Release Notes for revision 1787

Revision Number: 1787


-Community interface heavily reworked for joining, leaving, inviting and creating.

-Can sign up users for Sabisu as they join your community.

-Updated dialogs for sharing widgets and pages.

-Introduced user profile pictures.

-Added a switch to the on-premise server to restrict searching communities to within the premise, i.e., users within a premise cannot search for communities external to the premise server.

-Improved AD security.

-Accessing widgets data from a premise externally now requires the user to authenticate.

-Limit on invites. A user now has the option to restrict an invitation to a particular community.

-Introduced community keys, allowing users to be invited directly into a community, making joining the platform and the community seamless.
-Optimised scrolling for tabs.

-Introduced invisible widgets which are primarily used when a config is required for a widget (i.e., widgets do not show in a users sidebar).

-Introduced Open ID to the platform for Google logins.

-Minor bug fixes.

Release Notes for Revision 1606

Revision 1606 went live on 23rd May, including:

• Improvements to On-Premise to Cloud communication, including security enhancements
• Last admin can no longer leave a community
• Added feature to allow users to copy a community page to their personal pages
• Users must now formally rejoin a community
• Making any change to a community page gives users edit mode automatically
• Creating a new community now allows a user to inherit details from the attached community
• Login and registration have been updated with a new user interface
• Users can now setup a company when they register with Sabisu
• The widget design tool has had some user interface improvements made and defects resolved
• Various other bug fixes

Release Notes for Revision 1515

Revision 1515 went live on 13th May, with the following improvements including:

• Improved system ajax architecture
• Minor bug fixes including
• Widget recommendations now show in the sidebar
• Inviting multiple users to a community now invites all entered users
• Other minor bug fixes
• Overhaul of system security
• Introduced session based logins

Revision 1331 now live, improving security & CSS

We pushed revision 1331 to Sabisu.co today - lots of changes, even if most of them were 'below the water line'.

• Public cloud users are now invited to create a community page, publish it and invite users in a single seamless workflow.
• On-premise users can now set themselves up for access outside the corporate network through a new option on their User Profile (user menu, top right).
• There's a 'Hints' mode under the user menu (top right).
• Platform reskin, now with our new branding and colour scheme.
• CSS themes for communities have been expanded platform wide, now much more control over what you can change to add your own unique style.
• Sabisu Community Forums are now available as a widget; look under the "Sabisu" application in the side bar to add it to your page.
• The on-premise security model has been improved, as has the log-in security for cloud users.
• Various widget improvements have been made, including improvements to the way supply chain objects are drawn on maps.
• Chat has been made more efficient, shifting more activity server side.
• Minor CSS fixes have been made to the chat window.
• Improvements to widget editor - usability, security.
• The system will ensure that users will always have at least one page on their workspace.

Sabisu release 1240

Just a quick note for this release; it's something of an interim release while we work on new things.

Our current focus is security, usability and platform reliability.

Release 1240 adds:

- A new feature which allows a community admin to make amendments to the community profile.

- Various bug fixes

Sabisu gets chat, in-line notifications, load on-demand

Sabisu continues to get better; we've added some new features in the last couple of weeks.

1. Notifications
   Email might be the de facto notification method for most platforms on the internet and you can see why; it's a way to reach outside the platform and maintain contact. We'll keep on using it because we understand (most) people don't live in the platform 24/7.
   
   However, our customers expect a real-time experience; if the data being streamed to the cloud is real-time it would be strange for all elements of the platform not to be so. Therefore new notifications are not only emailed, they're flashed up at the bottom right of the screen with a quick link to take the user directly to the point of action in the platform.
   
   At the moment, it's community and widget related actions that are notified to the user. However we'll look at other events that should generate a notification; please feel free to suggest.
   
   
2. On-Demand Load
   Everyone on the development team is a heavy user; we have lots of workspace pages, each with lots of data based widgets. Until now, the platform would prioritise loading the current workspace, then would load background pages.
   
   Now the platform will load each workspace page as it is requested by the user. This makes the platform much faster. It also makes it impossible for a badly designed widget to cause a browser problem until that workspace page is requested.
   
   
3. Chat
   Clearly a collaboration platform needs some sort of real-time chat facility. Often it's the quickest way to get things done and users like multi-tasking many chat streams.
   
   We understand there are other chat facilities out there; both standalone and platform based. However we felt given our corporate focus we couldn't be reliant on another vendor; not only must we ensure reliability, we plan to develop chat in ways that might be denied to us had we chosen another route.
   
