The fact is, these vendors provide a technical infrastructure and security controls that can help you to be compliant, this won’t automatically make you compliant. If compliance with different regulations is an important requirement, this is one area where you should spend a lot of your evaluation bandwidth.

Finally, a closely related consideration is that of retention & disposition management. Retention and disposition management continues to be a weakness for most cloud vendors. Enterprise-tier suppliers universally fail to provide even the most basic record management functions.

Now you could of course argue why these features are required in these relatively simpler file-sharing tools when you already have more sophisticated ECM or DM type tools. And you would probably be right if you were using these tools in a stand-alone more for simple scenarios. However, when you start talking of using these tools as a part of your enterprise layer, things start becoming complex...

We cover this and other areas in which these tools need to improve in our Cloud File Sharing and Collaboration evaluation report. The next version of this report will include updates to existing vendors as well as some new vendors. If you have experience with any of these tools covered in our report, I'd love to hear from you.

Here’s a sneak peek.

Cisco WebEx Social (previously called Quad) is part of the company’s broader collaboration applications offerings, alongside web conferencing tool, WebEx Meetings, and instant messaging software, Jabber. The potential of adding social networking features to unified communications is interesting, but WebEx Social is still trying to make a decent case for enterprise customers.

tibbr, from integration software vendor TIBCO, is turning out to be a product to watch in this space. With a broad range of features (particularly for enterprise networking use cases), tibbr is perhaps one of the few products that tries to appeal to both business users as well as IT teams.  It's just not cheap or simple. 

Canadian vendor ThoughtFarmer offers a no-frills “social intranet in a box”, targeted at small and medium size businesses.

Traction Software’s TeamPage is very different from the rest of the products we evaluate. It’s a bit like being in the “The Matrix," amalgamating many different things and best thought of as a platform to build custom collaboration applications around interconnected pieces of information. It’s the smallest vendor we cover but the chapter is one of the longer ones...

Subscribers can download the full evaluations here. Or you can obtain a complimentary excerpt here.

Customer Story: Continued Challenges

One theme that we consistently see is how tough it is for social software projects to scale across the enterprise. In many cases, success achieved at the departmental level proves elusive to replicate across the enterprise. In other instances, enterprises struggle to sustain initial success over longer periods of time.

We also find that an enterprise typically implements social software for only a couple of use cases while in the aggregate we’ve noted a dozen or so use case archetypes. In short, our experience suggests that despite much hype, it is still early stages of enterprise adoption of social software.

Vendor Story: "You're Behind!"

However, vendor marketing pitches and their case studies try to paint a much rosier picture. Logos of large enterprises with thousands of employees across the globe figure on their slides and many prospective customers may mistakenly assume that they’re the only laggards. Also, many vendors are large organizations in their own right and one of the reference case studies they throw at you the transformation they’ve achieved in their own organizational backyards.

So, it was very interesting to take a peek at the “live” enterprise social network implementation of a large global vendor (who shall remain unnamed in this piece – my intention is not to name and shame here).

The Real Story: They're Behind...

I expected to see a thousand flowers blooming – the latest and greatest enterprise social applications being enthusiastically embraced by the vendor's employees, knowledge getting mined, social capital successfully generated, new connections created, serendipity rearing its lovely head – you know, all the good stuff that slideware is made of.

But what did I instead find? A virtual ghost town: not much activity, no great adoption, not much enthusiasm, and I’d wager not much business value. So, what gives? Well, let’s be charitable and say this vendor (along with other large enterprises) too cannot defy the laws of doing social at scale.

Yet, despite what they could not accomplish themselves, they’ll promise you Shangri-La.

Dig Deeper

I’d say as a smart buyer, the next time you see a case study, peel the layers and examine the length, breadth, and depth of the implementation, whether it’s a departmental level or a true enterprise-wide initiative, and assess whether you have a reasonable chance of replicating such success in your own organizational context. Also, check the repertoire of best practices available in our evaluation research to see if any of them prove handy for you.

For 2013 we isolate three key trends:

1. Rivalry between pure-play cloud disrupters and traditional enterprise platform vendors
2. Increased role of File Sharing as a Service (FSaaS)
3. Increased technical complexity and IT involvement

This briefing offers a snapshot of these trends in the current marketplace, as well as a comparative analysis of the relative risks associated with each cloud-based file sharing, sync and collaboration vendor via The Real Story Group's “Reality Check” chart. 

Fig 1: Cloud File Sharing and Collaboration Reality Check 2013

If you are a current subscriber, you can download this briefing right away. If you're not a subscriber, you can purchase it a' la carte ($895).

Innovation management platforms can help you streamline and sometimes even orchestrate the different stages and steps required to turn ideas into tangible outcomes. But pick the wrong platform and instead of tailwinds that expedite your innovation journey, you’ll encounter headwinds that’ll steer you off-course.

In addition to selecting the right software, enterprise innovation champions often also wonder whether and why they need additional tools for managing innovation, particularly when they have already invested in collaboration and social software. That’s a valid question and to answer that we look at the various functional / technical services of innovation management software that makes it easier to contrast what ships with traditional collaboration tools and what if any, is the value-add of specialist innovation management software.

We also note how social software has changed internal innovation flows as well as made possible to engage external stakeholders relatively easily, giving rise to new use cases.

We conclude with an important take-away for practitioners: profiles of key vendors in the space and this can help you in generating your selection shortlists in this very crowded marketplace. Vendors evaluated in the report include BrainBank, Brightidea, HYPE Innovation, Qmarkets and Spigit.

This 32-page report is available for immediate download to our Collaboration, Digital Marketing, and WCM clients as part of their research subscription and can also be individually purchased by non-subscribers here.

Fig 1. 2013 Reality Check - Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software vendors

The complete advisory briefing analyzes two trends: the proliferation of vendors, and the maturation of the marketplace as a whole.

Vendors, briefly...

In this advisory, we also have quick takes on each of the 24 vendors you see on the chart – which could be handy for you as you navigate the landscape as part of your selection or ongoing implementation decisions.

Current subscribers can download this right away and others can purchase it a' la carte ($895).

Awareness is a US-Canadian vendor that has gone through many twists and turns over the past decade.  Most recently, Awareness focused on “Social Marketing Hub” software to help enterprises manage their presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

The beginning of the end?

However, of late, we’ve noticed a few strange things that should set off warning bells for potential customers.

