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"Latest Synergy Research data shows Microsoft lapping at Cisco's heels in the overall collaboration market, and well ahead in the hosted/cloud segment. A couple of primary tussles characterize the collaboration decision today: Cisco vs. Microsoft, and cloud vs. premises. So it behooves us to ask, then: What impact might we expect Microsoft's big push into the cloud, a la Skype for Business and Office 365, to have on each of these critical enterprise decision points? Will Microsoft push ahead of Cisco as it makes cloud the center of its collaboration universe? And will its Skype for Business/Office 365/voice story make the cloud an easier choice for enterprise communications professionals trying to determine whether to ditch a premises installation? This is certainly one way to think about the latest collaboration market data from Synergy Research Group, released this week for first-quarter 2015. The Synergy research shows Microsoft trailing Cisco ever so slightly in the total collaboration market, but well ahead of its chief competitor in hosted/cloud collaboration, as displayed in the graphic below. "

Hey David! The horses have left the barn. Unlike the last great platform transition, the move to the Cloud involves moving billion and billions of existing data bits and documents. Much of this content (data + documents) is valuable "in-process" information vital to the current operations of legacy business systems. The last time there was a platform shift it was from the Mainframe-workstation era to the PC client-server era. Digital information was in its infancy. Today the volumes of digital business information is enormous. Meaning, the horses have already left the barn. The lock-in is set. Volumes of document content is locked into Microsoft Office applications, and can only be "worked" by either Microsoft Office, or Office 365. No business is going to move their systems to the Cloud and leve these billions of "in-process" documents behind. Another aspect to consider is the productivity equation which says that collaboration = the integration of communications and content (data + documents). ALL THREE must be integrated!!! Meaning if Microsoft apps have billions of documents locked up, an enterprise cannot make a decision based on best communications or data integration. They must choose Microsoft's Cloud where all THREE aspects can be integrated. This is the hook that has made Office 365 the most successful Cloud mover ever (85 million subscribers with an annual run rate of $13.5 billion - and all this after only two years in the marketplace) Quote: "The majority of IT decision-makers believe that vendor lock-in prevents their companies from maximizing the business value of public cloud. IT leadership often chooses not to move applications to the public cloud because they believe investing in just one cloud provider will hinder flexibility. Several studies reinforce this conclusion, stating that the overwhelming market dominance of public cloud players, like AWS, is negative for the industry. Even when using core services, such as Amazon Elast

"Enterprise communications is not a sector that typically generates palpable excitement. In the enterprise, the plumbing is never as exciting as the fixtures, and people spend more time noticing what communications enables than how it's delivered. It doesn't help that enterprise communications is often dismissed as slow to innovate, given its high capital costs to deploy new infrastructure and natural monopolies. But this bias is now outdated, largely because software has taken the lead in an industry that was previously hardware-centric. And communications is one of very few markets where startups can claim their share of a trillion-dollar market. Companies like Slack, Fuze (formerly ThinkingPhones) and Twilio have carved out large and growing businesses in new categories to improve the way enterprises communicate. One of the main drivers for this shift is because communications is moving from one of the most closed tech ecosystems to one of the most open. In the era of telecom monopolies and copper wires, only a few trusted wizards actually knew how to build and maintain complicated systems that needed to deliver 99.999 percent uptime. As infrastructure has moved to data, faster networks and the cloud, it has become much easier not only to provide basic connectivity, but also to layer on additional services."

"Shortly after the start of the millennium, Microsoft stated a goal to be the go-to enterprise platform for the data center. Many in the industry scoffed at the idea that Microsoft could dominate in a market traditionally led by Unix. Today, there are few enterprises that don't have a significant investment in Microsoft servers and infrastructure. Five years ago Microsoft launched Office 365 and, right now, we're seeing a parallel in their move to lead the cloud office application sector. Office and the enterprise applications that support Office 365-Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business - have become ubiquitous in the market. In July this year, it was reported that Office 365 is used daily by over 70 million enterprise users. However, Microsoft hasn't achieved this success without challenges. In 2013, many industry pundits saw Google Apps for Enterprise as the heir apparent for cloud and productivity, but things have changed significantly in the last three years. Under Satya Nadella's leadership, Microsoft has rebranded to support its 'mobile-first, cloud- first' go-to-market. The move to support Office on the Apple and Google platforms has strengthened its position in the market. Following this success, their next ambition is to enable customers and partners to move to Office 365. Earlier this year, Microsoft launched a number of initiatives to help clients consume Office 365 licenses more effectively. One such program is geared towards securing the license base by motivating renewals and preventing-churn versus a completely new sale. Once a client activates and consumes the licenses on Office 365, they receive ongoing upgrades, renewals, and new features as part of an evergreen service. Employees experience the latest across all their devices. This compares favorably to the historical process of waiting every three to four years for the on-premises Enterprise Agreement to be signed and subsequent refresh of a laptop with a new office applica

