Reminder: Free Webinar Next Week by Tony Byrne of CMS Watch: Enterprise Social Software: Ready for Prime Time?

Next Thursday, the IT Leadership Forum in association with Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch, will present a one-hour long web seminar on Thursday, August 13th from 2:00 - 3:00 PM EDT. Here's a brief description of that web seminar.

You can now find numerous case studies of successful departmental implementations of various social software technologies, such as wikis, blogs, forums, tags, micro-blogs, and so forth. However, extending those projects to enterprise-wide initiatives gets trickier.

Noted independent analyst and evaluation firm CMS Watch will explain how the challenge in enterprise deployments stems partly from immature technology. Many social computing tools – even from large, established vendors – lack key functionality. But the rest of the challenge lies in organizational factors, including common barriers to adoption.

This seminar will assess today’s social software and collaboration marketplace and offer concrete advice about how to select the right tool for your circumstances. It will also share best practices in enterprise deployment and adoption of social technology.

What you will learn by attending:
- Key success factors for enterprise-wide social software roll-outs
- How the enterprise social software marketplace breaks down into six categories
- Strengths and weaknesses of some of the major vendors
- How to pick the right tools for your enterprise
- What the future holds for 2010

Featured Speaker
Tony Byrne, Founder, CMS Watch

Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/345059881
Mention Priority code G1M2114W1BLOG

iPod Touch Gaining Enterprise Credibility

When the iPhone first came out, there was a sudden rush of executives that were trying to justify the use of this phone in the enterprise. Now, according to this post on the Burton Group Blog the iPod Touch might be an even bigger story than the iPhone. The iPod Touch already supports the Safari web browser and enterprise capabilities like support for virtual private networks (L2TP/IPSEC, Cisco IPSec, and PPTP). These latest numbers from the AdMob report show how traffic from the iPod Touch is just exploding!

• Traffic from iPod Touch in the US and UK was “2.7 and 3.2 times higher” the week after Christmas than the week before.
• “The iPod Touch is now the #2 device in the AdMob network with a 4.7% share.” The #1 device is the iPhone with a 10.8% share.

These numbers show us that the Touch might someday surpass the iPhone itself. For enterprise purposes, I want to see how well the Touch will compete with Blackberry’s release of its touch screen model, the Storm.

Barclaycard hails success of adverts across MSN portals

More than 4.6m unique users visited a Barclaycard website as part of a major push via Microsoft Advertising's first 'two-screen' takeover campaign.Barclaycard ran a major campaign to promote its contactless payment service for two weeks in November, using Microsoft Advertising's MSN Live fixed and mobile portals.The campaign was the first home page takeover across both portals and generated strong results for the brand. The site attracted 4.6m unique users and 102,000 played the related...

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Shaking Things up With Alfresco Enterprise 3.0

Paula Rooney writes in this post on ZDNet that Alfresco will be releasing a major upgrade to its current enterprise content management system, Alfresco Enterprise 3.0, which will have many new collaboration features and services.

It is due to be released on Halloween, and it will feature Share which is a collaborative content solution that makes capturing, sharing, and accessing information across virtual teams much simpler. It will also offer support for CMIS specification as well as the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Protocol. It will be interesting to see how the enterprise will respond to Alfresco’s latest offering

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?

Why does Zoho Compete with Google?

The question of why and how Zoho competes with Google has been asked many times across this industry. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu details why Zoho competes with Google in his latest post at the Zoho Blog.

Sridhar includes an excel sheet in his post that lists revenue per employee and profit per employee between companies like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Adobe, Google, Yahoo, and eBay to name a few. What this sheet helps show is that all companies fall short of Google’s revenue/profit per employee metrics. Sridhar believes that even though Google has a huge market in the technologies sector, there’s no rational business incentive for Google to actively pursue the business/IT software category. Zoho already has an array of software applications like Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho CRM , Zoho People , and Zoho Mail just to name a few, it will be interesting to see what steps Google might take in the future to involve itself more heavily in the business software market.

What’s your take on it?

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?

Enterprise is Moving Towards Cloud Computing

With enterprise organizations moving into cloud computing more frequently, Elastra, a startup company that hosts and runs software entirely on the internet, has decided to jump on this opportunity. This latest article in eWeek discusses how customers can save money by renting the computing power necessary to run applications, instead of purchasing their own hardware and software needed.

Kirill Sheynkman, Elastra's founder and CEO mentions:

"Enterprises are moving into the cloud and understand its financial value, but they need software that lets them deploy and manage applications that meet complex requirements."