   

Books that inspired Team Sabisu in 2010

What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis: Readable and provoking analysis of Google's approach. A starting point from which to explore internet platforms, practices and models.

Free, Chris Anderson: Makes sense of the new default price in the digital world; zero. Useful analysis and guidance as to what makes a freemium business model work.


The Longer Long Tail, Chris Anderson: Looks at the power of digital retailing as it applies to inventory; how a mass of niches can be as profitable as sticking to a few big sellers.


Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger: Another easy business/culture read. Develops concepts well, clearly argued and implications are well examined.


Cluetrain Manifesto, Rick Levine et al: Essential reading for anyone involved with web 2.0; a manifesto for changing the world.


Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky: As told through anecdote and example, interesting ideas on rapid forming communities and how faster is different.


The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell: Classic from the NYU school of new thinking (cf Shirky). Makes a good attempt to do some impossible analysis on the nature of virality.


Creative Disruption, Simon Waldman: Interesting look at how established businesses react to disruptions great for both for those seeking to disrupt and those on the receiving end of disruption.

What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly: Meticulously researched work proposing that technology extends the natural process of evolution.

Business Model Generation, Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur: a fantastic handbook for visualising new and disruptive business models

Retrospective: One Year On, First Customers, What Next

If it's possible to put a precise date on an idea, then Sabisu was conceived a year ago on 22nd February, 2010, at a TIF forum event about cloud computing. Euan Semple (twitter: @euan) gave a keynote that made perfect sense. 


Although we had a decent manufacturing focused forms tool in production at the time we felt it was too limited; our customers were facing problems that a forms tool - however we imbued it with disruptive qualities - wouldn't fix. Particularly regarding MES layer (InfoPlus 21, PHD) collaboration, or the overheads in getting ERP data.


It wasn't just that we weren't the best in our chosen field, we weren't even in the right field.


So this time last year the seed was sown. Lots of thinking and book reading later, we starting cutting code in June 2010, aiming to build a platform that would ensure manufacturing management teams could make faster, better decisions without depending on IT experts to get data to the right people; that would put control of the data in the hands of the decision makers.


A couple of weeks ago we started to softly roll it out at our first customers. You'll be seeing the case studies soon and they're pretty compelling stuff - we're pretty enthusiastic as you can imagine, but even we're surprised how well users are taking to it.

Where next?

Well, like all start-ups we're convinced we have a world-changing horizontal application. However, our focus for now must be on building Sabisu into a true portal for collaborative decision making and our next job is to evolve the main site at http://www.sabisu.co to reflect that.

Beta 1.0.2 available

We're delighted to say that a new beta version is available.

Changes as follows:

• Theming has been introduced so communities can customise the appearance of the platform and corporates can carry some of their corporate branding through to the platform. We've kept it pretty limited for now.
• Welcome pages have been updated, not least to include a link to our demo company.
• When registering with Flow as a service user, you are now only asked to provide your company name. This is in preparation for a better situated form to get the relevant company data from a customer at a later point.
• All the emails sent from the platform have been rewritten so as to be clearer.
• Fixed a bug in the Community application which caused users to be added to multiple communities.
• Fixed a bug in the Community application which caused a user to not be joined to the top most community when joining a sub community
• Sign out button now signs you out properly and completely.

We’ve also reworked the http://www.flowtools.co.uk site so as to reflect the benefits of the platform more consistently.

A lot of time has been spent over the last week or so on our on-premise server but this will start to reflect on the cloud solution too. More to come soon.

Beta 1.0.1 released

We'll be moving to using build numbers rather than version numbers shortly. However, here are the notes for today's release: 

- Widgets are now correctly brought to the foreground when you click anywhere on or within the widget (only works in IE). On other browsers the user still has to select the widget title area to bring the widget to the foreground.

- New feature on the widget side menu tab which allows a user to view related widgets that are not currently in use on the page.

- Where a sub-tab function is dependent on a certain widget being present, that widget can no longer be removed by the user e.g. when editing a Form, the Form Editor can no longer be removed from a sub tab but all other widgets can still be removed. Otherwise, widget adding and removing is unchanged.

- Widgets now have a maximise option which maximises the widget as to the size of the viewable workspace. Minimising the widget will return the widget to its original size and position. (In IE the widget sidebar menu tab does not show when the widget is maximised).

- Fixed a bug that caused the sidebar content to not expand to the screen height in Chrome.

