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People of Earth, Join Us…

July 3, 2008

My name is Jesse Matthews, and I am a Recruiter with LUCRUM. I joined LUCRUM at exactly the right time – we have a large number of opportunities that we are actively looking to fill. These include new positions for consultants, for contract roles, for contract to hire, and for perm positions. If you are an IT professional looking for a new opportunity, please send me an email (jmatthews@lucruminc.com). I’ve provided some of the “hot” opportunities that we are looking to fill right away – if these skills are your’s, I want to hear from you right away! If you possess different skills, please email me anyway – we get new positions every single day and I truly look forward to finding the right opportunity for you!
• Java Developers with J2EE (Cincinnati, OH). This is an internal consulting position. This person must be able to work with clients, will do customer requirements gathering, and will be working on a software installation of Clearspace (this is similar to Sharepoint). This position will work here internally until the initial installation of Clearspace is complete. The position will then work externally with clients.
• Windows Systems Administrator (Cincinnati, OH). This is a 6 month contract-to-hire position with one of our clients. We are looking for someone with fundamental experience working with Active Directory. This person will have working knowledge of Infrastructure Server services (DHCP, DNS, Domain Controllers, WINS, etc.) and a working knowledge in hardware installation and maintenance (server, RAID, Blade Configuration, etc.)
• Associate Web Application Developer (Dayton, OH). This is a direct hire position with another of our clients. We are seeking someone with a Microsoft Certification, Relational DB experience, SQL Reporting, MS.net development or VB or C#, XML, Schemas and DTDs.
• Applications Systems Administrator (Cincinnati, OH). This is a 4 to 6 month contract position with one of our clients. We need someone to provide third level support for a Web/Java based application. The client is looking for someone with 2 or more years experience with Oracle (10g is preferred), 1 or more years experience with Unix (Unix/Linux) and 1 or more years experience with Oracle PL/SQL.
• Senior Business Analyst (Montvale, NJ). This is a 6 month contract position with another of our clients. This client is rolling out a global implementation of SAP GRC. This position requires someone with experience in applications for access controls, process controls, and compliance.
If you have any interest or know of anyone with any interest, please email me at jmatthews@lucruminc.com. Please attach a resume and let me know what position you are interested in by putting the title in the subject line. Thank you very much!

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How I Reduced My Gasoline Expenses by 40%

June 10, 2008

My daily commute averages just under an hour assuming I leave home by 5:45 in the morning and make my return trip before 4:00pm. Now, when I accepted my current position at LUCRUM as Marketing Manager gas was about $3.00 per gallon. Roughly 100 days later, it is hovering at just above $4.00 per gallon, and showing no signs of plateauing. That represents a substantial increase, and one which costs me quite a bit of real money. I am fortunate to own a very fuel efficient vehicle, but still need to fill up multiple times in a traditional 5 day work week. After much thought and careful consideration I have found a way to reduce my gasoline expenses by 40% a month. Let me explain how.

When I am not listening to books on cd from the library during my daily commute, I tend to listen a fair amount of talk and news on the radio. I am constantly barraged with “what to do about soaring gas prices?” Generally the answer given is something like, fewer SUV’s and more fuel efficient cars, use bio-fuels, tax the oil companies, switch to alternative fuels, move to the city and walk to work, drill for more oil, etc… I hear Senators, Congressmen, Presidential Candidates, The President, American Consumers, Business Owners, and Foreign Dignitaries all expound on how to solve this pressing issue. From liquid coal to switchgrass, ANWAR to Ethanol, hydrogen to methane to propane, there are a multitude of solutions, but none that is viable today. At least that is what you think….

Now all of these ideas have merit. While I agree with some more than others, you can make rational arguments that any of these solutions could yield marginal decreases in the price of fuel. But marginal decreases are not what we need. You see, while these ideas are all sound, they treat the symptoms of the problem. We need something to strike at the root. The game itself must be changed. We spend an inordinate amount of time placing the blame on “big oil” when we are reluctant to change our behavior in the face of price increases. Simple economic theory will tell you that these companies are going to charge as much as they can until the behavior of the marketplace forces them to change. Consumers have given these companies no form of retribution for raising prices. We continue to fill up, drive to the office, and complain about high prices, but we do nothing.

I am here to tell you that there is a simple way to reduce your personal dependence on foreign oil at the micro level. At the same time, this way could improve the environment, enrich our personal lives, reduce company expenditures and increase workforce productivity exponentially. The real alternative fuel is utilizing collaboration technology and the internet to get more work done, more efficiently, and at a much lower cost.

