A core tenet of i-Dialogue 9 is that all website entities inherit the following social interfaces and behaviors:

• Comment
• Rating
• Tag

Objects integrated with other systems, such as Salesforce.com, automatically inherit these social extensions.

Once a community becomes active on a website, how does this information become actionable for a Product or Marketing Manager? How do you visualize a plethora of comments, ratings, and tags on a website? i-Dialogue 9 solves this problem by providing a graphical analytics application for visualizing the online community.

The community graph is interactive and supports high-level visualization of the community and the ability to zoom in on any entity. Graph nodes are color coded to indicate increased activity or negative ratings.

Graph nodes may be modified or removed (for community moderation).

Graph nodes may be ordered by time (most recent at top), rating (highest rated top to bottom), comments (most commented at top) or tags (most tagged at top).

Internal employees may assign a Task to any entity for follow-up.

Default Social Entities:

• Knowledge Base Article
• Trouble Ticket (aka Case or Issue)
• Discussion Forum / Topics / Post
• Document
• Article (Blog or Webpage)
• User
• Chat

Alerts:
Any user may initiate a 'Watch' anywhere within the object graph hierarchy. A watch results in email notification when any child entity is updated.

Product Roadmap Notes
Technology: Silverlight
Anticipated Release Date(s)
Social entity behaviors= Winter 2009
Community Graph=Spring 2009

• New - Added support for Microsoft AJAX client library
• New - Added Jquery support (requires update to ASPX page templates)
• New - Added JSON support
• New - Added XOSQL (eXtensible Object Store Query Language) support for use in AJAX apps (returns JSON array)
• New - Added 'db' interface to client-side Javascript API for use in AJAX applications
• New - Added 'Find' feature to CMS Toolbar (Searches page meta tags and content)
• New - Added 'Localize' feature to CMS Toolbar
• New - Salesforce ETL Map "Auto-Generate Map" dynamically determines storage type (Text or Image) based on XOS value setting
• New - Added 'Date Picker' control to Dialogue Script library
• New - Dialogue Script editor uses client-side Preview and Asynchronous Save (no server postbacks)
• New - Portal Registry Key 'Scripting.DefaultEditor' for using FCK or plain textarea editor

• Changed - Outbound emails set Return-Path to i-Dialogue NDR processing service. Reply-To set to email sender (previously Reply-To set to NDR service).
• Changed - Index optimizations to object store. Enforced use of BLOB storage for strings > 450 characters
• Changed - Disabled late-bound cache invalidation during Salesforce ETL and OM handler (was beta release. Withdrawn and deferred to Jan '09)

• Fixed - Improved caching of generic object collections. Thread safety changes.
• Fixed - Resolved issue preventing Live Chat ETL process to execute when Web Event custom object is not installed in Salesforce
• Fixed - Resolved ETL Map Local Object display issue (one-off index for certain object types)
• Fixed - Improved exception handling in Contact ETL when Account or Account Type not available (related to cascading role inheritance feature)

Salesforce.com announced support for Google Apps Engine (GAE), which is a cloud-based platform for developing websites and portals using Python.

Between GAE, Dialogue Script, and the Salesforce/Plone project, there certainly is a lot of love going around for creating sites with Python.

I'll admit to being somewhat envious when companies announce their positioning in an industry analyst report, but then reality settles in and I get back to focusing on the true objective influencers in todays market; You (the reader), existing customers, Google SEO, and now (even more so) Twitter and Facebook.

I'm not really sure what it takes to get on the radar of some analysts (someone once told me "$10K per millimeter"). Some complex IT procurements are best served by having this information in hand.

But purchasing decisions can get really cloudy if a vendor is mis-categorized, or simply not understood by the analyst. That's why I got a kick out of this suggestion to create a "Magic Quadrant" for Analysts.

Microsoft's Gen4 data center architecture involves trucks pulling up to an open air park and plugging right in to the Internet. No roof. Looks a little like an electrical utility transformer station.

Check out the video.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:b4d189d3-19bd-42b3-85d7-6ca46d97fe40&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision">Video: Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision</a>

If you can manage to run your business entirely in the cloud, then you'll enjoy the reward of using Good Operating System on a $199 netbook.