This is why Kirill has launched the Elastra Cloud Server which allows customers to deploy applications across the internet by simply pointing and clicking their mouse. The startup is being funded both by Amazon.com and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners for a sum of $12 million. Salesforce.com, Yahoo, and Google are among some companies that already run enterprise applications for other organizations. Could Amazon reign on top with its newest cloud computing project?

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?

Social Networking: Is the Enterprise Truly Ready?

Nowadays, we constantly hear praise about how social networking can boost productivity and collaboration within an organization, but Barb Moshe gives another perspective in his latest post on CMS Wire.

Barb points out that most employees still do not truly understand what Enterprise 2.0 really is. Most employees view social networking simply as “cool technology”, but they are still confused on how business value can be derived from social software. Towards the end of his post he mentions, “Organizations do recognize that they need some way to share knowledge internally.” Even though companies understand this need, they are still hesitant before venturing into adopting web 2.0 apps. So I ask again, is the enterprise truly ready?

Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal Officially Off

With Microsoft officially receding their offer to buy Yahoo! this week, Google is now in a prime position to overtake the enterprise software market within a few years, according to this recent news article at EWeek.

Even though Google is a small player now, the shift in the software business is moving towards “in the clouds” and SAAS. This primes Google to be a front runner within five years of this new, emerging way to operate. Inevitably, Microsoft is now going to have to catch up with Google, and find a way to launch themselves ahead of the already innovation-heavy giant.

With the failure of Vista, Microsoft needs to find a way to move their current profit equation into something that is more low-margin and which is supported by selling a high volume of products. The reason Yahoo! was so appealing was the fact that they had invested and developed cloud computing. Now, Microsoft must find a way to create this internally.

At Search Engine Land Danny Sullivan thinks that Microsoft has spent the past few years chasing after Google in terms of internet search, while Google has been slowly inching in on enterprise software, and now Yahoo is left with running ads of its chief competitor on its website.

So what’s next for both companies? One thing is for sure, Yahoo! is still going to struggle to keep up with Google. And Microsoft needs to find a way to adapt to the oncoming evolution of software in the clouds.

Enterprise 2.0 a growing business

In an study released at Forrester this week, they say the Web 2.0 business is growing so rapidly, it’ll be worth $4.6 billion by 2013. Details of the report can be found here at Read Write Web.

What’s included in this growing industry? Some of the key parts are social networks, mashups and RSS feeds. They also point out the blogs are not a part of enterprise 2.0. Neither is Facebook, Netvibes or Twitter. Why? These are ad supported. So, this growing is going to come from the money companies spend on web 2.0 tools such as Net Vibes, Microsoft and IBM. Also included in this Enterprise 2.0 category is tools that allow companies to collaborate on certain projects.

Mash Ups in the Enterprise: Serena Software making them happen

As we all know, Serena Software is one of the leaders when it comes to pushing out Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into the world.

Serena Software’s latest venture, according to EWeek, is that they are now releasing software with Creative Commons. This nonprofit organization’s aim is to push software out into the work place and having it open source so everyone can modify it to the different needs of the company. Their standpoint is that as long as the software is reworked, the original still has value and is worth the same amount of money. All of this between the two companies free of cost. They hope to set up an online community that encourages people to share their solutions to the problems in their business.

Serena Software wants to see innovation throughout a company, and this is why their mashups are free and open to anyone who wants to use or modify them. This cuts out time on the IT side, and users can modify the software to do exactly what they need. This way, productivity can be increased as well since the models can be adapted by the users and there is no middle man creating the product. Serena software looks to release 20 mashups with in the next two months. And after innovation happens from users modifying the software, who knows how many mashups those will turn into.

Many companies have already seen success with mashups. In this Business Week article, Société Générale shares that the use of mashups in their business has helped the time gap between California and France.

So, in mid-October, he brought in software company ActiveGrid, which added a host of tools, from Yahoo! (YHOO) news feeds to Google (GOOG) Maps to AltaVista's Babel Fish for on-the-fly English-French translation. Best of all, the upgrade took all of three days, compared with the three months it took to build the application at the outset. "It's all the applications I need, but simplified," Hababou says.

Société Générale as well as other organizations (E*Trade, Siemens, JDS Uniphase, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Realogy) have taken advantage of these mashups are quickly built and inexpensive.

Are you willing to share the mashups that are developed in your company? Or have you had a mashup that’s had great influence on your company? If so, what were they?