Collaboration Technology has allowed me to work from home on average 2 days per week. Thus, by this simple change in behavior I have reduced my consumption of gasoline by roughly 40%. I would like to increase that to 4 days a week, but baby steps are required for both me and my employer. Thus, I am sticking with 2 as the goal for now. Now, I ask you, what the net effect would be if consumers across the country were to embrace this trend? Well there are a few simple conclusions that come to mind.

First, by reducing the demand for gasoline, the overall supply would naturally increase. Now, the math does not work out exactly the same on a large scale as some people just can’t work remotely. Nurses, Doctors, Truck Drivers, UPS, etc… So the aggregate reduction in demand would admittedly be less than 40%. Still, if those who could work remotely chose to do so 2 days per week, the effect would be very noticeable. Include in this number those who are in sales, logging countless miles of windshield time to meet with clients in person and the impact increase more. Collaboration technology, delivered via the internet, empowers people to effectively “be in the same workspace” without ever leaving home. Let’s see switchgrass do that. Now this has a direct effect on gas prices in that Less Demand = More Supply = More Pressure to Lower Prices!

Now assuming that the distribution of remote office days was spread evenly across the work week, there would be a noticeable improvement in traffic patterns. Highways would be less congested - leading to safer driving, less gridlock, and as a result increased fuel efficiency. (Cleaner Air would be an added benefit, but that is another post.) Greater fuel efficiency would translate into reduced demand for gasoline. Again, Less Demand = More Supply = More Pressure to Lower Prices.

I don’t know about you, but I believe that if this trend were noticed, oil companies would act to stop it before it became a cultural norm by… lowering prices. Again the consumer benefits. Should this trend catch on and expand to 3 or 4 days a week, a virtuous cycle would develop, with oil companies again needing to reduce prices to entice you back into your car. Now the consumer would have a choice again, and oil would develop more of an elastic demand pattern. In short there would be real and measurable consequences to increasing prices - consequences which today don’t exist.

Finally in the benefits column is the fact that by working remotely 2 days a week, I recapture at least 4 hours of time that can be spent more productively. Exercise, family time, reading, working, and other activities easily fill the void created by eliminating my commute. Time is truly our most precious commodity, not oil. Giving me back 4 hours of productive time outweighs any economic benefits offered up in the first two reasons. More time = happier worker = lower turnover = more profits for company

So, in summary we would have fewer cars on the road, filling up less frequently, more empowered consumers, a better environment, and a more efficient workforce. Personally, by adopting this work model, I have more time, more money, and I am a better employee. It is just that simple.

I truly believe that the technology world needs to speak out about the concept of Collaboration as the Alternative Fuel of the Future. We are operating modern businesses on a factory model created to optimize the businesses of the industrial revolution. This system required people to work as machines, and the machines to be present to add value. This paradigm is no longer relevant for many of us, yet we continue on with business as usual. It is time to begin to use the collaborative tools of Enterprise 2.0 to solve problems in new and innovative ways. IT should be leading the charge in reducing the dependence on foreign oil, and allow us to get beyond simply blogging about how we hate high gas prices.

More to come on this concept in future posts. I would love to hear your thoughts on how collaboration can change the world. Please share your comments.

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Written by DAVIDeBOWMAN · Filed Under Information Technology | 4 Comments 

Social Networking and SharePoint 2007

May 27, 2008

On May 14, 2008, CIO.com published an article about Understanding Microsoft SharePoint in a Web 2.0 World.

Obviously, Social networking is a significant goal of Web 2.0 and has received a lot of attention over the recent past with the hope of improving worker productivity by making available enhanced online access to people, skills, knowledge and other resources. As Wikipedia says, “Social Networking has revolutionized the way we communicate and share information with one another in today’s society”. Social networking software typically allow users to build an online profile through which they can share information about themselves and thus leads to the building of online communities with shared interests and/or activities.

SharePoint 2007 uses the concept of individual, customizable user profiles to provide users with a means of publishing information about themselves. These user profiles can combine information from the organizational directory service such as LDAP or a Human Resource application.

SharePoint provides individual sites (My Sites) for each user that provides personnel information as well as private and public views of content. Visitors to an individual’s My Site can see contact information, presence information, and organizational hierarchy information. My Sites also enables users to display information about their skills, colleagues and other social information.