Good interview but i'm looking for ways to short Box.net.  I left lots of sticky notes and highlights on this page - all of which are under the Visual Document list since i didn't have a Cloud Productivity list going.  I spend quite a bit of time studying Box.net, DropBox and a ton of other early Cloud sync-share-store operations while doing research for the Sursen SurDocs product.  Also MS-Live/Office/SkyDrive and Google Docs Collaboration.  No one has a good bead on a Cloud Productivity Platform yet.  But Microsoft and Google clearly know what the game is.  They even have a plan on how to get there.  Box.net, on the other hand is totally clueless.  What are these investors thinking?

"In recent weeks, email and other collaboration and workflow tools are being re-imagined with new interfaces, social components, integrated video conferencing and easy swipes to dismiss messages. To wit: IBM launched  its Verse effort with a snazzy interface that combines, social, email, analytics and mobile nicely. Google floated Inbox , an app designed to help you manage your email better. For the most part, it's effective. Cisco's Project Squared is an app that runs on its collaboration cloud and integrates video conferencing, messaging and other tools. Facebook is pondering Facebook at Work with a news feed and doc sharing. We could go on, but the list of tech vendors trying to deliver a workflow leapfrog is long. And we're not even counting efforts by Workday, Salesforce and others to include collaboration with core business functions. WHAT'S HOT ON ZDNET Windows 10: You've got questions, I've got answers Windows 10 ​How to use Google's new My Account, the one-stop control center for all of its services Security Apple Watch or Android Wear? Neither. Why smartwatches aren't ready for prime time Mobility The tech of Computex 2015 in pictures Hardware Here's where all these efforts fall flat: These products are all pitched as magic bullets to simplify your work life, but in reality are just another item to sell or keep current customers in the fold. Another reality: These applications are trying to tackle human issues with collaboration and communications. Tech isn't going to fix those communication quirks or cure humans' need to try and keep up. We don't need another tool. We need less of them. We don't need another app to aggregate tech functions. We need to simplify tech functions starting with a bunch of check boxes marked delete. We don't need technology to help us communicate. We need to be taught how to communicate. And we sure don't need more messaging. We need to turn our damn phones off so maybe we can really get some work done or look up a

"The 2015 holiday season is upon us and the year is drawing to a close. Soon our thoughts will drift to our hopes and goals for 2016. For those who are dreaming of a new job at an up-and-coming young company, we've compiled this list to help. All of these companies specialize in making tech for work and business use, a $3.5 trillion worldwide market. All of them had spectacular years in 2015, by launching great new technology or getting a boatload of funding or landing big partnerships and generally setting themselves up for a successful 2016 and beyond."

"One of my key focuses when working with clients rolling out Office 365 starts from breaking down the complexity that is Office 365 into bite size easy to consume programs of work.  Usually there is a groan when I show them my Infographic as they aren't aware of the complexity that can come with rolling out Office 365 to users.  I didn't create the Infographic to scare them, I did it to get them to actually focus on the bigger picture and rich features that come with Office 365. Once they grasp this we can then focus on how they can collaborate, communicate etc and break it down into great user scenarios to digitally transform the way they work.  Just 'turning it on' won't work! " Great O365 Graphic demonstrating what the Microsoft Cloud Strategy is all about.

"Microsoft loves subscriptions. Moving a corporate customer from "transactional" purchases of Office -- the once-traditional practice of purchasing one-time, perpetual licenses that let workers use the suite as long as their firms want -- to Office 365 rent-not-buy subscriptions results in almost a doubling of revenue for Microsoft. "Over the lifetime, the increased reach, the increased frequency in this example, as well as some yield, adding some incremental services, results in a 1.8 times lifetime value of that user in the transition," said CFO Amy Hood in a meeting with Wall Street last week."

