ESME Blog

The ESME Project has come a long way in only five months, from its genesis in a conversation between people who had never met, to a demo-grade prototype which has been shown on a live stage to a crowds of thousands in Las Vegas and Berlin. This has been achieved in the spare time of a fantastic team of people, but what I want to talk about here is the support we have had along the way. The people and companies mentioned here deserve our thanks for being there when we needed them on our journey. In alphabetical order, they are as follows:

Adobe

An early, though temporary, member of the ESME team was Matthias Zeller of Adobe. Matthias was instrumental in introducing the team to Scrum, a project management technique which revolves around multi-week implementation “sprints” and daily quickfire team status meetings. Matthias’ great gift to the team, via Adobe, was the use of an Adobe Connect Pro room and a daily slot on a conference call number. Adobe Connect Pro allows us to gather as a team in a shared space where we can share live desktops, make notes and draw on a whiteboard together – key tools in the early phases of design. Adobe’s help has enabled us to use Scrum to function as a globally-distributed agile team, able to resolve in minutes issues which might have taken days to resolve via email exchange.

Assembla

While Adobe provided us with real-time collaboration tools, the good folks at Assembla provided us with all the asycnhronous collaboration tools that are essential to running a software project: source control, bug tracking, project documentation wiki and file upload/download. On top of this, they providing their own functionality to help with Scrum-based projects, and they even do this for free for modestly-sized projects such as our own. In our case, we just checked the box labelled “Trac with Subversion” and off we went. In their own words:

Trac is a popular open source ticketing system, with the mission to “help developers write great software while staying out of the way.”, if you are familiar with Trac, this package is perfect for you. In this configuration, you will get a Subversion repository you can easily manage and other enhancements like a simplified team management, HTML alerts (called “notifications” in trac), and hourly and weekly alert summaries. You can upload your existing Trac directory and import your existing Subversion repository.

Subversion is the most popular centralized source code repository and version control system. Our subversion tool includes email alerts on commit, code browsing, linking of comments to tickets, and a post-commit hook to trigger your own actions. We know that reliability is important for subversion users, so we backup to failover servers.

If Trac and/or Subversion are not your particular tools of choice, they also offer source control using Git & Mercurial, and their own Wiki and ticketing system. In their latest offering there is a Mylyn connector for Eclipse (Eclipse-integrated source & ticket control with Mylyn is awesome) and even a Twitter tool so you can feed your project activity into Twitter. Hmmm… must talk to them about ESME integration.

Families & Friends

Everyone in the ESME team has worked on the project in their own time. As we have approached our various internal deadlines, this has meant spending significant amounts of time away from our loved ones, who have supported us amazingly well in our endeavour and complained only when we have been truly overdoing it. One strength of our team is that we are always able to carry on if individual team members need time and space, ready to pick up again when they come back to the project, but even so we are fortunate to have got this far with personal relationships still intact.

Google

Our primary means of team communication in between daily Scrum calls has been a private Google group for the core team. We are slowly moving most of the traffic from this group to the public esme-dev* Google group, but we still use the private group for organisational discussions, as well as plotting how to win the next Demo Jam away from the eyes of our competitors.   In addition, since we took the project open source in September, we now use Google Code* to host the project source code, issue log & documentation. I don’t think Google have made much (if any) money from us in this way – there aren’t too many advertisers who want to be associated with an open-source enterprise micro-messaging platform just yet – and so Google deserve our thanks for providing these services.

Joyent

Joyent provide cloud-based hosting on heavy-duty Sun servers running OpenSolaris. In our earlier days, they generously offered to host an ESME instance for us, running on SAP’s NetWeaver platform. We would really have loved to take them up on the offer, but we couldn’t figure out any way of getting a NetWeaver license from SAP to do this. We’re still enaging with SAP on this issue via the SAP Mentor programme (several of the ESME team are SAP Mentors), but right now SAP just don’t have a licensing or operational model for working with community-based teams. They are definitely thinking about it – in some quarters at least – but we are not there yet, which is a shame. There is a lot to be gained from showing how SAP can work in the cloud, and Joyent provide the kind of heavy-duty infrastructure that SAP installations can often require.

Plurk

Plurk was the service that really started us thinking about the potential for micromessaging in the enterprise. During a Twitter outage, a bunch of us congregated their for a while. The differences between Twitter and Plurk got us talking about what we in the enterprise software world would want from such a service, and that conversation led directly to where we are now.

RedMonk

Open-source analyst firm RedMonk is made up of the smartest quartet of people this side of MIT, and they have been enaging with us in small but important ways ever since we started. Among many other contributions from them, this article was prompted by James Governor quite rightly pointing out that we’d been using a lot of free help and not thanking anyone publicly for it. James tell it like it is, and that is a highly valuable attribute. Michael Coté did a great video interview with some of the team, Stephen O’Grady has helped us with some thinking about open source business models, and Tom Raftery has us thinking about how to make software green – in our case, designing a messaging system with awesome performance and scalability, meaning fewer servers generating heat in datacentres.

SAP

Most of the people on the ESME team are involved in the SAP ecosystem in one way or another – working for SAP partners, SAP customers, even for SAP itself, but also passionate and dedicated to what SAP is about. Many of us are SAP Mentors, and of course our public demonstrations of ESME to date have been at the SAP Tech Ed conferences. SAP has paid for our entry to these conferences, and has even loaned us a server hosted at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab so that we can run ESME on the SAP NetWeaver platform. Most of the enterprise-oriented thinking around ESME is based on our experience working in the SAP arena. We hope that SAP sees the value in this, and is able to come up with some kind of community licensing scheme that will make projects like ours viable.