SharePoint uses the notion of Colleagues, where colleagues can be friends or co-workers or members of the same team, who are related to an individual by means of their profile. The list of colleagues is built by mining multiple sources of information and is directly influenced by the organizational hierarchy. A user can also manually add or remove colleagues from their colleagues web part.

The colleague tracker web part can track changes to the profiles of a users colleagues, for example tracking such things as changes to a blog, new or modified documents, and changes to user profile properties, etc.

The Memberships web part let users see the lists and sites that they are members of.

The In Common With web part shows a visitor summary information relating to memberships, colleagues and managers that the visitor has in common with the owner of that My Site.

The Organization Hierarchy web part on My Profile page shows the user’s manager, peers (others who report to the user’s manager) and any direct reports of that user.

In association with Office Communications Server and Exchange Server, presence information is made available that indicates online instant messaging status, Out of Office messages and contact information.

The People Search function allows users to find people or skills by means of a search interface that returns search results based on social distance (an ordering of results based on colleague relationships i.e. first your colleagues will appear, then their colleagues and then everyone else).

Microsoft has also provided several Role Based Templates for My Sites to cater to the unique needs and requirements of different roles in an organization.

For more information, see the following white paper from Microsoft: Managing Social Networking with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

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Written by Raveen Rajavarma · Filed Under Information Technology | Leave a Comment 

Some SharePoint competitors in the Enterprise 2.0 space…

May 19, 2008

There’s been a lot of buzz over the past couple of months around companies who are pitching their products against SharePoint. Just the fact that companies are targeting SharePoint tells you that it is the product to beat. For instance, have you read about the offerings from Google and IBM?

Here’a a link to a ZDNet article saying Google takes on Microsoft SharePoint with Google Sites. And here’s another one asking: Is Google Sites going to be a SharePoint killer?

Both articles conclude that for all the hype surrounding Google Sites and Google Apps, apparently they still have a long way to go to catch up to SharePoint. Also, given that Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is available for free with Windows Server 2003, users do not need to pay any licensing fees to use the basic collaboration platform available with SharePoint. And by the way, did you know that Office Live Small Business (which provides everything you need to take your small business online, including a free website, free email, free online business applications, etc.) and Office Live Workspaces (an online place to save, access, and share documents and files), are built on SharePoint products?

IBM recently announced how they’d like to “liberate” your apps from SharePoint. Also look at another article around the same topic. IBM acknowledges the “viral adoption of SharePoint” in the enterprise, almost like Lotus Notes back in the 90s. And it’s interesting to note that the man behind the success of Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie, isn’t with IBM or Lotus, but is the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft! Hmmm… And I know of at least 2 major corporations with a huge presence in Cincinnati, OH, that have decided to move away from Lotus Notes to SharePoint! I guess we have to wait and see if Quickr is able to stem this flow…

Evans Data Corporation’s recently surveyed over 400 developers for its May 2008 report on “Web 2.0 Developer Programs - 2008 Rankings”. Some folks might be surprised to hear that Google came in at second place. So who came in first? Apparently, “the strength of Microsoft’s Windows Live offerings for Tools and SDKs and Web Services allow them to finish first overall”.

So it seems that SharePoint is not something an organization would want to ignore or take lightly - plus, serious web 2.0 developers need to more closely look at Microsoft’s offering in this area.

 

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So why are people flocking to SharePoint 2007?

May 12, 2008

By flocking, I mean that “the vast majority of enterprises — 96% — are considering, planning on, in the process of, or have already completed deploying at least some part of Microsoft Office System server software. And most of those — 87% — plan to implement or upgrade to Microsoft Office System server software within the next 12 months”  and that’s from Forrester (see the free Forrester research document titled “Topic Overview: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007”, by Kyle McNabb and Rob Koplowitz, dated April 24, 2008)!

It’s easy to see why SharePoint 2007 is such a strong contender in the enterprise collaboration space, when you realize that it combines messaging, social computing, real time collaboration and virtual team workspaces.

I am currently working on developing a plan and strategy for collaboration for a client and it’s all about leveraging the power of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (SharePoint 2007) to increase employee productivity and connect seamlessly to people, knowledge and data to help employees make better informed decisions so that they can serve their customers more effectively.