Firstly, there is total silence on their social media pages.

• Last few weeks, their Twitter account @awarenessinc has been inactive
• Ditto with their Pinterest board
• Same goes for their Facebook page.

For a company that previously used to actively engage on social media and that too a social media marketing vendor, this is rather odd.

Fig 1. Awareness Facebook Page, ironically, shows a ship sailing into the sunset.

Most ominously, their website is also no longer accessible.

Who will turn off the lights?

Digging a bit deeper, we find a mass employee exodus in recent months. Many senior executives and tenured managers now sport the “ex-employee” tag on LinkedIn. This includes the former heads of finance, marketing and sales, and engineering, as well directors for sales, operations, and quality. Even their CTO, who’s been with them for more than a decade, is gone.

Social's Fiscal Cliff?

We don’t know what exactly transpired but can only surmise that Awareness ran out of money and was unable to raise additional financing or find a buyer. (Their last tweet ironically is how Linkedin is ideally poised to make a big acquisition.) If so, we can commiserate with the impacted employees and wish them well. We hope that the social marketing efforts of existing customers have not been adversely impacted, and that they have a Plan B ready.

For prospective customers, this should give you some pause -- even in "hot" market segments, not all vendors will succeed.

High on smarts, low on software?

At RSG, we’ve tracked the many incarnations of Awareness - from the start of their journey in 1998 as SurfMap to their transition into a SaaS CMS vendor iUpload, and then in recent years, when they rebranded as Awareness. Our evaluations archive noted “Awareness certainly maintains a high profile in the marketplace through regular webinars and presentations” but “software development is stagnant” and “their real value is in their conceptually thinking through… how to add value to social tools through versioning and workflows… based on their CMS heritage,” but “technology is rough around the edges.”

You probably see a pattern here.

Isolated incident or a larger systemic issue?

Another question this raises is about the overall health of the social media marketing segment. Have the premium valuations garnered by Buddy Media ($689 M) and Vitrue ($300 M) when they got acquired last year by Salesforce.com and Oracle respectively lulled customers into believing that it is a thriving marketplace? Are we seeing the other side of the coin now in the Awareness saga? Is it just a single vendor failing to keep pace, or is it a signal for the sector at large? I suspect it's a little bit of both.

Our Digital Marketing vendor evaluations pay attention to both technology and vendor intangibles.  You should too. 

Many of the vendor's marketing services came via acquisitions.  Salesforce.com acquired Radian6 for social media monitoring in early 2011. It also acquired Buddy Media for social media marketing in 2012. Both these are part of an offering Salesforce calls Marketing Cloud.  After adding on a few other offerings, Salesforce now proclaims itself the... "#1 APP FOR SALES, SERVICE, AND MARKETING."

Now, when you register for a demo of this marketing cloud, the demo request gets handled by marketing automation vendor Eloqua.

Eloqua is now owned by competitor Oracle.

Of course, there is nothing new in vendors not eating their own dog food. In a dynamic marketplace, frequent mergers and acquisitions are common. Salesforce.com signed up with Eloqua before the latter got acquired.

However, it does reinforce a couple of relevant points for you the customer:

1. Salesforce.com has a gap in their marketing cloud in the key area of Marketing Automation (MA). In general this is not a bad thing, since they integrate with several other MA vendors instead.
    
2. Perhaps more importantly, this episode reminds us that once you have selected a vendor, it's not trivial to change horses even if you have enough technical bandwidth at your disposal. Many people believe cloud based services are highly portable among suppliers. That may be the case for some basic implementations, but it's certainly not the case for a more complex, enterprise use cases. A lack of standards also hinders data migration from one service to another.

In general, many cloud-based applications, including file sharing and digital marketing services, allow you to provision an account yourself and get started right away. This approach may work very well initially, but over time, complexity increases. You can encounter a broad set of security, performance, and integration challenges.

We cover many of these challenges and best practices in our Cloud File Sharing & Collaboration as well as Digital Marketing Technology vendor evaluation reports.

Every so often, though, it is important to take a step back from the details and look at the more macro-trends that are facing today's business and technology decision-makers. One of my favorite ways to gain a different perspective is to read Jane McConnell's (netjmc.com) yearly report that reveals the findings from her impressive survey of digital workplace leaders from around the world.

This year's report, Digital Workplace Trends 2013, has just been released and it is chock-full of data, analysis, and case studies. This report clearly shows the reality of enterprises struggling keep apace with emerging technologies in a meaningful way. You may be surprised to learn the real driving factors behind technology decisions and the concerns, fears, and roadblocks that are holding many enterprises back. But, if you are a decision maker charged with making critical decisions that will impact the future of your enterprise's digital workplace, maybe the most comforting take-away, is that you are not alone.

The Digital Workplace Trends 2013 is available for purchase at www.digital-workplace-trends.com.

We are not unduly swayed by such claims but evaluate the product on its own merits.

As a technology buyer you too will get bombarded by such vendor market leadership claims (and sadly some senior management may be seduced by such siren songs). Let’s look at what to make of such claims and what role, if at all, they should play in your purchasing decisions.

The devil's details and friends: Many a time, there is an accompanying fine print. You can creatively define a category that eliminates everyone else and preside over a parallel universe in which only you reside (IBM has been doing this with Portals for nearly a decade). It's also not too difficult to find a seemingly credible third-party analyst firm who’ll bless such schemes and lend a cloak of respectability to such claims.

Statistics and Shenanigans:  Further, companies can also play the numbers game in many ways. In an example from the non-technology world, even the vaunted WSJ was not above secretly buying its own newspapers in a bid to inflate circulation figures. In the software world also, market share numbers can include both paying customers as well as those who’ve received the software as a freebie.

Vendor market share does not equal results delivered for you. Market share leadership does not automatically equate to leadership in satisfaction and results. Many Autonomy customers learned this lesson to their great chagrin.  Heck, in some instances it does not even mean customers are using the software (particularly when it was thrown in as a sweetener by the vendor – see above). It’s not uncommon to find enterprise social software languishing without any adoption and usage, despite a large number of licensed seats.

But even if you assume that market share leadership claims are genuine, what’s the real informational value?

What's in it for me? It only signals that a particular solution has worked well for others. Or to be more precise, at least many other enterprises were convinced that it’d work well for them to make a purchase. But as we emphasize in our scenario-based evaluations, you should select the software that offers the best fit for your use cases in your context. If not, you’ll have your own version of the Abilene paradox.

