A Recent Post from the JackBe Blog

Any honest 'expert' (if there can be such a thing on this topic) would probably admit that we are less-than-good for many reasons. I'd like to add an often-overlooked candidate to the list. It’s something I call the 'stalactite effect'. We all know what stalactites are, right? Those long pointy things that hang from the roofs of caves, formed as calcium carbonate-laden water drips over them. On any given day, you'd see no change. But given enough time they can become massive. (The biggest in the world is thought to be a 27-foot monster in the Jeita Grotto in Lebanon.)

In the enterprise, your water drops are your documents, like budget spreadsheets and project plans. Any one document/drop isn't likely to be a huge loss information-wise. But take what you create in a year, add what your nearest cube-mate creates in a year, maybe what the other 17 analysts in your department create in a year and you start to see wonderful stalactite of information. And it's all completely inaccessible to anyone but you. Enterprises like this literally exist in a data cave with lots of drip, drip, drip.

Is the stalactite problem something we just gotta learn to live with? Certainly not! Some very interesting approaches to these ‘micro-silos’ have emerged recently. For instance the Excel Services in the upcoming Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 allow you to use and publish Microsoft Excel client workbooks on the SharePoint Server. And on top of this they’re adding features that provide multiple users with the ability to edit any workbook simultaneously; a ‘Slicer’ feature that is a new type of interactive GUI filter; and a REST API that is a client server software architecture/protocol that defines workbook and how to access them.

Of course, Enterprise Mashups can also help. JackBe has tied spreadsheets directly to our enterprise mashup server through our Excel Connector and Server API. A user can make a workbook into a mashable service right from the spreadsheet itself. The user can also refresh the mashable service at any time. And the reverse is also true, where a user can create a workbook that is directly based upon a live mashups. This is a great roundtrip solution. Want to see it in action? Check out the recording of our 'Mashing Microsoft' webcast. During the webcast we mashed Excel (as well as Project files and a few other things) in real-world scenarios like project management and financial analysis.

This approach to the stalactite problem can be perfect if an organization is losing valuable data on a drip-by-drip document-by-document basis. The document owner contributes the document into the ‘mashup cloud’, tags it, describes it and sets all the right access controls on it. After all, who knows the spreadsheet better than the person who created it?

It’s time enterprises got out of the data cave.