SharePoint 2007 provides blogs and wikis as site templates so that you can easily create those as needed. The People Finder can help you locate people based on different directory level attributes and the neat thing is you can find people based on skills or expertise that they have specified in their user profiles. People and group lists are readily accessible depending on user privileges and presence information is available as well. Real Time Presence and Communication is enabled wherever the real-time presence smart tag icon displays. In conjunction with Live Meeting 2007, Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, this makes for a very powerful collaboration tool.

In the messaging space, the tight integration between Outlook 2007, Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007 allows you to take offline an entire library so you can work disconnected from the network. Also your SharePoint tasks can display right alongside your Outlook tasks. Alerts that you set up on your SharePoint site automatically send you email notifications. Discussion boards are email enabled so users can save their email as part of a threaded discussion. Also, lists and libraries can be email enabled so as to allow users to email a document directly into a library. There is an RSS viewer web part with which you can subscribe to an RSS feed. Furthermore, every list and library in SharePoint 2007 is RSS enabled, so you can subscribe to the contents of a list or library via RSS.

When it comes to virtual team workspaces, SharePoint 2007 provides several different site templates out of the box. Apart from this, Microsoft has released 40 site templates that cater to commonly used functionality such as vacation scheduling, contacts list management, etc. Furthermore, it is very easy to create a custom site template – once you configure your site to work just the way you want, you can easily save that as a site template so you can now reuse that as needed. These virtual team workspaces provide a repository for lists of items, libraries of documents, announcements, online calendars, surveys, task and issue lists, project tasks list with Gantt chart functionality, and task coordination using simple workflows. Lists and libraries can enforce security at the item level and they also provide versioning, explicit check in/check out, content approval before publishing, etc.  These team workspaces can be also be secured at an individual or group level. SharePoint 2007 makes it possible to easily create no-code, declarative, sequential workflows based on business rules using the SharePoint Designer 2007 tool. Combine SharePoint 2007 with Groove 2007 for collaborating across organizational boundaries, whether connected or offline and now you have an even more compelling scenario of use.

So all in all, it makes sense that the adoption of SharePoint 2007 is so pervasive!

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Written by Raveen Rajavarma · Filed Under Information Technology | Leave a Comment 

Collaboration and Search

May 5, 2008

We collaborate and work together to achieve a common goal, sharing knowledge and ideas and creating content in the process. Often times in a business, people are collaborating around a certain issue that needs addressing or improvement or maybe brain-storming ideas to come up with a new solution or collaborating around a certain task. Typically, as people collaborate, content gets created in the form of an email or a document or a discussion thread or a virtual workspace or a wiki or other similar mechanism. While the collaboration activity is at its peak, it’s probably easier to keep track of this content. However, the further removed one is from the actual activity, the harder it becomes to know or remember where something might be found. And ultimately for the business, all of this content could be considered assets that need to be easily and quickly retrieved.

Collaboration by its very nature creates a lot of unstructured content. Given that there isn’t a pre-defined structure, how does one go about quickly locating relevant information? It’s quite possible that the one who is looking for something might not even know where the information might reside. Is it on a file system or in a virtual team workspace or in a discussion thread or in a wiki? Also, it’s quite possible that the unstructured content that is created was actually pertaining to some structured content out in a database or a line-of-business application. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to search and reference that information as well?

IDC estimates that information workers spend on average 48% of their time searching for and analyzing information, (9.5 and 9.6 hours per week, respectively) which costs an organization $28,000 per worker per year (see “The Hidden Costs of Information Work”, IDC April 2006)

As mentioned last week, I’m going to look at some of the capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (referred to in the future as SharePoint 2007) which make it such a strong contender in the Enterprise 2.0 space. With SharePoint 2007, you are able to search both structured and unstructured data and quickly find the information you might be looking for. You can search content on your file shares, your internet and intranet web sites, IBM Lotus Notes repositories, Microsoft Exchange Public folders, and of course, SharePoint sites. You can also find information stored in databases and backend Line of Business systems, such as ERP and CRM. Not only this, but you can also search for people in your organization and identify those who might have the required expertise to get a job done. The best part about SharePoint search is that it returns security-trimmed results, so that a user only gets to see what they’ve been previously authorized to see. The search experience in SharePoint 2007 is highly customizable as well so that one can display best bets, eliminate noise words, and customize the display of search results and do so much more. Another highly useful feature is that there is really no preset document limit unlike other well-known search products.