- Changed the Flow Charts to make them more efficient.

- Changed the sidebar content to get its content on demand rather than when the platform is first loaded

Beta 1 available

Today the first beta version was released at http://www.flowtools.co.uk.

Significant changes have been made to improve stability, hence we feel it meets our quality criteria for beta release. We expect to be in beta for some time now whilst we work on giving you what you need to exploit the service delivery capabilities of the platform in the simplest way possible.

The more visible changes made this time are:

• Sidebar updated to reflect the grouping of widgets into applications.
• New users to the platform will get some helpful introductory pages to get them started.
• All options in the top bar have been shifted into a drop down (we'll need the space later).

You'll notice that we've not sorted the SSL cert out yet. That's because we're considering a rebrand and a new URL. More on that soon.

Alpha 4 available

As noted on the main http://www.flowtools.co.uk site, we released Alpha 4 at the start of this week. Registration is still on a invite only basis; there's an enquiries button on the login/registration page if you want to get on board and try it out.

Regular users will notice that the livery bar has a new, lower profile, cool all-black look; we think it really separates out the static livery bar from the dynamic, data driven, user controlled workspace area.

All existing communities are now locked down; users are welcome to join the Turkey Farm Plc community if they wish to see the demo graphs and so on in action. All users become part of the Flow community by default so you're in the same boat as a lot of like minded individuals.

Widget drag and drop should function much better as we've overhauled that too.

We're hoping to release Beta 1 soon; probably around the 8th November.

Flow is Meaningful

“When facts are commoditised, understanding follows...In the miscellaneous world the task is to build meaning.”                                                       
                                                               David Weinberger, Chapter 10, Everything Is Miscellaneous

When defining Flow as ‘meaningful’, a number of words suggested themselves as alternatives; understandable, conversationalist, valuable, connective, coherent, cohesive, salient, relevant, informative.... 

Flow is all of these things, but the quote above sums it up best of all; Flow allows understanding to be derived from data.

Simply categorising data is useful for finding what you want, so allowing users to choose, say, the categories under which a piece of data should be logged has some use is a basic, one dimensional form of metadata; your users are augmenting the raw data with more information that allows the company to make use of it.

Flow goes beyond this, allowing users to highlight and tag data at will, in any combination they like. This meaningfully enhances data by generating metadata and is transforming. It allows the data to be found, shared, and placed into context for others. And the best metadata generator any organisation has is its people, because they have the expertise.

Knowledge Management was very popular in the late ‘90s but it failed as a concept in its execution; there was no way to get all the tacit information out of people’s heads. Perhaps the Knowledge Management vendors of the time expected resident experts to write a book? What happened in practice is that forums and wikis found their way onto some corporate intranets but that was about it; no solution has the immediacy of Flow, where conversations and metadata are tied to particular source data points.

So if an expert looks at a manufacturing process and sees a correlation between two trend lines, then they should be able to tag that, adding their expertise and insight for others to draw on. Everything of interest that happens could be tagged, building up a huge repository of information that was previously held in expert’s heads.

Facts are commodities; and streams of facts, of data, are being produced by organisations at a huge rate - too fast to handle. By aggregating this data into something meaningful, then providing a platform which allows users to add their knowledge to the raw data, the data can begin to be understood and the understanding shared.

Flow offers a platform that helps organisations realise the value of their hidden knowledge. It provides a platform for extending this capability worldwide; expertise shared on a global scale.

Flow is Social

Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) describes an alternative view of an organisation in “What Would Google Do?”; he proposes that it is drawn as a network diagram rather than a hierarchical chart. This would include all the suppliers, customers, members of the public and so on that interact with it, working out why each relationship existed; goods, services, revenue, knowledge.  It would show that the exponential growth in influence of an organisation lies not with looking inwards, rather growth would be maximised by identifying new network nodes and working with them. Light up lots more nodes, get lots more influence.

That’s why the network is crucial. You could think of Flow as taking social networking principles and applying it to actually doing work. You could say “it’s like Facebook, but you’re actually doing work” and not be too far off; Flow exploits the exponential value of networks (as described by Metcalfe’s Law).

Inter-organisation networks therefore add huge value and Flow can allow an organisation to take advantage of the network effect without a huge implementation or culture change effort; Flow will just take advantage of the communities that already exist unrecognised, as users define working groups.

Flow will bring what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called ‘elegant organisation’ to the way organisations do things already; in terms of an application platform, it’s de-obstructing the process of working with partners – it’s facilitating, then ‘getting out of the way’ as discussed here.