"Amazon's purchases of Twitch and Elemental Technologies appear to be only two parts of a bigger strategy at the company to move deeper into video services through acquisition. Last year, the marketplace and cloud computing giant also quietly acquired a startup out of San Francisco called Biba Systems, which develops and operates video messaging apps aimed at business users. Sources say that Amazon has been working on its own video messaging service, which it plans to unveil during its re:Invent AWS conference later this month. News of Amazon's possible purchase of Biba Systems first surfaced last week, when GeekWire found some Delaware filings that spoke of a merger with an entity called "Justin Acquisition" in September 2015. There was no direct mention of Amazon in the Justin Acquisition document, but the filing included the name of a paralegal employed at the time by Amazon. Amazon never responded to our request (or GeekWire's, it seems) for comment on the story. So we decided to do some digging of our own. We discovered some direct links between Biba and Amazon that point to both Biba's technology and employees now being part of Amazon. We found that Biba had filed and received two patents, one related to video conferencing, and another related to audio streaming. Both of these patents transferred their ownership to Amazon Technologies in the last two months. Furthermore, we've been able to trace active Amazon work email addresses to current Biba employees. (We are not publishing those here.) "

"Collaboration platforms offer the promise to eliminate unnecessary meetings, phone calls and other time-consuming interactions. However, to succeed those tools have to perform better than the incumbent, which for most people is still email."

"I've been exploring a growing list of web-based tools for the creation and management of what most would call 'documents' - assemblages of text, images, lists, embedded video, audio and other media - but which, are in fact, something quite different than the precursors, like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages documents. The big shift underlying these new tools is that they are not oriented around printing onto paper, or digital analogues of paper, like PDF. Instead, they take as a given that the creation, management, and sharing of these assemblages of information will take place nearly all the time online, and will be social at the core: coediting, commenting, and sharing are not afterthoughts grafted onto a 'work processing' architecture. As a result, I am referring to these tools - like the pioneering Google Docs, and newer entrants Dropbox Paper, Quip, Draft, and Notion - as 'work processing' tools. This gets across the idea that we aren't just pushing words onto paper through agency of word processing apps, we're capturing and sharing information that's critical to our increasingly digital businesses, to be accessed and leveraged in digital-first use cases. In a recent piece on Medium, Documents are the new Email, I made the case that old style 'documents' are declining as a percentage of overall work communications, with larger percentages shifting to chat, texting, and work media (enterprise social networks). And, like email, documents are increasingly disliked as a means to communicate. And I suggested that, over time, these older word processing documents - and the use cases that have built up around them - will decline. At the same time, I believe there is a great deal of promise in 'work processing' tools, which are based around web publishing, web notions of sharing and co-creation, and the allure of content-centric work management."

"Docady, an iOS app that lets you store and manage all your important documents, has been doing well in the App Store since its official launch in mid-July, including being featured by Apple as a 'best new app' for the last few weeks. And to help continue with that momentum, the Tel Aviv-based startup has just closed a $1.5 million funding round. Investors include Pitango Ventures, and Disruptive, the VC fund from Tal Barnoach, Eilon Tirosh and various unnamed former AOL video execs. The new investment will be used to bring the app to more platforms, with Android up next, and for the development of additional 'smart' features to make your documents work harder for you."

"One of the best parts about being in marketing is that most of us can work anywhere and everywhere -- as long as we have an internet connection, it's relatively easy for us to get most our day-to-day work done. To publish that blog post, send that email, or set up that email nurturing workflow, we simply need to connect to Wi-Fi and get to work.  But an internet connection doesn't solve everything we need to accomplish during the day. Often, we need to communicate with team members, project managers, and freelancers -- and when you're remote, that communication can get a little ... messy.  To help make it easier for their employees to have flexible work arrangements, many companies are discovering and implementing new tools and resources. To help you figure out which tools might be handy for your team's work arrangement, we compiled some of the best ones my friends on the Inbound.org discussion boards suggested for remote working. Check 'em out below. When You Need to Stay Organized"

"As reviewed by Tom's IT Pro, Egnyte's enterprise file sync solution has three aspects: Cloud File Server,  Storage Sync and Storage Connect. The alliance/partnership announcements further demonstrate Egnyte's serious intent to compete for the higher-value enterprise market, with unique capabilities fostering expansion beyond commodity-based storage into a hybrid data access platform as communicated by Egnyte's CEO, Vineet Jain."

