Cisco Aids in Business to Business Collaboration with New Social Software

According to this article in CNN Money Cisco has recently introduced several product improvements to its already existing line of collaboration portfolio. It also announced its launch of two new markets - enterprise social software and hosted email. It's goal is to bring the collaborative power of communities to businesses.

Cisco TelePresence and Unified Communications allow for collaboration by delivering video, voice, and presence capabilities throughout the organization. It will be interesting to see the companies that will quickly follow suit.

CIOs should go primitive in communication

This recent post on CIO.com highlights that even though social media tools like Facebook, YouTube, twitter, email, technorati, and various other collaborative technology is popular now, it might not be the best choice for communication and messaging. Loraine Antrim mentioned that going "primitive" like a simple phone call or in-person meetings can give CIOs a strategic advantage for many critical situations.

Going "primitive" allows the CIO to engage in a more personal level. Here are some examples as detailed by the post when CIOs should go "primitive".

1. When body language can make a world of difference in your communication. At times a simple gesture or a shrug of your shoulder can really aid in communicating your point. Also, when the tone of voice is important CIOs might want to make a live phone call instead of tweeting or emailing.

2. When attempting to persuade or influence. Any type of persuasion is best done in person and in live delivery. Social media communication is best for expanding on data points.

5 Basic Reaons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail

Michael Krigsman recently posted on ZDNet that organizations can follow a simple guideline in order to avoid enterprise 2.0 failure. Here's a quick recap of his 5 points.

1.What’s in it for me’. Not just ‘What’s in it for us’ - Most failures occur at the initial planning phase where the typical business focus is on organization benefits and personal incentives. An example of this is how a sales rep would act in an online community as opposed to an engineer who would want to collaborate, learn, and share information.

2.Social software plays an important but limited role towards Enterprise 2.0 design - Another big stepping stone is premature technology selection. It's best to think of the performance objectives you're trying to affect and then deciding whether a best of breed solution is best of if you can stick with a general purpose platform.

3.Fix the True Break points in Your Organization - You must carefully think through inputs and outputs of enterprise 2.0 design before deploying anything.

4.Figure out the Optimal Ownership Structure - It can be quite confusing to figure out for this broad functional set in the enterprise. Do this instead, identify which benefits most closely support your performance objectives. This should help you figure out the right home for it in the enterprise.

5.There’s Metrics and then there’s Performance Goals - Explain to superiors that metrics for new media is different. You should measure your business based on conversations, engagement, affinity, frequency of sharing, and other such points.

Do you have any more reasons to add to this list?

Enterprise 2.0 - Efficient Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange

Oscar Berg from The Content Economy recently put up his slides from their seminar, Enterprise 2.0 - Efficient Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange. Take a couple of minutes to view them below.

Enterprise 2.0 - Efficient Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange

View more presentations from Acando Consulting.

What are your collaboration rules?

Brett Young recently posted his collaboration rules at his blog Collaboration Tech. I thought they were worth sharing:

1. Capture once.
2. Process once.
3. Resist printing.
4. Don't use email to collaborate, use it to communicate.
5. Send links, not attachments.
6. Store in a searchable, likable repository.
7. Be a sharer, not a hoarder.
8. Use real time communication, instead of voice mail or email, to reduce cycle time.

For an indepth look at these eight tips, read the blog here.

Cisco invests in Xobni

According to the New York Times, Xobni has received a $7 million of funding from Cisco. This is Cisco's latest venture in to Web 2.0 tools, following Jabber, Postpath, and WebEx.

Collaboration is a key focus of this investment, both between companies and the software that Cisco has been investing in.

“Cisco and Xobni actually share a very similar vision of using collaboration,” said Sandhya Venkatachalam, director of corporate development at Cisco. They both “center the experience around the people one wants to communicate with.”

Read more here.

Near-Time Updates for Enterprise 2.0

In a recent article from MarketWatch, they announced that Near-Time has made updates to their enterprise 2.0 hosted collaboration service. The focus of the update was to combine social networking, content, and collaboration technologies. As CEO of Near-Time, Reid Conrad, explained:

"With this update, we bring the most engaging aspects of social networking and knowledge discovery into what was already the most robust on-demand collaboration solution in the marketplace. Near-Time brings social context and content together in the most agile Enterprise 2.0 platform in the market.We enable customers to transcend silos of information and achieve seamless interaction, knowledge sharing and social discovery."