Each organisation is already part of numerous external communities. Flow is unique because it can bring those communities together in one place. Instead of building a bespoke database, engaging a third party to host it and then working out how to update it, we believe it should be a simple case of designing a process and – click – sharing it with those users who share a community.

The key is to give the power to the users by making it easy to form useful cross-functional groups. It doesn’t matter whether they’re tiny or big, with a couple of users or a thousand; in fact, in terms of contributing to the community conversation the smaller might well be more productive. Communities are free; create one when you need it. Projects are great examples of short term communities.

There are many places that communities may add value; a supply chain can truly be a chain of partners working together; peer organisations can work together on common problems; suppliers can service or easily gather information from all their customers through a single point. 

Communities are at the heart of Flow and conversations are at the heart of your business - and sharing a widget, or a process, is the start of a conversation. Your organisation is made up of users that already share, discuss and collaborate and Flow will capitalise on that by making conversations easy, then capturing them in a central place where they knowledge they contain can add value to the organisation.

Your organisation is full of conversations right now, none of which is being captured. Those conversations may be about the canteen, the weather, a crucial line of business problem, football, late running projects and so on...Flow makes it easy to discuss elements of your business and every time this happens, someone in your organisation is adding value to that data; they’re turning it into knowledge.

Flow is Personal

“Get out of the way”                   
                                         Craig Newmark, craigslist.com

Flow’s underlying philosophy is permissive; business knows what it has to do and the role of IT systems is to make it as easy as possible – to remove the obstructions.

This particularly applies to the user interface for Flow. The user experience should be dictated by role, data and the processes that make up day to day work, not by the interaction with the system.

So, the UI needs to get out of the way; it needs to be conducive to performance not obstructive of it. What this translates to in practice is an interface that is;

• Clear; no hidden functions
• Configurable; users can configure it to work for them.

The user interface is a key component of the platform and adopts it’s principles; it can be easily extended to meet the business needs. After all, your business is made up of people, it needs to be personal; sensitive to each indidividual’s individual published and not so published roles and tasks; not only suitable for large corporates but also extensible to their not so large freelancers and SME partners.

We see Flow as the way that everyone gets everything they need to do their work. That might mean everything required is within the platform, or might mean linking to other platforms.

Flow is everything a magazine style intranet isn’t; personal doesn’t equate to a top down broadcast mentality. Rather each user has their own voice; Flow allows users to engage with each other about things on the shop floor. It’s going to be a key innovation tool, linking together people and data in new ways.

Flow is Viral

Information is usually distributed by email, print, discussion or intranet.

Our position is that none of these is ideal.

Email is a conversational tool that hides the conversation, probably losing it forever; you’re probably reliant on a search through proprietary format archive file that’s might well be based on your own hard drive. Not ideal.

Email is also insecure. It’s very easy to email data to third parties. Indeed, email is perhaps more insecure than print for this reason, though printed copies are more likely to be left lying around, or printed out and posted on a notice board.

Both email and print encourage discussion. These conversations are where expertise is exchanged and data is made sense of; this is where knowledge is created.

As soon as the conversation is lost to a wider audience, its usefulness is diminished. The final exchange of that conversation, where a decision is made, or an understanding is reached, is lost and with it, the knowledge gained and value added. When those involved leave the company, that knowledge goes with them. Their emails for example are unlikely to be trawled for information – even if they were, they’d have no context.

Many intranets don't have a conversational element at present; it’s broadcast news for consumption only, or at best they include forums and wikis. The broadcast isn't efficient - not only does it cost but top down communications can turn people off. A recommendation from a colleague however is more likely to get looked at and acted upon, and has the big advantage of being free.

So with Flow we wanted to make it so easy to start a conversation about a particular bit of data or event that users didn’t bother to email; they can share it with a community of interested parties with one click – whether they’re in or outside the organisation.

This is viral; in fact, with the communities model, it’s viral plus; 

• Relevance
• Users will share things that they know their community may be interested in. Other users can choose to deal with that person based on their credibility or any other value system they choose.
• If the data itself is annotated, or a shared with an explanatory message, users can assess its importance and view it in context. 

• Security
• Where a community is protected or private, users are approved. Widgets are similarly controlled.
  
• Source data
• No need to export, print or otherwise manipulate data; users can tag and link directly to the source.

Viral is not sequential. It’s exponential. So the right information finds its way to the right people without needing to be addressed properly.  Viral is quick.