Numero Complacento Uno? Also, it’s possible that the #2 tries harder. We usually find that greater innovation comes from smaller vendors rather than erstwhile market share leaders, who’re content with the status quo and often don’t want to rock the boat.

To be fair, market share leadership is often earned by vendors working diligently to meet their customer requirements, and can signal that there is at least something good about the product or vendor. But as the custodian of your company’s technology assets, you should not be unduly swayed by a vendor's sales acumen, and instead conduct your own due diligence.

Moving away from marketing monologues

It is not just consumers who’re afflicted by the paradox of choice. Ironically, marketers too are in the same pickle these days – seemingly numerous ways to reach consumers but that much harder to make your brand connect with consumers. And a big reason is that consumers are wary of one-way marketing monologues.

Riding on the wisdom of crowds

In response, some savvy marketers are adding co-creation and crowdsourcing to their toolkits. Co-creation is getting the consumer to help you create better products and services because it’s beneficial for them too.  But more importantly because they like your brand and care enough to contribute. Crowdsourcing is similar, wherein you seek inputs not just from your internal teams but cast the net wider and reach out to your consumers to contribute ideas.

The Motor Cycle Diaries

Now, these techniques have certainly been around for some time. Prime exhibits being open source software and that port of first call for knowledge, Wikipedia. But to gather momentum and achieve mainstream adoption, there's nothing like the visible embrace of a popular brand.

Harley Davidson, the iconic American motorcycle maker, may just provide the tipping point for crowdsourcing in the creative circles. I am referring to their collaboration with the advertising agency Victors and Spoils.

Here comes everybody

Victors and Spoils is an agency based on “crowdsourcing principles.”  What it means is: to execute client projects the agency relies on creative talent that is not employed by them.  When they land new projects, they prepare a project brief and release it to their database of thousands of experts. Then they select the best ideas received from this crowd and present them to the client.  

If this sounds radical, it is. But to make it easier and more palatable to their clients, the client-interfacing team is the same as would be in a traditional agency - they have account directors and such like. 

Using this model, the agency and by extension the client are able to tap a wide pool of global talent rather than a limited set of internal talent pool.

"Judging from the data we gathered, they are no dillettantes"

When Harley Davidson let go of its ad agency of 30+ years, V&S got the crowd to start work on new marketing campaigns for Harley, even before they pitched Harley. Their ploy worked and the partnership has resulted in some high quality campaigns. 

In fact in a validation of this model, the big traditional agency Havas (formerly known as Euro RSCG) acquired V&S with an eye on applying similar principles to its own large talent pool of 15,000. To the victors, the spoils then.

Making it all happen - Collaboration and Social Software

Of course, an important enabler and (the unsung hero) of the V&S model is collaboration and social technology. A strong technology platform must enable a big chunk of this operating model, especially with regard to creating and nurturing a global community of experts, curating crowdsourced ideas and content, orchestrating client project workflows, and many other activities.

What's your mileage?

While V&S employed a custom-built platform, you’ll also find some off-the-shelf innovation management software in the marketplace. In fact, we're looking closely at some of the leading vendors in the space for an upcoming advisory paper for our subscribers.

Depending on your specific use case, some of the collaboration and social software vendors evaluated in our social software report may also fit the bill.

We also account for other vendor additions and subtractions -- typically via mergers and acquisitions, such as the ones that finally put Oracle firmly on the purple line.

Some Key Take-aways

So what can we learn from this map?

• These marketplaces all still characterized by major platform players and (typically more agile) smaller players spanning out from the center. Platform versus Product remains a critical decision-point for selection teams in almost all marketplaces.
• Because a vendor has multiple stops doesn't mean that transferring from one line to the next (i.e., integrating two of their products) is easy for you the customer. In fact usually the opposite: traversing from one line to another means navigating poorly lit passageways with broken escalators and station diagrams that don't reflect the actual station layout...
• Digital Marketing Technology, Web Content & Experience Management, and Brand & Digital Asset Management (the purple, blue, and red lines, respectively) remain quite distinct. No single vendor has mastered these three increasingly inter-related disciplines, so customers should be sure to budget resources to tie them together on a case-by-case basis.

Want more info or context? If your employer subscribes to our service, feel free to schedule an analyst advisory session.

P.S., For a higher-resolution JPG and nicely-printable PDF versions of the map, visit http://www.realstorygroup.com/vendormap/.

Of course, the first three are central players in this marketplace, so our updates feel a bit like a health-check for the industry as a whole.  Here’s a short-hand version of our prognosis:

IBM’s social software portfolio contains many tools but it’s very clear that IBM Connections remains at the center. In the digital workplace, you can make a distinction between collaboration and enterprise social networking scenarios and Connections remains more suited for the latter. In typical Big Blue fashion, Connections will often work best when deployed together with other IBM collaboration products – at times overlapping and jostling with them, but also filling in for the missing pieces of functionality.  Our review has all the messy details.

Google Apps also gathers many tools under its umbrella, but gmail still remains the tip of the spear and many Google Apps customers are actually lured because of gmail. Google Drive (now housing Google Docs), Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Sites are also part of the Apps bandwagon. Individually, they’re all serviceable-enough instruments, but together a symphony they do not make. May still be value for money and attractive propositions but first make sure what you’ll be getting and what you won’t be getting.

What do you call the enterprise social capabilities in SharePoint? If you answered NewsGator, you were not far off the mark. So, not surprisingly after Redmond acquired Yammer, many customers considering NewsGator posed the important question, “two’s company, but will three be a crowd”? From what we’ve seen so far of Microsoft’s plans for Yammer (and SharePoint 2013) as well, looks like NewsGator will continue to play its part as a major SharePoint-socializer.

Moxie Software’s Collaboration Spaces is a new addition to our evaluations. Spaces is not as functionally rich as the more mature offerings in the marketplace, but is a lightweight tool offering many collaboration and social services in a single suite. Moxie Software’s main focus is services for knowledgebase management, so Spaces might interest customers with simpler requirements, especially if they already license other Moxie modules.  Our review details all the high and low points.

Beyond the marketplace health-check, subscribers can obtain detailed CT scans of these and two-dozen other products here.

Below I'll evaluate how our 2012 predictions (from December, 2011) held up:

1. Big data meets web marketing
   Oh yes: Big Data is all the rage among the digital marketing crowd. Practical understanding? That's another matter...