Enterprise 2.0: Is it about Groups or the Individual?

Michael Idinopulos’s latest post on Transparent Office compares two different responses about Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

One of the statements being compared is from Stowe Boyd’s post:

I disagree with the notion that Enterprise 2.0 is about groups not the individual. On the contrary: Web 2.0 is based on the person and personal relationships in networks, not group membership.

The 2nd post compared is from Michael Idinopulos himself:

Enterprise 2.0 posits the group as the primary unit of activity; email posits the individual

What’s your take on it? Is enterprise 2.0 about the group or the individual?

IBM is Bringing Business Networking Closer with Bluehouse

This post on ComputerWorld discusses how IBM has released Bluehouse, which merges social networking features with business collaboration tools. At first, Bluehouse will be free during the initial beta period, after testing has ends the SaaS product will be subject to subscription pricing, which has not been determined yet.

Like Facebook, Bluehouse will combined many collaboration tools such as instant messaging, document sharing, profiles, and tools to build business networking opportunities. One thing that will be different from Facebook is that Bluehouse has management features to help ensure privacy, and this is a feature that businesses have been looking for. Sean Poulley, vice president of IBM's online collaboration services seems to think that the current economic situation will encourage consumers to adopt SaaS with its subscription model. What are your thoughts?

Smart phone is now main focus at Nokia

Nokia recently decided to drop its work with enterprise email and work with partners such as Microsoft, Cisco, and IBM to focus on collaboration between smart phones and enterprise platforms. The plan was mapped out at EWeek.

Niklas Savander, Nokia's executive vice president for services and software, had this to say abou the new focus:

"Together with them, we will use our expertise in devices, as well as the combined channel footprint and customer base, to deliver a range of unbeatable end-to-end offerings for business."

Instant Messaging in the Enterprise: Is it Finally Here?

There has been some recent hype this past week about the Cisco’s latest purchase of Jabber, a tech startup that enables real-time text and VoIP communication over the internet.

This post on Telecommunications Industry News discusses how Cisco will be able to embed certain messaging features into its collaboration products such as the WebEx Conference system and Cisco Unified Communications. Instant messaging has long been banned by many corporate offices across the US, but could this new acquisition be the changing factor in the adoption of IM in the enterprise?

The Case for Collaboration

The latest post on ComputerWeekly.com makes the case that effective collaboration could have saved us from the mess that banking systems are at now. Financial institutions make an effort to analyze risk, and so why not use collaborative technology to aid in this process.

Integration of collaborative portals would given the right people access to the right knowledge, thus improving decision making within all parts of the enterprise. Ian White mentions that people should not ask when and what collaborative technology should be used for, but how can the features of the applications be used to improve the organization.

Wiggio: Group Collaboration Made Easier

Cnet gives a great review of Wiggio, a web-based collaboration site that was recently released on Monday. This interface was built to get rid of complications associated with group projects.

A big downfall in collaboration software and interfaces is the inoperability and difficult features that less tech savvy employees have a hard time learning. Wiggio’s features, blast test messages, free conference calls, email poll to a group, and asking questions of your choice are all simple and easy to use; thus, it eliminates the long learning process that more difficult applications have.

It will be interesting to see if Wiggio can capitalize on previous mistakes made by group collaboration applications and lead the pack.

Zoho Docs…At it again

Today I came across this post on eWeek which describes how Zoho is beating Google Apps to SaaS file management. Zoho is launching Zoho Docs, which unlike Google Apps, will be able to store files created in Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheets, and Zoho Show.

Zoho is making the productivity experience much easier for users since they can now use an online one-stop storage space for all of their files. Users will be able to edit, collaborate, share all of their files through Zoho Docs. Zoho is definitely giving Google a run for it’s money in Saas productivity apps.

Is Google Apps Enterprise Ready?

I came across this post on eWeek this morning which gathers insights from different analysts on the idea that is floating around with the recent infrastructure outages from Google Gmail and Google Apps. Does this mean that Google’s software is not yet dependable for the enterprise?