Flow aggregates corporate data

"Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies.”                                          
                                                        David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto

Data ends up stored in many places; entropy rules. Legacy systems, new systems, consolidation initiatives, new storage facilities, old shared drives - the list is endless.

The distributed nature of data is both its weakness and strength; it’s weak because it’s hard to get at and make sense of but it’s strong because it allows data to be held in the ‘right’ place architecturally.

We believe that metadata adds value; whether it's tagging a point data source or trend line. We also believe the larger the dataset the better, allowing users tag and share larger trends or better detail. That's why Flow aggregates data from lots of different sources so that users can get even more out of it. That’s why Flow currently talks to most popular data sources and we are confident we can talk to any; Flow’s aggregation engine even deals with non-relational databases such as Lotus Notes or manufacturing data historians.

Flow is easy to configure for new data sources and the user interface is easy to extend, meaning that as a management information system it's well positioned. But that's just a step towards a more powerful solution, where Flow will deliver the benefits of aggregation; search, mash-ups and fusion.

Every corporate can benefit from the subversive effect of hyperlinks; it doesn’t matter where the data is. It doesn’t matter whether it’s stored way down deep in a manufacturing system, or on a network drive. This new level playing field allows users can find and link data that is hierarchically distant yet relevant. It allows an organisation to make sense of what it knows. It allows conversations to start.

The fact that Flow maintains a single, central, shared version of each truth is important as it makes the conversations about them relevant and actionable. But it also makes it searchable which really adds value; searching a component name will return not just documents with the right term, but actual comprehensible contextualised data. 

Using mashups to fuse data from different sources is coming soon in Flow. Like mapping crime statistics onto Google Maps, Flow will be able to combine data from different sources so as to see the data in the right context.

Flow is a Platform

“A platform enables. It helps others build value...Platforms help users create products, businesses, communities and networks of their own.”

Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?

Flow was conceived and designed as a platform.

Flow is not a reporting, workflow, collaboration or other kind of tool precisely because it is an open platform. We would rather build a platform that can accommodate the best reporting tool in the world, adding value to the platform and providing users with the functionality they need through an interface with which they are familiar. We're good at building platforms that allow integration and extension.

This is the reason the platform can ‘borrow’ from other web applications in real time; we don’t want to dictate to our customers how they have to do things. Flow doesn't ‘lock in’ our customers – rather, it frees them to choose any tool for any purpose in the future whilst the common user interface minimises the effort and cost involved with implementing that tool.

For example, if there's a great manufacturing system reporting tool that meets your organisation's requirements, that’s fine; it can be embedded into Flow's user interface. We understand that there are tools out there that fit your requirements so well, or represent an investment already made so significant, that they're integral to your business. So we've made sure you can continue to see their benefits.

Equally this means that we're always looking for third party tools and applications to link to; if you have a great tool we should look at email us.

Flow has project management, forms design and business processes capabilities built in so it promotes action rather than just analysis. It's platform agnostic and can fit into existing security architectures.

We believe that the best way to deliver on the promise of the platform is through a browser interface. Client installed software has traditionally been functionally rich, but overall it can be a poor experience; users don’t use most of the advanced functionality and it’s often difficult to package and deploy. A browser front end means that every user can immediately get value; extend the platform, converse with their peers, get the data they need. The platform is personal, without any client software or the associated expense.

Welcome to Sabisu

Welcome. Sabisu is a platform for creating an elegant world, one organisation at a time.

We used to call it Flow, so you might see some legacy nomenclature about the place. This is a temporary home for us; once we have our own blog site up and running we'll move there.

We believe that we can help organisations work together better through sharing data and processes, creating a responsive, transparent and secure network of partners. Through the Sabisu platform, those areas where organisations overlap become the source of opportunities and value.

A supply chain can be a chain of partners working together. Peer organisations can work together on common problems. Suppliers can service their customers from a single point, or easily gather information from all their customers through a single point. With our freemium model, non-profit organisations and sole contractors can benefit from network too without taking on extra financial commitments.

Flow is free. Come on in and tell us what you think.

1. Register: all you need is your email address. Everything else is optional. Join your colleagues in a community, or set up your own.

2. Find: other communities and widgets for your workspace.

3. Share: with colleagues, partners or friends.

Sabisu is currently in a limited release, so it's stable but still work in progress.

Sabisu is free on the web; users who need an on-premise server to stream data out of their organisations pay a license fee.