"Web mail, calendaring, task management, conferencing, and file sharing have become essential parts of our lives and work. They live on the web, but increasingly on mobile devices. At stake is our data and who owns it, and at the enterprise level it's a game of lock-in and standardisation that can make users feel like peasants of Westeros in giant games played by titans of the tech industry. Roundcube.net is a platform created with the goal of enabling applications that would feel native to any platform and on any device. Ten years ago the Berne, Switzerland-based project used the most advanced technologies and was ultra-modern, dynamic, and beautiful. Reviewers and users were delighted and Roundcube quickly became the default choice for many governments, universities, companies and individuals. The results to date? cPanel reports that Roundcube is dominant with 62 percent of all users in its systems. The technology is installed on approximately half a million websites globally, and it's used daily by hundreds of millions of users. Roundcube is integrated into major commercial offerings such as the Kolab Enterprise Collaboration suite, and offers a full Exchange replacement for organizations and corporations all the way up to the Fortune 50. Simply put, Roundcube is the unsung work horse of web mail. But a decade is an eternity in technology. When Roundcube started, mobile devices were large, clunky affairs used by the few. Today they are the most commonly used communication device. Roundcube Next is today's answer to that radical change. Instead of once more embarking alone on that ten year journey, Roundcube Next is about building a strong, healthy and diverse Open Source community to achieve that task within 12 to 18 months."

"Office productivity: Has Microsoft blown it? Microsoft has dominated the 'office productivity' tools market for decades and is a de facto way of working in most companies. Having significantly held back innovation in the last 10 years, Office is arguably reaching the end of its useful life as modern digital tools make it look like an old bureaucratic anachronism."

"Six years ago, we surveyed our employees with the goal of determining the optimal place for each of them to work in terms of maximum efficiency and productivity. What we quickly determined was that no one wanted to work in the office. Workers Can't Concentrate in the Office When asked to identify the best place to get work done - specifically work that requires maximum concentration and creativity, such as designing a web page, programming new functionality for software, developing a financial report or writing a sales proposal - not a single member of our 34-member team chose the office. Rather, they selected: An extra room at their home Their favorite coffee shop A train or airplane Our finding wasn't an anomaly. In a much larger study based on 2,600 interviews, FlexJobs concluded that 76 percent of workers prefer to avoid the office when they have important work to do."

"Either way, customers win. In early November Microsoft announced a new product called Microsoft Teams. It's a way for groups of people, typically colleagues inside a company, to communicate with each other over multiple, simultaneous conversations. It will be part of the software giant's online Office 365 product, the "productivity" subscription program used by 85 million "knowledge workers" around the world. More than a billion additional customers use the offline version of Office. A relatively small group of people-4 million, to be precise-will recognize something familiar about the new Microsoft offering. That's because it's more or less what a San Francisco startup called Slack does. Microsoft is adding a few bells and whistles, including easier-to-follow threaded conversations and video conferencing. Slack, which took the charmingly old-fashioned step of buying a newspaper ad to "welcome" Microsoft to its game, has said it will match those features. (Fortune, like many journalism organizations, uses Slack; after a year of steadily increasing usage, I've grown to like it.) This isn't the first time Microsoft has unveiled a "Slack killer." In fact, it is becoming something of an annual event. What's more, Slack is growing fast. It has 4 million users, up from 1.25 million a year ago. About 30% of those customers pay either $6.67 or $12.50 per month for the product, depending on which features they use. My back-of-the-envelope calculation of Slack's annual revenue, assuming all customers pay the average of the two price points, is around $140 million. "You're pretty close," Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield told me just before Thanksgiving. "

"Several forces are at work in the "social collaboration" tool marketplace that are creating great turbulence.  It's fairly well-known that businesses face a systemic issue with adoption of social collaboration tools. These tools (also called enterprise social networks, or social business) share some common design motifs, like activity streams, project or group workspaces, file sharing, user profiles, and various communication mechanisms such as direct messages, @mentions and so on. But what isn't generally acknowledged is that business productivity was much higher in the years preceding the emergence of Web 2.0 social collaboration tools. This means that Web 1.0 era tools - like instant messenger and the much maligned email - may have offered more oomph, at least when compared with pre-Web techniques like fax, phone calls and inter-office mail."