2. Enterprise search marketplace opens up...again
   We'd say yes, with the implosion of Autonomy and the virtual exit of Microsoft FAST, but it remains a very small marketplace.


3. Social services get called on the carpet in SharePoint
   Absolutely yes. That's why Microsoft bought Yammer.


4. CRM and CMS on a collision course
   Yes. Some Web CMS vendors are competing. Some are cooperating. You should place your bets with the cooperaters.


5. Death of the intranet as we know it
   Perhaps an overstatement, but the phenomenon is real. Vive le Digital Workplace!


6. BPM springs back to life
   Kind of hard to tell. BPM never died, that's for sure. Keeps coming up in conversations with our subscribers.


7. Rich media goes mainstream in the enterprise
   Definitely happened. What are you doing about it?


8. Big data blows into the cloud
   Yep. An unholy alliance between two overhyped buzzwords or a natural marriage of two inevitably intertwined concepts? More the former, but the latter can't be discounted.


9. Pervasive mobile-only apps
   Absolutely. Mobile development agencies are totally backlogged. But are we creating real value here? Hint: Facebook was wrong about HTML5...


10. New job titles emerge
    We saw a lot of this. And it's A Good Thing.


11. Security fears rise: phones, tablets, portable drives, the cloud -- where is our content?
    Not so much. Confession: we predicted this again for 2013.


12. Lines blur between commercial and open source technologies
    Absolutely. Alfresco and Drupal are hiring scores of professionals on the premise (promise?) of a lucrative IPO.

So, by my count, we made ten out of twelve, or about 83%. Somewhat higher than in the past, but hey, there's an element of luck in all predictions.

Let us know if we can help you plan for 2013.

As you might expect, there are some specific challenges for large, diversified enterprises trying to roll out Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

The reason for this is that nearly all the platforms and products we evaluate were designed initially for departmental usage, and often don't anticipate the kinds of demands that get placed on them at scale.

Let's do a short run-down of key issues, and then I'll conclude with some advice.

Application Diversity

Larger enterprises must address multiple diverse use cases for collaboration and social networking, ranging from knowledgebase management, to ideation and innovation, to project collaboration, to enterprise conversation, and more.

At scale, the typical enterprise will need multiple tools -- often from different vendors -- to adequately fulfill diverse goals. As our Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software subscribers know, these different tools often bring quite different architectures, which can be difficult to reconcile, let alone integrate for a coherent user experience. Consider for example, the differences between Yammer and SharePoint -- now offered nominally by the same vendor, but quite different in approach, model, and underlying technology.

Scaling Pilots in Large Enterprises

When it comes to social and collaboration, pilot projects may not provide as accurate predictor of success or failure as they might with other technologies. I'm not suggesting that pilots aren't needed -- just pointing out that customers often find that a social project deemed successful in one business unit may fail to take off altogether in another business unit. Pilots for social projects do not always provide the recipe for scaling across the enterprise.

Your challenge here is partly a reflection of my previous point: that different groups of users have differing use cases, and one-size does not fit all. Careful analysis and rolling, iterative pilots are your friends here.

Getting to real business value also helps you deal with the related "sustainability problem," which arises when users initially adopt social software because of novelty or because of the buzz generated by the marketing blitz at launch, but stop using the platform when it shows no practical business value.

Sometimes, though, you may just need patience and flexibility. Those managing these projects in multinational organizations in particular should recognize that cultural norms around sharing and recognition will vary widely. You may need to take subtler approaches to adoption and business process integration.

User Management and Privacy

User management for most platforms, most of the time, means: "we authenticate via your LDAP/Active Directory."  Fine.  But what about provisioning (and restricting) access to certain communities or project teams?  Most tools in this marketplace still have you do that one email address at a time.  This doesn't scale well for the complex enterprise.

And we all know privacy norms and laws present difficult challenges across national boundaries.  With rare exceptions, you have to implement kludgey work-arounds or manually set broad usage limits to some features in some countries.  To be sure, this is not a simple problem to solve with technology alone, but you will struggle to find much in terms of a leg-up here.

Global Performance and Effectiveness

Issues of privacy are really just reflective of the broader challenges of Enterprise 2.0 in multinational environments. For example, many tools ship with an English-only interface.  That may not go over well.  Some tools favor one mobile platform over another, or assume that all employees have either an Android or an iOS device; again, not necessarily realistic in many parts of the world. 

Application performance also becomes a near-endemic challenge in many global enterprises.  A single or small handful of deployments may not address latency, especially when some offices may have access to only limited bandwidth.  Most platforms, including SharePoint, require specialized voodoo skills for reliable replication -- even if you can afford all the licensing. 

Meanwhile, most SaaS vendors have a limited geographic footprints, though this is improving a bit with greater adoption of true Cloud infrastructures.

What geography is particularly underserved?  You got it: Asia-Pac...

Signal to Noise

Paradoxically, achieving scale in some instances may actually reduce usage. In large-scale implementations, for example, separating signal from noise in burgeoning activity streams can become prohibitively difficult for most users.  They respond by retreating.

A savvy architect will look for solutions that put signals in context of place and activity, and allow employees to filter activity effectively.

Business Process Integration

That issue of context lies at the core of why most social projects are nowhere close to claiming enterprise-wide adoption, but remain single-use case or single department implementations.

To meaningfully include social in business routines and workflows, you have to first identify which processes can benefit from being "socialized" and then integrate them with existing systems that run those processes.

On this journey, given the current state of social software, you will run into many challenges, like a dearth of integration standards, and poor thought given to service consumption (as opposed to service production) among major platform vendors like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.

As an enterprise architect, however, you want to keep pushing here.  Your colleagues want to socialize their broader digital workplace environment as much as (or more than) they want to participate in specialized communities.

Setting the Right Expectations

Like any marketplace, there's no ideal Enterprise 2.0 platform that will address all these problems.  Some vendors are making strides in some areas, but many customers still experience the dreaded "enterprise surprise" when departmental platforms don't scale.  For a detailed run-down on where major platforms do and don't excel, consult our Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software evaluation research.

If you are a leader within a large enterprise, the key thing is to set your colleagues' expectations about what's possible today.  The sociology of Enterprise 2.0 is hard enough already that you don't want to over-promise on the technology side.

