Enhancing Customer Value Through a Collaborative Shared Source Infrastructure

Collaborative Communities illuminates an emerging pattern of business development fundamental to success in the networked economy. Customers are increasingly expecting to collaborate in the development of personalized goods, services, and information. The problem, quite simply, is that the business structures that prevail in our economy are not designed to fulfill the needs and wants of knowledgeable and powerful customers. The issue is to create information systems that provide the flexibility that's needed to model processes on the fly.

So Jcorporate is about creating the software products to make collaboration possible for across the enterprise. Jcorporate uses is own collaborative products to create an shared source infrastructure for networking its customers and and support staff. Our collaborative Community illustrates this new business pattern – the seamless alliance of businesses best able to profitably satisfy the shared set of needs and wants of a virtual customer community.

On the Jcorporate site not only do our customers actively collaborate on task lists for new product features, and communicate with each other on their issues via the forums, but they also participate in development. The collaborative process also builds the FAQ and Helpdesk knowledgebase. Additionally Premium Support customers and contributors can checkout and update documents/code from the site; as well as contribute new material to the site. At the center of this collaborative infrastructure is our content management solution that lets used collaborate on documents; and facilitates secure content with context sensitive forums, tasks, news and other collaborative functions.

Making Cents of Open Source

Open source has gained tremendous momentum. The open source movement, with its paradigm shift and its appeal, is adding a jolt of excitement to what was thought to be an established and well-understood industry. It allows products of a quality and flexibility never before seen to be produced, created by no one and everyone, using the world as a QA division. Now, many companies are basing their products on projects whose source code is given away for free! The developers who actually work to create the products benefit by collaborately working with other developers on source code to meet their internal company needs.

Open source technology has become a force to be reckoned with. Tools like BIND and Sendmail are the backbone of the Web, while the Apache Web server owns their market and the Linux operating system is gaining market share every day. Open source application frameworks, like Jcorporate's Expresso, are competing with entrenched proprietary vendors and these vendors are feeling threatened. Witness Microsoft officials' recent disparagements of open source development while IBM has chosen to embrace open source, pledging a $1 billion investment in Linux. These technology titans have good reason to feel nervous: open source software has the most rigorous quality assurance process on earth and is supported by thousands of developers.

The open source momentum reflects both increased use of open source in high-profile applications and the maturity of significant open source applications. Because open source is fundamentally about sharing best practices and building on existing work, it is a great foundation enabling enterprises to take advantage of the web technology revolution. In fact, most open source software was developed because, and in support, of the open standards that make the Internet and surrounding technologies so compelling.

In open source development, code is freely available, so those who know how to modify and extend code are able to fix bugs and add features without having to depend on a software company to do it "in their next release." This means that programs can be rapidly extended and modified to fit the needs of the developer. In order for this process to work effectively, however, the source code must be freely available. This works, and the developers are happy because they are getting the freedom to make the application work the way they need it to work.

Shared Source Code Solution

Customers have been at the mercy of traditional software companies that provide only proprietary code — taking flexibility and control out of the customers' hands. Most software companies today deliver their proprietary software to their customers as object code, that is, in a form that only computers can understand. Therefore, customers are totally dependent on the software company for changes, extensions, or repairs no matter how trivial or fundamental. If a customer needs a change to the software that is critical to their business, their only choice is to request that the software provider make the change and hope for the best.

Returning flexibility and control to the customer means that the customer has access to the actual source code when they procure a software product.By having access to the source code, customers have the software in a form that is readable, understandable, and modifiable, by any skilled software engineer. This gives the customer ultimate flexibility and control over their own destiny. If in the middle of a project using Jcorporate software the customer finds that he needs a change or enhancement, he can either request that Jcorporate make the change, make the change himself, or enlist the help of a third party. There is no dependency on a long decision making cycle within the software company, there is no dependency on a long development and release cycle (at Jcorporate our software release cycles are 90-100 days). The customer can make the change and the project proceeds.

