year ago to support our Customer Engineers (CEs) - kind of like Wikipedia (do i need a tm here?) for CEs. It has the advantage of wikis - easy to update by anyone who can access, so it can be kept very much up to date.

Now if I haven't lost the non-Sun audience, here's where I think it gets more interesting. Our plan is to:

• merge OneStop and CEpedia into a wiki with access control so that not just anyone can edit everything (after all, you wouldn't want me to be updating anything remotely approaching technical content - trust me on this), but updates are easier and therefore more frequent.
  
• We also want to host this outside of our intranet so that initially our partners can also have access, including update capability where appropriate. Over time we would like to share as much as possible of this information with everyone, but that will take more "cleansing" of what information should be public knowledge and what needs to be restricted
• Additionally, we are introducing various Web 2.0 concepts - tagging, RSS / Atom aggregation, AJAX, voting/comments to drive search results, etc. so that we obtain the benefits of this more participatory technology (aka the Wisdom of Crowds) at the same time as understanding how to leverage this technology better for our customers.

This future vision we are calling CE 2.0 - basically a Web2.0 experience for our CEs, partners, eventually customers, developers and others. Stay tuned.

I couldn't agree more with Jonathan. I was a sys admin myself a long time ago and it can be a thankless, confusing job often under appreciated and under rewarded.
Guys - go have a long lunch, have a beer, relax for once.

After Christy's post on social network overload I couldn't resist including the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0, forwarded to me by Victor Kuriashkin. It claims to list the 200 most successful sites on the web. The author is from Information Architects Japan.

 

I've been thinking more about the information and tools overload with the explosion of social networking. As I mentioned in my last post, these tools are all really exciting and generating lots of user generated content and discussion - all GREAT!. With the increase in this content, we can learn from people and make connections that were far more difficult to do in the past. Another potential benefit is that it may actually help with information overload.

If I can pull together all my tools, content and networks in a more efficient way with these new platforms and services - regardless of what application or site they reside on - then that is the place I go to get the information I want, stay connected, collaborate and access the tools I need. This may actually help with not having to weed through the useful content vs. the noise as well as reduce the time to actually "find" the information I need and learn. Reducing the time spent looking for information and people is a critical goal that the Digital Libraries & Research team at Sun continually works on.
 
    Knowledge workers now spend more time looking for information than applying it
    (Source: Outsell's Information Markets and Users Database, 2006)

Image, all your key social tools and content pulled together and how that could help you, as a knowledge worker, reduce the time spent looking for information and more time applying it and connecting with people.

•     Ning
•     LinkedIn   
•     Facebook
•     MySpace
•     Search engines
•     Twitter
•     Second Life
•     trusted subscription content (Safari, IEEE, EBSCO, Forrester, IDC, Springer, ...)
•     NameFinder
•     OneStop
•     Tagging tools
  
•     Wikis (Sun Learning Services, OneStop, and wikis.sun.com all exploring Confluence today)
  
•     Blogs

The one tidbit that we must not forget is the serendipity of information (see The Joy of Serendipity) - the search and then the discovery of information or people that we may not have ever found if we just accepted the information pushed at us and/or requested by us. Discovery is what drives innovation.

Search may become more important with the explosion of user-generated content. If I'm looking for very specific information then search is not so important but if I'm doing research and discovery, then search becomes very important and I want to include all the trusted content in addition to the social media / user created content in my discovery process.

Connecting the trusted content, the user created content and the tools to search and discover there must be some "glue", as Mike Briggs suggested,  to bring this together -  metadata. Metadata, created by information experts, users and some auto-generated/clustering/classification tools would help with enabling users to pull all the above mentioned tools and content together and also to facilitate effective information discovery.

As Scott Brown wrote in his recent blog entry - the power is when it becomes an "and/plus" - it's not either or. We need discovery. We need search. We need social media. We need trusted content. And we need authoritative tagging and social tagging to help bring it all together to increase innovation, learning and the application of knowledge.

Christy Confetti Higgins
christy.confetti@sun.com
AIM: christyconfetti
Digital Libraries & Research
Sun Learning Services - Sun Microsystems

This is not yet a done deal as we still have small things like licensing () and more functionality testing still to work through, but as Maverick says in Top Gun, "Things are looking good so far".

We asked the OneStop authors to play with our Confluence test instance, read about the functionality, and provide us feedback. The response was uniformly positive, a first with this vocal group of 300!