If you have a good adviser on the project, you probably know to ask vendors to refrain from canned (or, even worse, recorded) demos, and instead have them address your narrative, testable use cases. Those use cases detail, step by step, sought-after processes and functions as they apply specifically to your organization.

The Case for Testable Scenarios

This is, of course, the case against checklist RFPs, and in favor of scenario-based RFPs.

The good news: I’ve been noticing lately at many industry events that vendors are becoming proponents of scenario-based RFPs, as they realize that check-lists of features and functions are not only painful to check off, but also not useful for either the vendor or the customer.

The bad news: Many vendors still struggle with a scenario-based RFP approach. Maybe it’s lack of time and preparation, or inability to operate outside of rehearsed marketing stories, or the simple effects of jetlag… None are valid excuses, by the way. 

When the Vendor Goes Astray

I’ll give you an example, a real story from a project where I'm advising one of our subscribers.

To make a long story short, one of the vendors slated to deliver a demo of use cases ended up shell-shocking the audience by deconstructing the carefully-crafted scenarios into a list of discrete features and functions. They listed the features on PowerPoint slides and then demoed each, one by one, outside of any business context. Well, they didn't actually demo all the features, only those where the presenter could tell a rehearsed story. When the customer asked questions outside the scope of the vendor's carefully controlled narrative, it resulted in blank stares and awkward sighs.

So what do you do in a situation like this? You did, after all, plan a good portion of the day for this exercise, you’ve rounded up stakeholder troops and invested time, you’re all in the same room, because you want to do due diligence and do it right.

One (admittedly radical) solution is to part ways right then and there, and not waste anyone’s time. If the vendor didn’t bother parsing your use cases, would they bother responding to, say, your support tickets?

Alternatively, I recommend put the vendor and their team in a “time-out.” As childish as it sounds, isolating them into a separate room for an hour -- to come up with a different approach and to re-architect the demo to focus on what you really need -- might also work. Some demos, even with the worst possible prologues, can be salvaged.

Taking Control

As a buyer, you want to give everyone an equal chance to present their solution, while also making sure they follow the protocol you've established. It's the vendor's job to put on their dog and pony show. It's your job to make sure that pony trots, canters, and lopes according to the business rules of your ring...

I believe this is great progress. Not just because I'm an advocate of the term "Digital Workplace" (so is Jane).

Rather, those 40% of large enterprises are recognizing what 100% of their knowledge workers already know: that there is such a thing as a Digital Workplace. Now, the employee experience within their particular digital workplace may well be fragmented, inefficient, and user-unfriendly, but that workplace exists.

To me, that's the key point. Every day your colleagues log in to various enterprise (and non-enterprise) applications to get work done. Increasingly they don't care about our labels of "Intranet," "Collaboration Zone," "ERP," and the like. Much of their day still remains spent in Outlook regardless.

Savvy enterprise digital leaders will recognize that their purview has broadened considerably. Based on the advisory calls that we get from KM and Intranet managers among our subscriber base, this can present a daunting challenge. Today they have to become proficient in the disciplines and practice of numerous different types of technologies across our vendor subway map and beyond.

But the notion of a Digital Workplace is also an opportunity for those with vision to reshape the employee experience by working from the screen backwards. This will likely require cooperation with enterprise architects, who tend to look at the challenge of a Digital Workplace from a systems-outward perspective.

Either way, the Digital Workplace simply just exists already. So the question becomes: how can you make yours more effective? Let us know if we can help you shape an answer...

Here are our collective predictions for 2013:

1. SharePoint 2013: Consultants Rejoice, Customers Yawn
   Microsoft’s latest release of this almost ubiquitous platform won’t magically transform content management or the social digital workplace.  SharePoint 2013 is an improvement more in degree than kind.  But it’s still SharePoint, so you know it will continue to fatten consultant and integrator revenue streams.


2. Trans-Media Trumps Multi-Channel for Brand Marketing
   We’ve talked about "multi-channel" distribution for years now, and distributing brand assets to print, web, and mobile channels from a single source has long offered a rationale for investing in brand & digital asset management systems. But brand engagement is increasingly about delivering different parts of the brand story and brand promise via different media -- not necessarily the same story or advertisement on different channels. In a tip of the hat to gamification, you’ll see more enterprises stretching to allow people experience brands and products in different ways and via different components that are unique to each media.


3. Convergence of Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Marketing
   As social media monitoring becomes more accessible -- and social media intelligence becomes more jaded amid widespread customer disappointment – enterprises will focus more on engagement in the social space.  This takes comparatively high operational savvy and effort – not to mention higher-end technology investments – so you’ll want to investigate cost considerations very carefully.


4. Cloud Adolescence: Business and IT Both Deal with Growing Pains
   For both business and IT teams, Cloud has definitely arrived already.  But with vendors and gurus alike using the term Cloud to describe such disparate models as IaaS, SaaS, and (especially) good ol’ managed hosting, customers can’t consider Cloud to be all grown up yet.  Consider:
   • Vendor promises of “hybrid” models are typically separate environments when you look under the covers, with some nasty usability issues resulting for Business and IT.
   • Many Cloud vendors really can’t track where your content resides, nor that they can truly delete it. Expect to see lawsuits in 2013.
   • IT and Business teams will struggle with usability vs. security trade-offs in the ubiquitous search for the ideal file-sharing solution.
   
   To be sure, Cloud is here to stay. It will reach young adulthood in the years ahead.  Just remember that Cloud is not transformational in and of itself.  It’s simply a better way of doing some things, some of the time. 


5. Web Content & Experience Management Vendors Litter Systems with Outbound Digital Marketing Services
   Much like the influx of social and community features into WCXM technology a few years ago, in the next wave WCXM vendors will infuse their technology with tools for marketing automation, email marketing, predictive analytics, lead scoring, and reporting. But, in long-term, this strategy will prove faulty as the more polished and mature capabilities of specialized digital marketing vendors will win out.
    
6. The Autonomy Debacle Reverberates Across Several Technology Sectors
   Leave aside for a moment allegations of financial hanky-panky.  HP’s disastrous acquisition of Autonomy will reverberate far and wide throughout 2013.  It re-opens the enterprise search market, especially given Microsoft’s exit with its SharePointization of FAST. It also validates the demise of the highest-end Web CMS segment, something we’ve been pointing out for several years now.
   
