Spam Kama 2.02 + Me = Removed Comments + Spam emails

I was trying to be very smart tonight, and failed.  When I upgraded to WordPress 2 I decided to try out SpamKama 2.  The installation process went like a dream over the weekend and it has been humming nicely in the background until I decided to modify things.  I thought it would be good to go back and run my old comments through the plugins to give them a Kama rating.  Not until I have done this to about 200 comments did I realise that Spam Kama was marking them as Spam!

I am now going through and Recovering them 😦

I have also found what seems to be a bug with the recover process in Spam Kama, you can only recover a single comment at a time.  Very frustrating when you have 200 to do.  It also seems to notify the blog poster that their comment has been accepted.

Therefore I have spent the last two hours trying to recover my comments, and spam all of my readers.

Sorry!

On a positive I think I have all the comments back now, I may just not have any readers.

Wiring the web and organisations

Following the recent posts on RSS, Web 2.0 and the impact on HR vendors I was listening to the Gillmor Gang talk with Ray Ozzie CTO of Microsoft on the Live Clipboard and it got me thinking.

Live Clipboard allows you to copy and paste structured data to and from a web site or your PC. If you are like me your immediate reaction is huh? But after thinking it through for a few minutes I started to understand what he was getting at. Take a look at the example site that has been created to show how you can copy & paste contact data with a single click. Take a look at the screencasts to get an even better understanding of what is going on. Live clipboard allows us to extend the whole concept of a mashup even further to mesh applications together.

The example that really got me excited was the publishing of contact information between sites. It also showed me that was I naive to suggest using HR-XML for ESS in a comment on Thomas’s site?  It also shows how fast things are moving. Imagine you HR/Payroll system being able to receive a feed of your contact information, no more ESS. Using a service like SKIP you could store a single version of your contact details and then publish them to all manner of services, including your company HR/Payroll system.  How does it (or should it) work with Mendocino?

Workflow was touched on briefly in the podcast. Maybe this Live Clipboard approach will provide a more open workflow framework for interoperability?  Not sure but anything is good if it allows business workflows to cross functional and organisational boundaries, workflow is the piping that holds business together.

Double Dubs has as always provided us a great perspective on the conversation:-

When we talk about self service and HR portals, what I really care about is not pushing out content, but increasing transaction volumes. Sure content is important.

I kind of see RSS, OMPL, LiveClipboard and HR-XML as providing a method of enabling these transactions.  Transactions are in some respects just content, admittedly content between systems.  Where things get a little complex is in the actual implementation.  Big companies tend to implement big systems, with big budgets and long delivery times.  How long will this process be accepted by businesses when they are seeing organisations like Flickr and Google releasing new features for consumer tools on a monthly basis?  Michael Cote asks a similar question based on a BEA analyst conference.  How easy will it be for us to implement all of these great new things?  Will there be a 2 year wait for the IT department to complete the project? Take a read of Michael Cote’s vision of LinkedIn as Platform.

So many different options and opportunities for vendors and organisations.

On a related note Ian Black, MD of SAP Australia wrote in December about composite applications, essentially the same thing.

HR in the New World

Kris Robinson serial blogger, mom, HR professional has created a new blog on HRBlogs.org called HR in the New World, in her second post she describes what HR in the New World is all about. To quote:-

I’m running an HR department that is living with and acting on such notions as transparency, collaboration, and individual self-empowerment. …. I must understand what true innovation looks like and how to create an environment that enables it

Read the rest.

When will HR catch onto the wave?

A few days ago (16 to be exact) Thomas Otter (a solution architect at SAP) posted on Enterprise RSS, web 2.0 and HR, he also skimmed the social web and it’s potential in the enterprise space. It is fantastic that these concepts are being picked up by more and more people.

However I kind of disagree with that the niche providers not being able to move to the new world. While the current band of niche providers may not move new entrants are more likely to get a jump on SAP and Oracle in the space. Small niche players can build and deploy point solutions to the SME market place rapidly, getting an enterprise solution based on an ERP toolset is a big undertaking. However “joe average HR” will not be ready to jump until SAP, Oracle and prodominantly Microsoft enter the market as then technologies will not have hit mainstream, this is 2 – 3 years away just look at the Gartner hype cycles.

A couple of points we need to consider when looking at HR and these new social media tools. We are moving into a world of “mashups”, where open APIs, scripts and open standards (RSS, OPML , SSE etc) are allowing people with fairly limited technical skills to create tools that we only dreamt about a few years ago. This change is going to fundamentally impact how HR delivers services to employees, employees deliver services to employers, and how employees deliver services to each other.

Let’s look at OPML to delivery training content as required, or replacing your ATS with Google. Ok neither are 100% possible today but every month we get closer to being able to create toolsets like these using a “mashup” of services from a variety of vendors. If HRIS vendors really caught on and implemented HR-XML as Chuck Allen has been talking about for the last 6 years and then made a set of open APIs things would really begin to rock. What about Google Maps integrated with job board feeds to show where jobs are located? Indeed has done something like this with their Job Trends, but lets go bigger. Or a basic performance/360 review tool built on SSE allowing managers, employees and peers to participate in the review process.

Over the last couple of years SAP has really begun to open up. The NetWeaver platform is providing companies with a great foundation for many things. SDN has examples every day on how to open up SAP and connect it to different bits of the enterprise, I have spoken before about SAP and PHP. There are talks within SDN of enterprise RSS readers and other types of tools that will enable more content sharing within the enterprise.

For a real vision of what the world holds have a read of the whitepaper pointed to by Thomas’s post.

Vendors get cracking and open your systems more.