Many industry experts believe open source movement is starting to have a dramatic effect on the conventional software development organizations within the Information Technology (IT) departments of large global organizations.The driving force behind this belief is that as developers, via the web, access, modify, and redistribute the source code for a software project, it can evolve at an incredible pace when compared to conventional proprietary software development. The quality of the code can improve through the efforts of a larger pool of motivated talent. Enhancements can be more rapidly incorporated and redeployed to the user community, resulting in a significant reduction in overhead costs. The feedback loop between user requirements and programmer delivery is then dramatically shortened for faster response to today's accelerated time-to-market imperative. These collaborative benefits are also possible in non-open source projects, as long as the source code and collaborative environment are available to developers. In the following paragraphs we discuss what these benefits are:

Collaborative Environment

Jcorporate uses it own commercial software to provide the infrastructure for enabling the rapidly growing number of community collaboration of companies, developers, partners and users of shared source software.  Our infrastructure enables our customers to collaborate with our support and development staff; as well as other customers.  From questions asked and answers, we create a knowledge base of information for other users to utlilize. Our unique global collaborative infrastructure is built using of Web-based technologies and services. This infrastructure encourages sharing of information; facilitating ideas and discussion groups; it also offers support; as well as provides a mechanism to initiate new projects proposed by developers or organizations. This exciting model enables the creation of dynamic ideas and development. Here are some of the resources available to each product:

• Live Demo: runs web application onsite. Managed by Jcorporate's Expresso' target="_blank">eContent product. And is used to send event notifications to site managers when the demo is run; and sends a sales message to users the first time they access the demo to encourage them to buy premium support and the product.
• News: dynamically generated and maintained using Jcorporate's eHelpDesk component.
• Source code: including CVS. Download managed and number of downloads tracked onsite using Expresso Framework.
• Documentation: Using Expresso' target="_blank">eContent allows premium support and contributing members to collaborate on documents and add new material
• FAQs: Site uses Jcorporate eFAQ product.
• Task List: dynamically generated and maintained using Jcorporate's eHelpDesk component.
• Discussion Forum and Listserv: using Jcoporate's eForum component. eForum also provides automated Notification of project updates to users to entice them back to the site.
• Known Bugs Lists: dynamically generated and maintained using Jcorporate's eHelpDesk component.
• Online HelpDesk: Premium support and contributing members have access to Jcorporate's eHelpDesk component directly.

These resources put control in the community and customers - to learn from the project and to collaborate with others to enhance the project over time.

Network Economics

Focus is Now on Shared Standards

Foundation of Java Standards

Community Based Support

Open Source Expresso Framework

Jcorporate Shared Source Model

• The Expresso application development framework infrastructure is free to customers so that they can quickly build application components
• Commercial software applications are also provided to complement the free software infrastructure. These products are provided at an affordable price often a tenth of competitor object code solutions in order to develop strong software communities that furthers the software development collaborative efforts.
• All software is provided with source code so that customers have the flexibility and control to modify all products. Customers can focus their resources on building solutions that add value to their business.
• A collaborative online environment is provided to faciliate community collaboration globally.

So what are are Jcorporate's commercial solutions? Our commercial products are collaboratively focused products and include eContent, eHelpDesk and eFAQ. These products are designed to enable creating a knowledge base when used with our open source eForum. eContent is our flagship commercial product, and is a fully featured content management system (CMS) with functionality for content management, workflow, permissioning, and collaboration. The content management system (CMS) offers the essential tools to publish content online and provides complex functionality to meet the needs of mid-sized and larger corporations. eContent is the first content management solution to offer integration to collaborative functions in the user interface for resource context sensitive task lists, discussion forums and so on. It's a winning proposition for everyone who is looking at the Web as a solution for uniting people, content and processes

One of the primary benefits of our commercial products, over other solutions, is that they are based on the Expresso open source project. Expresso Expresso Framework has over 60,000 downloads and about 3700 developers on it's listserv - and brings tremendous benefits to eContent and our other commercial solutions - that other commercial companies cannot offer. It has the benefit of a large user base - and the benefit of several years collaboration globally. Both Expresso and eContent have been in development since 1996.

There is a major new release of eContent due out shortly with an improved default user interface, Struts integration, and integration to collaborative functions the user interface for resource context sensitive task lists, discussion forums and so on. We will be the first content management solution to offer context sensitive colllaborative functions. This latter feature is about:

Information + Human Intelligence (collaboration) = Knowledge Management.

Information technology (IT) is essential but insufficient to achieve information superiority. The full utilization of an entity's knowledge base, coupled with the potential of individual skills, competencies, thoughts, innovations and ideas will enable a company to compete more effectively in the future.

i.e. an example of this benefit is often when a person leaves a company a lot of knowledge leaves with that person. But by utilizing collaborative tools such as a discussion form, helpdesk, faq, integrated with content management, much more knowledge is retained for new people to utilize. Another example is major corporations are using such systems to re-evaluate how decisions are being made - and using the knowledgebase to improve decision making.

Conclusion