I’m doing another Enterprise 2.0 project–leading implementation of a Sharepoint rollout for another very big client.

I keep want to believe that Sharepoint rocks. But keep getting data points that it doesn’t.

E.g., this excellent overview of Sharepoint’s deficiencies re Enterprise 2.0 by Dion Hincliffe whose main points are:

The issues and challenges of using SharePoint for Enterprise 2.0

1. SharePoint is not a Web 2.0 native.
2. The technology landscape of the enterprise environment fits SharePoint well; the business requirements to a lesser extent.
3. The wilds of the open network can be a challenge for Sharepoint.
4. Self-service capabilities are lacking or not emphasized.
5. Cost and complexity.

Ouch. And then there’s this blistering criticism of Sharepoint. Punchline:

-”Sharepoint doesn’t have any full-text search function”
-”de facto only Internet Explorer can be used when working with SharePoint”

Double ouch. More thoughts on this topic later. Suffice it to say I’ll be pushing Microsoft and its partners to get some responses to these criticisms…

It’s likely to be connected to the recession. With millions getting laid off and credit tight, who can fault a free service for going dark for a few days? SLA, what’s that? “Service Level Appendicitis”? “Startup Leaking Air”? “Sounds Like Apocolypse”? “Sillicon valley Looks to Atrophy“? “Silly Little Apps”? “So, Loser About your data…”? “Savings Liposuction Alchemy”?

OK, I’ll stop with the bad punning. But not before saying, I told you so…

Zendesk gets it.

They have drunk the 37signals Kool Aid and are now serving up a monthly online subscription-based help desk ticketing system which

• is elegant and simple in design
• is well-thought-out, with battle-tested features
• has key Web 2.0 elements “baked in” that make for “joy of use” and increase efficiency (e.g., tags, smart folders, RSS, built in Ruby on Rails for speedy responsiveness exceeding traditional fat client desktop apps, etc.)

Om Malik writes in his blog: “Just like 37Signals offers you project management tools or hosted chat, Zendesk offers you a simple way to manage all incoming help desk inquires.” And Zendesk just got US$.5m in funding from private/angel investors, including Christophe Janz, from my favorite web-top RSS reader, Pageflakes.

I had dinner with one of the key people behind Zendesk last week, Michael Hansen, and the more I hear, the better I like it. Check out this video describing the features:

The key features and benefits of Zendesk seem to be:

1. Tight integration with email.
2. Very cool implementation of tags to be used by a group–more than a simple folksonomy (which is “anarchy by design”–fine for Flickr, but not fine for enterprise knowledge management). It seems to suggest “most popular” tags. Why tags are revolutionary: folders force you to file items (e.g., help desk call notes) into a rigid hierarchy. Tags are extensible (i.e., you can add new ones any time). And they allow you to tag things with “apples” and “oranges” and “problems”. Or, in the case of a help desk call, e.g., “XP”, “Junichi’s clients”, “VIP”, “strange flashing screen bug”, “Very important”, “Possibly related to Known Bug 716″ etc. etc. See another cool Mac software that exploits tags very well: Leap.
3. Smart folders a la iTunes (aka saved searches with the results always available, no need to hit the “Search” button).
4. SLA (service level agreement) monitoring dashboard and reports.
5. “Cases” and macros which allow you to automatically fill out fields for oft-repeating sets of data entries.
6. Can easily build up a comprehensive self-service “solutions database” out of previous resolved Help Desk tickets.
7. Community forum/group blog enabled, in a sensible way that ties into the overall workflow of servicing individual ticketed problems.

Originally I was thinking Zendesk would be appropriate only for SMEs. But the more I mull it over, the more I realize this may be an excellent and low-cost solution–up in days–for large enterprises also. For example, Zendesk allows you to ITIL Incident Management and it can be made to conform to your company’s IT departments workflow and business rules.

Pricing is from free (for one help desk agent), to US$49/month for two agents, up to US$349/month for 25 agents.

Stay tuned for more on Zendesk…

I just tried to access my Backpack (handy online virtual notebook utility) at 3:15pm on a Sunday in Hong Kong, and I get this. Even though this maintenance was properly announced well in advance, it’s still annoying to have your “online virtual notebook” down for 4 hours in the middle of the day. (Chicago-based 37signals’ wee hours of the night and graveyard shift are the middle of my day.) It’s what I call the “coffee/beer” conundrum (having been on conference calls from Asia to the U.S. for the last 17 years where, when I’m drinking beer the other party is drinking coffee, and vice-versa).

Any of these cool SaaS online Web 2.0 apps that want to be a serious player in Asia (including those which I’m a big fan of: 37signals, Near-time and Ning) really need to take this into account. Minimally, all maintenance needs to be scheduled, so that users in Asia can prepare for it. Optimally, you need to figure out how to have a server farm or replicate in another data center or virtualize or something–so that you don’t have 4 hour outages. That’s really “20th century” and not very international. C’mon, e-commerce sites (amazon, etc.) don’t go down for maintenance in the middle of anyone’s night, because they lose clicks to shopping carts and revenue. SaaS’s (for which we potentially pay pretty good money for) need to start thinking the same way. For this reason (of potential outages in the middle of my day) I’m seriously considering Microsoft’s OneNote, instead of upgrading my Backpack account–for my ‘virtual notebook’ application (I’m still a very big fan of 37signal’s Highrise–even with these outages in the middle of my day.)

[Update (13 Feb 08, 10:45am HK time) : "Messages" and "Newsroom" features added to Backpack.]

37signals just announced that their online “information manager” Backpack is now multi-user:

Backpack matures into a great business tool
There’s a clear advantage to a multiuser Backpack account: Backpack becomes a wonderful small business/group tool.

While Basecamp is great for managing client and internal projects, Backpack multiuser becomes a great tool for sharing information across your organization, centralizing knowledge, and a home base for all those little bits that everyone needs but no one can find. Since anyone with access to a page can add content, Backpack pages turn into collaborative blank slates.

So many of the things people use enterprise wikis (and formerly tried to use intranets for)–authoring content of multiple types for commenting and collaboration, tagging, notification/alerts, basic project managment and caledaring–for can now be done easily and elegantly in Backpack. Check it out. One main defining feature of wikis that Backpack can’t do: track multiple revisions in collaborative documents, including the ability to “roll back” to an earlier version. But 37signals’ Writeboard does exactly this. And Writeboards can be attached to Backpack pages.

So, voilà, new multi-user Backpack + Writeboard = good, easy to use SME wiki (with SSL). And it’s relatively inexpensive: US$5-US$14/user per month, depending on the plan.