   Perhaps more importantly, it should temper appetites for mega-acquisitions.  We doubt, for example, that Autonomy wannabe OpenText will get acquired in 2013.  To be sure, some small social vendors will surely get sucked up (à la Yammer) by major players, if only for eye candy.  For you the technology customer, a pause in big-time M&A should prove a welcome respite.
    
7. Document Management and Cloud File-Sharing Vendors Compete Head-to-Head
   Traditional Document Management (DM) vendors and Cloud File-Sharing suppliers are on a collision course in 2013.  DM vendors will try to build (or acquire) file-sharing services, and file-sharing vendors will continue to build more sophisticated content services.
   
   As our subscribers know, DM vendors have been trying hard to offer SaaS/Cloud based offerings for certain productized applications, like simple case management, but with only modest success. In 2013, they will take a more serious run at it, via the simpler file-sharing route.
   
   On the other hand, Cloud file-sharing vendors will continue to enhance basic content management capabilities like version control, versioning, and workflow, rolling out more sophisticated, SaaS-based content management applications. Of course for you the customer, more choices is a good thing.


8. Contextual Mobile Delivery Rises to the Fore
   Delivering a "contextual experience" will rise to number one on the mobile songsheet.  This means getting the right message to a particular device according to what the user needs at that moment in time.  For marketers, this means thinking about customer journeys in a whole new way.  For digital workplace leaders, it means re-thinking the environments in which your employees want to get work done.
   
   Note that most WCXM and Portal vendors can’t do this today and likely won’t deliver any major breakthroughs in 2013.  We see a growing drive to mobile middleware next year.  Watch this space for more details, and our usual tough analysis of that technology segment.


9. Big Data Gives Way to Useful Data
   Some enterprises can achieve some business value from some Big Data use cases some of the time.  The rest of us will discover that smaller, better-quality data will prove more practical, manageable, useful, and ultimately preferable to "Big." Enterprises will need manage multiple data scenarios: when large high quality data is available, the quality of data is suspect and… when no data is available at all.


10. Rise of Social Media Compliance Concerns
    Social media gurus often espouse a tweet-first, think-later approach to social media communications.  As social media engagement gets more diffused through the enterprise, compliance will re-emerge as a big topic in 2013. The past two years have only been a foreshadowing: A CFO fired for tweeting ahead of the results; Politicians risking their jobs for social media indiscretions; and so on.
    
    Vendors will begin to wake up and build new or better archival and retention modules. A cottage industry of social compliance solutions will also spring up.


11. Broadcast & Media Management Focus on Social TV Strategies
    Much like video never killed the radio star, the internet hasn’t killed television – in fact it’s made TV another avenue for social media interaction. Interactive television will continue to proliferate, and MAM vendors will race to supply broadcasters and media distributors with multi-screen applications, content / program discovery apps, companion apps to particular shows, everywhere/anywhere sports access, and ways to see what your friends are watching via social network presence applications.


12. Several DAM Vendors Morph into Digital Media Management Suites
    Though we may see a pause in mega-acquisition à la HP-Autonomy, we won’t see an end to acquisitions and moves in the DAM market, where vendors are looking to service more of the end-to-end brand and media management ecosystem. North Plains has emerged as the most ambitious in this regard with recent acquisitions.
    
    More large DAM vendors will acquire tools in the production and distribution ends of the ecosystem in an attempt to fulfill a broader need, just as document management vendors made acquisitions in prior decades of tools to fulfill document creation, production, scanning, and archiving needs. This could bring added value for DAM customers, but just remember: most of the time, suites are less than sweet. 

This is our seventh year making these predictions.  In the past, we’ve been only about 75% correct. You’ll want to apply that same co-efficient this time as well.

If you are an RSG subscriber with deeper questions on any of these topics, please sign up for a personal advisory call, and we’ll be happy to walk you through our thinking, as well as help you plan for next year.

Please join me for a complimentary Webinar, "The Right KM Tools for Your Enterprise" next Tuesday, 4 December, at 12:00 pm ET / 17:00 UTC.

I'll offer some analysis of how key KM technologies -- from Portals to Social to Mobile to SharePoint -- are evolving, and where you should focus your energies in 2013, to find the supporting technologies that best meet your business needs.

You can register here. Hope to see you then.

According to Microsoft, SharePoint has grown quite a bit since last year's conference.  If the 10,000 attendees (from 84 countries) is not enough to get your attention, the approximately $2B in revenue should.

This year's conference was special in that Microsoft made public an RTM (release to manufacturing -- Microsoft's way of saying "it's ready") version both the latest version of SharePoint and Office.  Both products dubbed 2013 sported a new visual design aesthetic and plenty of new features.  However, the big question is, "what's actually changed?"

To answer this question, Microsoft responded with three major themes: Social, Cloud, and User Experience.

Unfortunately, the words by themselves offer little insight to the average conference attendee or watcher of all things Microsoft.  To that end, here's a brief summary of what each of the themes mean.

Cloud

Many organizations (mostly smaller to mid-sized firms) are already using Office 365.  If you're not familiar with the service, we wrote an Advisory Paper critiquing this offering.  Office 365 represents a Microsoft-hosted and managed collection of Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and Office, based on a monthly, per-user subscription model.  While this service has been around for quite a while (since 2008, though it was called BPOS at the time), the products lacked direct parity with their on-premise siblings.  For example, until the latest release of SharePoint Online (the SharePoint bit of Office 365), customers had little customization capabilities.  While some of the restrictions have been lifted, there are still quite a few challenges in developing a customer-centric solutions using SharePoint Online.

For the 2013 round, Microsoft invested heavily in both infrastructure and experience dimensions to support a multi-tenant SharePoint environment that provided better functional parity with on-premise implementation, as well as vastly improved performance.  In fact, according to Microsoft, some kinds of operations have improved by 40 to 50%.  Part of the changes made also include closer (but not complete) coupling the Office 365 infrastructure with the larger cloud platform, Azure.

The two versions of SharePoint are still not quite at parity, even if Microsoft has clearly spent a great deal of time and effort trying to get them close.  If you want to know the differences, you'll be hard-pressed to get precise answers; even Microsoft employees could not enumerate what differences existed, just that there is not yet true parity.

Moreover, as Real Story Group subscribers know, there are real issues with hybrid Cloud/on-premise deployments.

Social

As the default collaboration platform inside of many enterprises, SharePoint's lack of social features has been a constant concern for customers.