An Enterprise Search feature pack is expected soon which is going to further enhance the Search experience with SharePoint and incorporate some of the powerful functionality found in Microsoft Search Server 2008, which Forrester Research has labeled as a Disruptor in Enterprise Search (see Microsoft: Latest Disruptor in Enterprise Search). Also, with Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST earlier this year (see Gartner Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, 2007), which Microsoft plans to integrate into SharePoint Search, it’s going to make the already powerful SharePoint search experience even more so. It’s worth noting too that other software vendors have also recognized the power of SharePoint Search and are integrating their products with SharePoint to leverage its powerful search functionality (for example, look at this news article about an open source collaboration vendor integrating with SharePoint for its Search functionality).

So with SharePoint 2007, you can pretty much assume that you will be able to search and retrieve the content you’re looking for. For more details, look at Enterprise Search from Microsoft.

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Written by Raveen Rajavarma · Filed Under Information Technology | Leave a Comment 

Of Web 2.0 and SharePoint 2007

April 28, 2008

            Web 2.0 made a big bang in 2007 advocating and offering new avenues for information worker collaboration to increase their productivity. Forrester Research expects that “adoption of social networking solutions for business” will “accelerate dramatically in 2008 with many firms looking for internal social networking solutions”.

            Web 2.0 in the enterprise is now here and companies, big and small, are having to figure out how best to deal with it. Technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, instant messaging, surveys, team workspaces, web conferencing, mashups and the like have grown immensely in popularity. In many cases, employees have figured out for themselves how to accomplish their work more efficiently using such technologies without formal offerings or support from their companies, and so it has now become imperative that businesses and especially their IT departments seriously consider how they are going to support this growing need for social computing in their organizations.

            One of the primary contenders in the enterprise web 2.0 space is SharePoint 2007 from Microsoft. In the short period of a year since it was first released, SharePoint 2007 has generated over $1 billion in sales for Microsoft and has become their fastest selling server product ever. Industry analysts such as G. Oliver Young of Forrester Research say that “Microsoft’s SharePoint will continue to steamroll the market” in the enterprise Web 2.0 space (see Forrester Research’s “Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008” by G. Oliver Young, January 25, 2008). He also says that “for SharePoint, 2008 will be another banner year.” Forrester also expects that the IT departments taking a leadership role in enterprise 2.0 deployments will look at SharePoint first.

            For Lucrum, SharePoint 2007 is currently a cornerstone of our collaboration strategy. In subsequent blogs, I plan to spell out in greater detail those aspects of SharePoint 2007 that make it such a strong contender in the enterprise web 2.0 space. Of course, one cannot assume that SharePoint is the holy grail of social computing and it is what everyone needs - depending on the customer’s needs and environment, it’s possible that other tools might be better suited for them.

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Written by Raveen Rajavarma · Filed Under Information Technology | 1 Comment 

April 22nd 2008 Job Postings

April 22, 2008

LUCRUM is growing - fast.  As a result, we are constantly on the lookout for exceptional people to join the LUCRUM team.  Below is a current listing of jobs I am looking to fill here at LUCRUM.  Because we are growing so rapidly, the list changes frequently, so it pays to check it out regularly.   Here is a listing of openings that I have an immediate need to fill for the week of April 22nd, 2008

1.  2 recruiters

2.  SharePoint mid-level developers and one SharePoint senior level dev

3.  A mid-level Rails developer that is competent on the platform and can work directly with clients

4.  Junior to Mid DB2 DBA

5.  A PHP developer that also has competency in one of the following: SQL Server, .NET (C#), SharePoint, MS Reporting Services

6.  A mid-level designer that can interface with business people. This designer would be responsible for mostly web and some print design. Knowing Flash is a major plus here.

Before you apply, you might want to snoop around our blog and check us out.  In fact we encourage you to do so.  No corporate speak here, just real people posting real thoughts about work and life at LUCRUM.  You should be able to get a pretty good feel for who we are and what we are all about.  Then, if you decide you are still interested in joining our team, which we hope you will be, contact me. - Andy Erickson.

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See What is Possible

April 21, 2008

Friday morning I had the opportunity to talk to Raveen Rajavarma, our new Collaboration Community Leader. Raveen was sharing with me the latest info on SharePoint 2007. I’m really excited by the untapped potential inside of SharePoint. Raveen has committed to get some demo sites out under our own internal SharePoint site so that everyone can see what’s possible. Additionally, he’ll be working with our team members to determine how many resources we need on staff to support our clients and how best to position all Collaboration tools.

I look forward to seeing great posts, great information, and a great community under Raveen’s leadership.

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