Recent articles and events have been making waves about the integration of CRM and social networking. I personally don't see the "sales mining" approach being a very good idea. In fact, it could outright backfire.

So how does an organization effectively leverage social networking? The answer is.... (drum roll please... are you ready?) ... "socialize".

5 things you can do right now

1) Read the ClueTrain Manifesto
It all started with this. "Markets are conversations".

If your corporate culture is not conducive to a majority of the 95 ClueTrain Theses (it's not entirely palatable), then social networking may not be a good fit. But it could also indicate your organization is on a path to extinction.

2) Own your brand
If a company is going to get into social networking, then ideally several employees will belong to that network. However, if it's possible to register your organization's name as a username, go ahead and reserve that account (or someone else will).

3) Be Informative
Break news for your company on social networks. Keep micro-messages informative by always linking to relevant pages and articles.

If people ask questions, point them in the right direction (don't respond if you don't have an answer).

4) Be Personal
You'll very quickly figure out that http://twitter.com/dlog is just me, tweeting on-behalf-of our service. Most days, I'm sharing links relevant to our service or industry. But if my dog dies and I'm having a bad day, I may share that too.

Upload a personal picture, even though you're representing a branded profile.

5) Manage Your Twitter SNR
Potential followers only have your last 20 tweets as a basis for your signal-to-noise ratio (Twitter SNR), so you need a reasonable balance of information-to-socializing.

I find myself intrigued lately with the possibility of using OpenID in B2B marketing campaigns and portals.

The idea is simple. Let your customers/partners use their existing Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, or AOL account to login to your website.

For a consumer website, this is a no-brainer. I would not be surprised if I could click on a Yahoo! banner ad and log into a sponsors website using my Yahoo! username.

But does this necessarily apply to a B2B website? I'm sure Marketers managing a complex sales process will continue to want to own the relationship end-to-end and collect as much information as possible upfront. But if a Marketer is willing to collect a minimum amount of information upfront and invest in cultivating the lead to incrementally collect more information over time, then this might work.

Less complex sales cycles might actually have quite a bit to gain by letting leads self-identify with an existing identity, given they're "in the hunt" and scanning 5+ competing site at one time. The site offering the path of least resistance is most likely to win.

RPX has a freemium service that supports OpenID (RPX is also an Oregon-bred company, so it must be good ). I'm going to experiment with the free version of this service and play with integrating it with i-Dialogue membership management (and by proxy, CRM Lead/Contact management). 

So what do you think? Would you support OpenID on your website? Why or why not?

Dynamic RSS Feeds are a little known, but powerful feature in i-Dialogue; and when integrated with a cloud data source, such as Salesforce.com, can be used to keep your visitors up to date and pull them into your site.

As users start to adopt RSS Readers for aggregating their news, it becomes even more important for Marketing Managers to become familiar with RSS and how to get mindshare in the "new inbox".

This Wiki article describe how to setup a recruiting RSS feed of recent job postings. RSS feeds are expressed as SOQL Plus queries, so you can add anything to your feed.

The major components to this Dialogue pattern include:
1) Salesforce managed record (Press release, listing, property, etc...)
2) A published RSS feed that displays top 10 or 20 items
3) A click-though landing page that displays record details

Our implementation services team can deploy this Dialogue template in less than 60 minutes. Give us a call to learn more.

 

Update: Here are a couple good online resources for learning more about Azure
MSDN Forums for Azure
http://blog.smarx.com/ (this blog is actually built and hosted on Azure)

Thanks to Steve Marx, Microsoft Azure Program Manager, for pointing these out.

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I recently received this invitation from Microsoft (emphasis mine):

"With the recent unveiling of Windows Azure, we’re very interested in your thoughts about cloud computing. Take this short survey and tell us what you think about cloud computing. Your opinion counts. "

However, about half way through the survey, they apparently decided my opinion doesn't count (see screen shot below).

Ouch. Talk about a negative customer experience! So exactly how does one participate in this dialogue? Should I just engage with Ray Ozzie directly via email?