To Microsoft's credit, they attacked this problem in two ways: creating some new social features inside of SharePoint natively (largely building on what was already in the 2010 version) and buying Yammer to give them additional social capabilities, technology, and skills.  In reality, the first approach was the only investment that paid out this round.  Yammer got acquired too late in the development cycle and, even in the keynote speeches, the Yammer story was simply, "it's coming."

Generally, Microsoft was able to deliver a more competent social experience.  They provide an enhanced personal site experience (My Sites are gone -- more on that later) that rolls up your activities within SharePoint, even across sites and tasks in Exchange.  Sites within the SharePoint get automatically enabled with discussion and micro-blogging concepts (security trimmed) and, as you'd expect, a full complement of newly re-architected social programming interfaces for inevitable extension or customization.

I found some of the new social features a little confusing and I became even more confused when overlaid on Yammer.  The social experience feels a bit scattered, and many features seemed duplicative of what Yammer could already provide (albeit not integrated).  Further, many large organizations are already reluctant to enable My Sites for fear of both excessive storage consumption and viral site propagation.

Microsoft is clearly excited by what they've delivered. The actual velocity of adoption remains to be seen, since Redmond is still not delivering the kind of prepackaged social applications that business users want, nor a comprehensive, enterprise-wide social layer that seems increasingly necessary.

User Experience

User Experience (or UX) became a very prominent feature of the conference and, especially the keynotes.  Next to Social, UX seemed to get the most attention from the speakers.  On the surface (no pun intended), the now famous "we can no longer call it Metro" design aesthetic has supplanted the heavier interfaces of the 2010 era.  SharePoint's new interfaces do feel much lighter and easier to navigate.  What surprised me was that many features remain where they've always existed, but the design approach, nomenclature, and functional density (how many functions are presented simultaneously) give you a sense of a much lighter interface.  This is also true of Office, Exchange, and Lync.

Microsoft also gave a great deal of thought to the experience beyond what hits the eyes.  As previously mentioned, performance has been improved.  The keynote demonstrated a SharePoint site running in the Netherlands, and performance was quite snappy.  Microsoft attributes the performance improvements to refactoring their interface code, extensive use of caching, using differencing techniques (i.e., don't send the whole document, just the bits that changed), and making broader use of client-side interactions (think JavaScript and specifically jQuery).  This should all add up to a less frustrating experience for many end users.  Having worked with the preview version for a few months now, even the beta code was faster than the production Office 365 environment I use frequently.

Will these changes will be enough?  Snappier performance is certainly welcome, but the jury's still out on the new interface paradigm in the workplace.

As I've mentioned in the past, Microsoft has largely dominated this space by creating simple and purpose-built tools that addressed a broad set of needs.  Today, SharePoint is a behemoth that, in the words of Chevy Chase from the "New Shimmer" SNL skit -- "it's both a dessert topping AND a floor wax!"  SharePoint has become the answer to any question and the solution to any problem, given sufficient time, money and 3rd party products (see a previous post on "the end of [portal] history").  In SharePoint, Microsoft has created a product very much like the competitors they bested in the early part of the last decade. It's reasonable to ask whether SharePoint could suffer the same fate, at the hands of upstarts like Box.

Concluding Thoughts

The release of SharePoint 2013 offers many of the same promises the previous versions promoted.  It is absolutely true that 2013 is the best SharePoint release to date.  From the refreshed visual design, improved performance, updated social features, improved sharing with nice security controls, and better Cloud alternatives, SharePoint has come a long way.

Beyond that, one of the biggest features that doesn't neatly fall into any of the three categories exclusively is the idea of "apps."  This is a big shift primarily for developers, though it carries the implication that Microsoft no longer views SharePoint exclusively through the lens of an omnibus platform.

However, it is also true that SharePoint still has both new and old challenges to overcome.

For example, many "pillars" like Web Content & Experience Management have remained largely unchanged. (RSG subscribers will learn more about that shortly.) And before you mention the demo of creating a display template with Dreamweaver, I'll remind you that a base SharePoint-powered website still has the same infrastructure requirements as a collaborative intranet -- at least 24 Gb of RAM for a webserver, lots of disk space, and at least three servers.  If you want to take advantage of the "continuous" crawl feature of the new SharePoint Search (an upgraded FAST derivative), you'll need a fourth box and potentially another database server.  It's become a very expensive proposition to solve a relatively commonplace need, and SharePoint still does not address many e-marketing requirements that simpler and much cheaper WCXM tools offer.

RSG advisory customers know that each new version of any technology platform carries both the promise of a better world and the agony of the upgrade.  SharePoint 2013 is no exception.   Stay tuned for additional updates as we continue our discussions with early adopters and the ISV community to get the real story.

No wonder then that there is considerable interest among enterprise leaders to explore gamification, or the use of game techniques outside of the world of games.

Despite all the buzz and vendor hype, we found only scant information about the technology and practical implementation aspects of gamification software as noted here.

Much of the present discussion of gamification focuses on topics like whether it is truly useful technology, or whether it's really only old wine in new bottles. Perhaps you’ve moved past this stage of theorizing and are actively considering a gamification pilot. If so, I trust you'll want an objective discussion about the criteria you should use to identify the right gamification platform -- or even a critical dissection of the various features offered by gamification software.

In response, we brought out a buyer’s guide to gamification technology that aims to move the needle on enterprise gamification efforts. The leading gamification vendors we profile in our report are Badgeville, Bigdoor, and Bunchball. For each of these vendors, we evaluate their software platform as well as plausible (and not so plausible) implementation scenarios.

This 25-page guide is now available for download to our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software research subscribers.

Alternatively, you can purchase the report a' la carte here.

As some you know, in addition to our premium research and associated advisory sessions, some of our subscribers ask us to assist them in a more hands-on consultative engagement. Whether it's helping to construct a strategic technology roadmap or jump-starting a technology procurement effort, it entails helping business professionals make the right technology decisions that can lead to business success. 

Looking back on this past year, we have had the pleasure of working with enterprises across a wide range of fascinating projects. As some examples, our analysts helped...