Melissa Webster, an analyst at IDC, mentions that corporate networks, and email systems have outages all the time. Abner Germanow, another analyst at IDC said that in the beginning companies are not too attached to apps, but as time goes by the level of reliability on the application increases as well. The real question lies: Is the application reliable enough to run a business on it? Can your business afford any downtime in case of outages?

Dana Gardner, founding analyst of InterArbor Solutions claims that organizations go through email outages internally regularly, it is just that users from web based apps have higher expectations than those who pay higher for internalized communication systems.

How has the recent outages of Google Apps affected the enterprise and cloud computing realm?

GE Understands Enterprise 2.0

Support Central is the heart of GE’s global business. It is available in 20 languages, has 25 million hits a day, supports over 50,000 communities and over 100,000 experts are on the site daily to manage information and answer questions. Oliver Marks takes an in depth look at their system and how it works in a recent post on Collaboration 2.0.

Using the new tools for Enterprise 2.0, GE has created a way to digitize their documents and internal processes. The complete system is protected by a firewall, but there is 30,000 external users who can log on to the site and access the Support Central system. GE hosts its own internal cloud to support this impressive enterprise system. In addition to all of the processes available to GE throughout the world, they also offer a way to make mashups at the click of a button and a professional networking system that provides a way to instantly find the experts. Also in the works is a program to collaborate on online shared documents.

Yahoo’s Zimbra Desktop Could be Google’s Top Competitor

I came across this post earlier today on TriAdeptDotCom which pointed out a couple of highlights from Zimbra’s new Collaboration Suite. Zimbra Desktop now offers a way to manage and search through email, even when offline and it also expands on services and mashups which it previously did not offer. It has the capability of showing one’s schedule when hovering over a date, and it even shows flight statuses when hovering over flight numbers. The Zimbra Desktop is downloadable and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users with access to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite.

Yahoo is seriously looking to take some of the spotlight away from Mircosoft and Google as it enters this space. Will the Yahoo Zimbra Collaboration Suite overtake these two giants?

Tips for Improving Collaboration Within the Enterprise

Peter Burris, a principle analyst for Forrester research reveals some useful tips in this article regarding Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace to foster collaboration. As he points out many businesses understand the need for these technologies in the new enterprise 2.0 workplace, but sill have little understanding of how to execute. Below are five tips that he recommends:

1. Trust matters: The key to collaborative applications is to keep providing information regarding the status of participants.
2. Encourage simple methods: Technology implementation is never automatic, but successfully applications of collaboration technologies inevitably start with a well-articulated set of simple objectives
3. Let change bubble up: The most successful principles for collaboration system design, implementation and operation have emerged from highly decentralized systems.
4. Intercept and guide: “Radical maintenance”, which involves overhauling a system without disrupting it, is a critical competence for any Web 2.0 technology specialist – and must be mastered by IT professionals.
5. Leave your systems open: An open approach affords greater flexibility in use and agility in implementation

Do you have any tips that could be added to this list?

Social Networks to Improve Your Company’s Bottom Line

Enterprise networking still receives a fair amount of skepticism in this day and age. Most companies fear that employees will waste time and that overall productivity will decrease. Despite major criticism, this latest article on eWeek discusses how Wachovia, the nation’s fourth largest bank, is launching an enterprise social networking site for its 110,000 workers.

The real value of enterprise networking shines the more it’s used. Wachovia envisions a knowledge management system where employees can not only build relationships across departments, but where they can easily collaborate, share ideas, and locate information. This will be done through blogs, an in-house encyclopedia and an intricate intranet made accessible through a Facebook-like service.

Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta, analyst at Burton Group mentions:

"Social networks improve the ability of people to do their work.”

Web 2.0 applications in the enterprise make it easy for employees to get together online and offline on projects. Workers can easily combine expertise from across departmental boundaries which were previously unattainable through a social enterprise. Traditional organizational charts and the nature of organizational hierarchies are changing with each growing day. Out with the old and in with the new.

Making business sense of unified communication

I stumbled upon this videocast from Rick Seeto, VP of Marketing for Nortel Asia, on Enterprise Innovation in which he discusses the fundamentals behind unified communication and how organizations can harness UC to reach their business goals. How does your company use the integration of business applications and protocols to aid collaboration within the enterprise? Take a couple of minutes to view the webcast and take in valuable insight from Rick Seeto.