I had the pleasure of meeting with Jon Herlocker and John Forbes this morning from Smart Desktop.  Smart Desktop is part of Pi Corporation, the mysterious ‘personal information management’ company EMC acquired in March of this year.  Pi is run by Paul Maritz, previously of Microsoft’s platform team and member of the Microsoft Executive Committee.

Pi, which is run as an ‘EMC Company’ (much like VMWare), has not yet released a product and has been in stealth mode for most of its existence.  Maritz now oversees Pi and is president and general manager of EMC’s new Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division.  Smart Desktop, which has a product currently in closed beta, is led by Herlocker (CTO) and Forbes (President).

Seems like a lot of executive management without much product yet, doesn’t it??  It certainly speaks to a grander vision, though what this vision includes from a larger EMC perspective is still under wraps.

But I did get a demo this morning from Smart Desktop and, grander visions aside, it’s pretty cool.

Smart Desktop is a desktop tool that aims to improve an individual’s access to information stored on the desktop or accessed from the desktop (i.e., Web pages) by grouping it into ‘projects’.  This takes into account whatever organizational structure an individual has on the desktop in Outlook or Windows Explorer and whatever ‘activity stream’ is created as a user works.  It makes recommendations as to what project content should be assigned to based on topics, email meta data, context and so forth.

The end result is that it is possible to view all content from multiple apps (Office, emails etc.) related to a project at the same time in one place. It’s tied nicely into Outlook so users can create new projects when an email comes in and all subsequent emails and documents deemed to be related to this project will be tagged by Smart Desktop.  Smart Desktop recommends content to the user based on current activity and can also be used to view content activity via a timeline – so you could look at all content (documents, emails, web pages) you accessed during a particular meeting, for example.

There’s clearly a larger potential opportunity for this technology, which ultimately tracks the activity and information consumption of users on the desktop.  It could be used to discover expertise or look at the usefulness of individual applications, though there are of course privacy concerns to be managed differently in various geographies.

I could hypothesize about how this all fits into EMC’s cloud computing vision, but won’t go too far down that road at this point.  It’s not hard to imagine though how this technology, which is currently slated to be deployed in a desktop environment (there is also meant to be a server-based product), could translate to different types of delivery models.

Some public disclosure finally about where EMC is headed in social software & collaboration from EMC followers Marko Sillanpaa and Laurence Hart both currently attending this week’s EMC World in Vegas.

EMC Documentum Will Not Go Quietly Into that Dark Night

“Finally a UI that is as clean and simple as Alfresco and SharePoint and a bonus that it’s as sexy as an iPhone.”

EMC World 2008: Introduction to EMC’s Next-Generation Knowledge Worker Client

“The vision: – Web 2.0 Client - Information Intelligence - Anywhere Access -Web 2.0 Platform”

It’s been a long week in the Reidy household…coughing, pink eye…anyone with little kids knows the drill. I’m finally catching up on some feed reading and there’s been some interesting dialogue this week about SharePoint. Is it possible to post about content management or social software these days without involving SharePoint?

• Collaborative Thinking: Microsoft Continues To Fill SharePoint Social Gaps

  Be sure the read all the comments on this one.

• SharePoint altering ECM landscape, survey says – Network World

  Newsflash!!

• eRoom Users Call to Action « Big Men On Content

  A worthwhile thread for anyone with an eye on EMC’s plans in the collaboration market – note the comment by EMC’s Lance Shaw.

I’ve gathered all my current thinking on potential M&A in enterprise search in a SectorIQ that we published earlier this week to our customers. In it, I look at four main potential targets plus a few other small ones and look at a few of the likely acquirers. (This is the way we write all our Sector IQs, btw and they’re a great way of getting a quick grasp on what might be coming down the pike in any particular sector of the IT industry)

Fortunately those of you that are not our customers (yet!) are able to read it via our arrangement with the New York Times DealBook section. Click here to see the NY Times posting or go here to go straight to the report – and while you’re there, sign up for a trial of our M&A KnowledgeBase, where we’ve been collecting details of every IT, internet and telecoms deal since the start of 2002!

Finally, a quick word about the headline. We like to have some fun here at 451 with these things and while I appreciate that this one might have been pushing things a little in terms of clearly explaining what the report was about, when else would I be able to use it?