Siemens SIS

One of our team works for Siemens SIS, and the Siemens name is one of the factors that got us an entry into Demo Jam – there’s nothing like having a big-name customer reference on the entry. More recently, Siemens SIS have been a really useful sounding board for discussing such things as cloud-hosted SAP NetWeaver and some of the large-enterprise-scale business scenarios for ESME.

Twitter

Last on the list, but reallt the first: Twitter is really where this all began. The core team behind ESME started off as a Twitter-based network of people from the SAP community, and we still regularly use Twitter alongside ESME. We do not compete with Twitter at all – in fact we are completely complementary. Twitter is the PSTN, we are the PBX – or to translate that from telecomms acronyms, Twitter runs a public, accessible-to-all communications service, whereas we focus on running within and between the boundaries of companies. There are overlaps in functionality, but a completely different emphasis on features.

Many of the people and companies where ESME could be useful may not be familiar with the notion of microsharing. They’ll maybe have heard about some of the cool things happening on the web like Twitter, Plurk, Pownce and Jaiku but may not be sure what they mean. Microsharing is about making connections between people you already know and discovering those you don’t in an environment that allows you to easily find the information you need that helps you get things done.That’s the start. There is much, much more but that’s a good use case to be mulling over.

Even those that have will be concerned about security issues. As we make ready for showing ESME to the world, the security issue has been something that we have been noodling around. This article from ReadWriteWeb puts it into perspective and this extract makes clear the nature of the problem.

Enabling secure, fine-grained communication across the firewall. This is the big issue for enterprises. Not many vendors do this right yet. Today we see too much binary “you are either inside or outside”. The winners will enable security in a much more fine-grained way.

Unfortunately, there is one section where the author misses the mark by a country mile:

The vendors who really get it, who are driving this include Wordpress, Google and 37 Signals. The losers in this game will be Oracle, SAP and lots of other traditional enterprise software vendors. The incumbents understand the problem and have plenty of smart developers and they have the capital to buy any of the start-ups. But they face the classic “innovator’s dilemma”. Any serious move in this direction will hurt their current cash cow, validate the start-ups and alienate their allies in the internal IT departments.

I find these kind of sweeping statements disingenuous. I don’t care how much the writer thinks they ‘know.’ There is no substitute for a reality check. In a previous article, I referenced Thomas Vander Wal’s view on the UI side of things and in yet another, Mike Gotta  talks about Oracle and SAP as dark horses. I’m not going to say too much but I do know SAP gets this far better than people give it credit for. The business model issue is real but some of us on the ESME team think we know how that can be solved. Oh yes – and one thing the big players understand very well: building robust applications at scale. That’s a huge challenge for any other player, especially when it comes to integrating the solutions. That’s where ESME is going to score a slam dunk. From day one, we made it clear that having hooks to NetWeaver and an ABAP client would be high on our agenda. We’ve done one and we’re hot on the other.

Image credit: ReadWriteWeb

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This from Thomas Vander Wal , the person who coined the term ‘folksonomies’ gives credence to the general ideas behind ESME:

As has always been the case large enterprise systems are worked around through the use of smaller and more nimble solutions that augment the existing tools. Even in Dan’s [Rosenberg, SAP] incredible demo I saw gaps for these tools. The quick tools that can fill these gaps are blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, tagging, Twitter type sharing, Veodia type video sharing, instant messaging, etc. There are many avenues to quickly capture information and understanding and share it. These tools get out of the way and allow what is in someone’s head to get digitized and later structured by the individual themselves or other people whom have had the information shared with them in a community space. This turns into flows through streams that can be put into many contexts and needs as well as reused as needed.

The key to making these tools truly useful comes in the integrations that can be offered. It’s not enough that such tools have a purpose, they need embedding into the processes people are engaged in so that the all important traceability and auditability can be applied.

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Flattering commentary from no less than CapGemini’s Andy Mulholland. I first met Andy way back when, maybe 10 years ago in London. He’s always been a great thinker, leader and conversationalist. Talk about how time flies:

First up is SAP, who deservedly, or not, are often thought of as being pretty staid, but are right out there in the forefront of Micro Blogging with Twitter. Actually, SAP are doing pretty well in the use of ‘interactive’ technologies to support their customers, partners and their own staff, and have brought into their in-house team some hot expertise from some well known Web 2.0 leaders. My SAP colleagues are active in this for the simple reason that they tell me it works for them in making ‘sharing’ of information, expertise, etc easier. However Twitter is a long way further on from the now fairly mature use of the basic capabilities that ‘Wiki’ and ‘Blog’ based collaboration provides so to find ESME, Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment, a behind the Firewall version of Twitter running on Netweaver was pretty interesting.

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I posted this at SDN. It is worth reproducing here: This is an edited version where the comments from some team members have been moved to their respective inidividual pages

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Any project leader will tell you that team selection is vital to success. Mixing the right skills, motivation and personalities requires a careful assessment of the people to include and the roles they might take. Not on ESME.

This is a self-selecting group of people, loosely tied by the SAP Community. Each person who has contributed chose to get involved and commit time to a project that presents special challenges. A recipe for disaster, especially when some members didn’t know each other before ESME kicked off. In my case I’ve only met one of the team in the real world. But no.

As this story explains, in the right circumstances and conditions, it is perfectly possible to assemble a working unit that is able to deliver. Key ingredients:

I sense that if the community is large enough, you’ll always find groups who are willing to push the boundaries of innovation and invention. The fact SDN and Twitter have brought this group together in a discoverable context is more than serendipitous, more than coincidental. It is more than vaguely knowing, learning to trust and having a deeply felt mutual respect for one another. It is because the community exists for EVERYONE’s common good and provides the environment for EVERYONE to get something positive out of their involvement.

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