So there's such a thing as Micro-Blogging. Just when some of you are getting used to blogging, whether personal or professional, now more and more people are Micro-Blogging. This is embodied in services like Twitter, I can be found here http://twitter.com/bwatters. Most of it is mundane, and lots personal, but some is professional. And this got me to thinking about Micro-Blogging in the Small and Medium Sized business. The other day I read a nice Blog post / pseudo article / white paper on Micro-Blogging in the enterprise. So here are some thoughts on the matter. Micro-Blogging is out there. Its status updates, its letting people know snippits of info in a loose format, consumable on my time, not n theirs. Some of it is stuff that heretofore was put out in Memo or Blog or announcement or IM or the corporate standard, email. Is Micro-Blogging a replacement, I doubt it, but it is a great way to disseminate information and to let others digest it. By its very nature it is designed to be small, and quick and to the point.

For a small business, one could leverage existing services like Twitter, but that is a public service, and while some security measures are in place, it is not at all considered SECURE for groups and the such. A service like Twitter is better for your public face. Maybe a public announcement or public thoughts could go out there. Not necessarily 'orchestrated' but certainly not sensitive data…So then internally, a Small Business could leverage their SharePoint Intranet for such a service. It's achievable, and searchable, and secure within the intranet and corporate policies. I have built integrated Twitter WebParts for a couple of clients and internal use, and am working on a 'Shatter' service (SharePoint + Twitter = Shatter) if you come up with something better let me know, but please shy away from the obvious, that's dull and predictable…With the other Web 2.0 and social networking aspects of sharepoint, tied with the business applications, workflow, search, and whatnot, it makes for the perfect platform for an ever changing corporate brain, and Micro-Blogging while not the only solution, is a big part of merging the knowledge in the 'knowledge workers' brain with the corporate knowledge repository…

Without going into the whole discussion going on over on one of the Yahoo Groups, I will interject some thoughts here. Why not over there, too much over talking!!!

Anyway the general consensus is that the cloud is built, it is out there, and cloud computing will take over the IT industry and ultimately Information Assets will become the property of business but controlled by trusted hosting providers. That's probably true, to some degree, and that is less a factor of desire on the part of the business world, and more a factor of developers moving their R&D that way. The model is pretty simple, and in a utopian internet world, there's nothing really to worry about. Sure there's hackers, and industrial or even patriotic espionage to worry about, but that threat changes very little in a cloud based world versus a premises based world. No I see it as something a little more Facsist…Businesses controlling governments and the lives of people for profit. I am reminded back to when Abbie, a CPA worked for a VERY LARGE regional construction company. They used a hosted terminal based accounting application…which is to say their windows desktops had a terminal application that connected to a main-frame hosted application in a remote hosted data center. The company 'shared resources' at the data center to for benefit. Increased availability, standardized management and probably most importantly, set and stable IT costs…great! The problem lay in the fact that the construction did not own access to the data. Theoretically the data was theirs but it could not be imported into other systems or even accessed and manipulated for special reports or anything. The hosted application and more critically the hosting company CONTROLLED ALL ACCESS TO THE CONSTRUCTION COMPANIES DATA. Sure, they could pay for special reports to be written by the developers, but that was an arduous task that took far toooooooo long, and cost far tooooooooo much money!

The point is that the idea of a cloud based business environment has been around FOR A LONG TIME. It is maturing enough to start threatening small business consultants' market share. My feeling is that until there is a defined business model for Partners and consultants to earn a living off recommending Cloud Computing, this will not make a marked impact on the SMB space. Look at Google Apps or Salesforce.com. There is more hype around it these days than in past and more fear because Microsoft has announced its intentions of blowing up in that space as well. Perhaps rather than worrying about Cloud Computing competing for $$$ SBSCs should keep it as a part of their solution portfolio…Cloud Computing will mature, but I see it not as a replacement, especially in the largest sections of the marketplace, but as an augmentation for the existing solutions set.

By far the MOST Powerful feature of SharePoint Designer, specifically when combined with Windows SharePoint Services on a site, is the Data Views. We have been developing a new product line, and consistently through the process I am called upon to 'consolidate' data from a variety of sources, but for me as a pseudo developer the manipulation of RSS feeds to build an interactive consumer of data is phenomenal. Imagine a dashboard with all your social networks in one place. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo 360, Windows Live Spaces as well as the Corporate SharePoint. So for a business you might say, I don't want my people on MySpace or Facebook or Freindster all day long. Well, by bringing in data in clean RSS feeds and controlling interactions with that, now the Dangers of those sites is diminished. Extend that to interacting with your customers and others in their demographic, consuming and mining data from these social networks and mashing that together into a cohesive 'picture' of your target market, coupled with your business, and apply your business rules against that, and the Power of Web 2.0 starts to shine through!!!

We have a far less sinister view of Web 2.0, but imagine at home having a 'dashboard' that consolidates all your social networks, along with GPS of where the kids are and a phonebook and a consolidated calendar of everything going on around you…now it gets REAL FUN!!! Consolidated views of your day, from TV schedule, to Soccer Practice and where, and who else is on the team, with addresses, phones, and emails, and what snacks you need for the Party tomorrow night…without having to 'go' all over the virtual world inside your PC and the Internet. The dashboard can bring that all in to you.

Those concepts are the stuff that dreams are made of. It is a fulfillment of the potential of all this computing power!!! We aren't there today, but the sick thing is, that it is finally possible to start making it come true. A dashboard that feeds you as you are. If you aren't on MySpace, fine, it ain't feeding your dashboard. If your son is on Friendster or your daughter's soccer team has its own portal, the dashboard will bring that to you, rather than you having to remember to go out there and get it.

That's the beauty of Data Views. And with a little prowess, a developer can take those views and stitch them together to make interactive applications, hosted internally on a corporate web server, externally on a portal site, or at the house, or in the community center…bringing the data you need to you, when you need it, in a meaningful manner.