• A major university find the right WCXM solution to support publishers within separate departments, but still maintain key central standards

• An international video game company find the right technology to better control their many digital assets related to their numerous products and brands

• A health care company find the right technology to deliver a seamless visitor experience through their customer portal

• A pharmaceutical firm develop a roadmap for replacing their promotional and digital marketing materials workflow and digital asset management

• An international consumer goods company deal with challenges due to the viral (and unsupported) spread of collaboration technology

• A global professional services firm determine where best to use SharePoint and where to supplement it with alternative solutions
   
• A major financial services firm develop a long-term roadmap and select the right portal technology for their channel partners

• An association drowning in paper find a way to manage applicants and their associated documents and records digitally 

• An online retailer find the right WCXM solution to increase their speed of publishing in order to boost productivity and increase sales

• A government agency evaluate the open source options for publishing regional websites

• A global manufacturing firm find the right technology to publish content in 65 countries in 38 languages

The best part of these types of engagements is that we meet hundreds of great, hard-working professionals. Thanks for welcoming us into your workplaces and allowing us to get a glimpse into your day-to-day challenges and successes.

As we begin to put together our 2013 schedule, please drop me a line if you'd like to start the discussion about how we can help you address the major decisions ahead of you next year.

The heavily tattooed, highly talented chef and trumpeter of natural wine, Pierre Jancou, recently caused quite a stir beyond the sauté pans and casseroles of his tiny kitchen in the 10th arrondisement of Paris.

A "Classic Approach" to Getting Positive Press

Things started bubbling over when he received an email from the publisher of Marie Claire -- a women's magazine not known for food news, let alone pictures of women who look like they've ever eaten foie gras -- announcing that Jancou's restaurant, Vivant, was chosen as a featured restaurant for an upcoming edition of the magazine.

Jancou was then asked when it would be convenient for the publisher to come to the restaurant for a free meal. And, by the way: the publisher would bring a guest. Jancou snapped back that the request was "fraudulent and shifty," but the publisher persisted, saying that this was "an extremely classic approach" for testing restaurants, and that the publication has nearly half a million readers. Then came the best line of all: "you have the right to refuse our request, and we will remove you from our featured list."

Those of you who read French might enjoy reading the entire exchange here, which Jancou craftily forwarded to every Paris-based independent food blogger in addition to various friends around the wine and food world. Now widely known in the Paris food scene as L'Affaire Marie Claire, I first heard the story while chatting with Paris blogger and fellow Philadelphia native, Aaron Akira, and Jancou outside his wine bar just a few days after it happened. 

Those of us who follow the food & wine world closely found the exchange comedic (or as Jancou called it, "delicieuse"), mostly because Jancou is the last person who needs publicity. His 25-seat restaurant and tiny next-door wine bar are filled every night by those of us for whom unique food and wine are the vivid paintings and arresting symphonies that punctuate our daily lives. We are not, to be sure, the readers of Marie Claire.

The Analyst World Is No Better

The whole affaire, as well as a recent request I received from a Digital Asset Management vendor, reminded me that the world of technology analysis is no less shifty -- it's just that the attempted manipulation of the system for personal and business gain is of a different nature. Some analyst firms, in the same way Marie Claire approached Jancou, actively approach vendors and ask for advertising or sponsorship dollars in exchange for their research coverage. Other approaches are more subtle. 

The seemingly innocent emails we get originate from marketing managers and analyst relations managers who offer us money, free travel, and yes, free dinners. Recently I was asked to speak at the annual conference of a DAM vendor we cover in our Brand & Digital Asset Management research. "We'd like you to come and talk about the DAM industry," said the lead product manager, "and explain to our customers and prospects how we're uniquely positioned to help them succeed in the coming years. Since you're an independent source, your opinion would be highly trusted by the attendees." They offered free travel and a handsome fee for my time. I declined. 

Though this is much less direct than the request Jancou received for a free meal in exchange for being on a publication's list, it's no less manipulative, and it's what we hear from vendors often. It's a classic attempt at ego-boosting, and of course, vendors' hope is that they will move up in our esteem, or that our evaluation of their technology will be less hard-hitting, as a result of such offers.

Well, they can dream on. The difference between Real Story Group and other analyst firms is that we never accept such offers. Like Jancou, we find such offers shifty and manipulative. Other analyst firms consider it an "extremely classic approach" to getting to know a vendor.  

What You Should Do

You, as a reader of the technology media or subscriber to research that your company pays for, should know who's funding your analyst's dinner. The technology vendor that might be the best fit for you might not be covered by a particular analyst firm, perhaps because they're too small, or haven't bought the analyst a week's stay in a five-star hotel.

Remain a skeptic, and don't be afraid to stir the pot yourself. Seek to know about the free travel, overpaid "consulting" projects, and other gifts your analyst has received from the vendors they're recommending to you. It may make you think twice about whom to trust.

Tools such as EMC Syncplicity, Box, Accelion, Citrix FileShare, and others provide lightweight collaboration and basic file services using a cloud-based deployment model. Enterprises will naturally question: since the functionality these cloud-based tools provide is really a subset of the larger problem document management tools like Documentum seek to solve, why not just use of the traditional ECM or Collaboration tools for file sharing instead of selecting a new set of tools?

Large ECM vendors such as EMC, Oracle, IBM, or OpenText specialize in highly customized, integrated, process-driven, high-volume, transactional implementations. They offer a full range of services to manage the complete life-cycle of content – starting from creation of content to its management to delivery and then archival and disposition.

Similarly, traditional Collaboration vendors are also relatively heavyweight solutions: they provide sophisticated services for collaboration that include advanced features such as instant messaging, presence, social networking, Q&A forums, structured knowledgebases, co-authoring documents, and so forth.

These tools are also much more expensive, more scalable, more extensible, and more readily secured (mainly because your install them on-premise).

Now, you don't need any of those advanced platforms for many common scenarios. What yous colleagues may need most of all is an easy way to share files (including via mobile devices), perhaps taking part in light-weight collaboration around those files.

This is where the relatively simpler, cloud-based tools that we discuss come into the enterprise. Their current lack of advanced functionality is actually a bonus, and in fact has become a key selling point. They offer only a subset of what the heavier ECM or Collaboration tools offer, but do it in a much simpler and better way.

There's another reason for the current split in the marketplace. Tools such as Documentum or FileNet are not really architected for providing services in a cloud-centric model. If you don't believe me, try asking a business user to self-provision a site using one of these tools. And this is why many of these traditional ECM/DM tools actually integrate with relatively simple cloud-based file sharing tools, and also why EMC acquired Syncplicty.

We review many of these tools in our forth coming cloud file sharing and collaboration report. Contact us to get notified as soon as this evaluation research is released later this month.