Kemer Thomson, the guy who runs the Sun Blueprints program had some excellent feedback worth sharing:

Confluence seems to address not only the challenges in creating wiki content, but makes it a pleasure and opens new possibilities. I have played around with great success. Everything seems to work. I ran into no problems ... nothing crashed. Cool features, like creating an RSS and adding tags worked intuitively.  I could recreate my entire OneStop content quickly and without any concessions to the content and structure. Indeed, the ability to add plugins and control access to pages opens up many possibilities.

I find it truly compelling that we can combine an almost seamless transition with features and functionality that will enable solutions we haven't even considered yet.

I can't wait to see what our smart motivated group of authors will do with this truly enabling platform.

Sometimes your first choice isn't always the right one - you learn through experience... and indeed I've talked about our wiki challenges before..

Our first choice for our internal wiki was mediawiki. For several reasons, it's stable, proven and continues to evolve and we could implement quickly without worry of license restrictions.
We've found over time though that even though there are lots of extensions to mediawiki they often do not meet what we need in an Enterprise environment - a robust tagging infrastructure, Enterprise Level access control with fine grained granularity, wysiwyg editing or that  the plugins are not portable across mediawiki releases as the codebase continues to evolve.

You may have already seen wiki.sun.com  is coming. It's currently still in Beta and will not open to the world at large for several weeks but we're hoping to leverage the fact that our DotCom group decided to go with  Atlassian's Confluence and possibly move to confluence.

Confluence has more of the pieces we need for an "Enterprise wiki" -a nice plugin architecture (with a good list of existing plugins) better editing, fine grained access control etc. plus it was good to find yesterday (amongst others) the Universal Wiki Converter  so hopefully we will be able to move most of our existing content into confluence without too much hassle.   I think it's time for some scalability testing and to double check the UWC works correctly ...  maybe play with some plugins too.

I have been exploring, along with many of my friends and colleagues at Sun, the value and use of social networking applications. There is definitely a lot of potential and value with tools such as Ning, Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, Delicous (aka Swanlicous for Sun employees) and many others.

My question or challenge is this: with so much information already available and difficult to find within Sun and on the open web (a challenge we have been trying to address with Grokker, Goolge Search Appliance, good information architecture and organization, tagging, etc.) - how are we going to ensure that these new high value tools that hold high value content are organized and the content findable within the organization (see The Magic of Findability blog entry by my friend and colleague Soctt Brown)?

A specific challenge for me are my Ning communities - there is nothing alerting me in any way when there is something new. Sorta like the beginning of static websites where you'd have to go to the site daily to see for yourself if there was anything new. I'd don't want to see us facing information and social networking fatigue.

If some things could be pushed at me via RSS/ATOM or email or IM or text message - that would be great and help with ensuring I don't miss the things I need to know on a daily basis. It would allow me to decide where I want the information and how I want to receive it. Then there is the discovery and findability of all that content - we need to be sure we are thinking about an approach so that 1-2 years from now we are not struggling to "find" the information we need to do our jobs, communicate, innovate, discover, and collaborate.

RSS/ATOM is certainly allowing me to aggregate some of the information from some of the tools. However, I don't have that one site where I can aggregate all the things that I'd like to - maybe this is the ultimate mashup and intranet for an organization. An interesting exploration is the Facebook Platform (see Facebook's app feeding frenzy) where developers can develop tools to integrate with Facebook - this alone has helped me to keep up on my Facebook connections as well as messaging from folks via Twitter.

At the end of the day, we are at a really interesting and booming time for social tools. I've learned so much already from our experiments with tools like these - things about colleagues opinions, interests, projects, skills, etc. that I would never have known otherwise. It's all really valuable and the heart of the information world - creating, sharing, collaborating, finding, discovering, exploring, using and accessing critical content and people - when, how and where I want.

Hey - maybe my avatar, Violet, can help me keep up? 

We're very lucky @ Sun. I go to the office once per week - sometimes less. I mostly go to meet people, I have all the tools at home to work and function from here.

We're now fast approaching our annual Customer Engineering Conference. The event is where our technical field folks get exposure to executives, hopefully learn a little and get an opportunity to network. As people see less and less of each other, spend more time on the road and working virtually it becomes more and more important.

We'd like to expand it to have a virtual presence - we have several options depending on what we might be trying to achieve:

1. extend reach of conference for people that cannot attend       
2. enhance the on-site conference experience for attendees (do something cool)
   
3. showcase Sun technologies       
4. specifically reach out to  partners that cannot attend       
5. use it as a starting block for future conferences  /   events that might be all-virtual

We have several different technologies to look at Second Life,   MPK20,    Plazes
 which is cool -  maybe we'll use one or more of them.

Time to go explore environments - work out the heros and the zeros.
Ethelred Hax now exists in secondlife - need I say any more.