Group items tagged

"Software, software everywhere and not a drop to drink.  Every day it feels as if a new app is released into the digital workplace ecosystem which promises to make employees more productive, more efficient, more valuable. Yet headlines and studies continue to sound alarms with reports of stagnating growth and slowing productivity. Could it be that we're measuring the wrong things? That the value today's knowledge workers (among others) provide isn't actually being recognized?"

"Google has been incrementally making its workplace products more and more functional - all, it seems, with one goal in mind. It would like to eat Microsoft Office 365's lunch. When it first launched Google Apps (now called Google for Work), the best feature was the cost. The products were free to use, although there was little in the way of service or advanced business functionality. But that's been changing. More companies are piggybacking on Google for Work's foundation to launch their own products and, as these products mature, continue to invest and expand them. One of the latest examples is ProsperWorks, the developer of Simple CRM for Google Apps.   "

"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."

"SAN FRANCISCO - The number of worldwide email users will reach 2.9 billion by the end of 2019, according to predictions from The Radicati Group. But has anyone really learned to use it effectively and efficiently in the workplace? Two-year-old San Francisco startup Emmerge claims it has: It's marketing an inbox with collaboration features, which is designed to streamline team projects. Project Management and Collaboration The project management and collaboration platform in one allows users to assign action items in the body of emails and build on ongoing tasks and projects. Emmerge organizes information by hashtags and also offers a way for employees to track billable hours if they need to do that, too. Emmerge CEO and founder Marc Blinder said his company isn't trying to replace email. Rather, it is trying to enhance it with a little "social DNA" and other features. "We know everyone in the business world is going check emails," he said. Emmerge offers a new way to look at it, he continued. Blinder said the Emmerge solution is more collaborative than the way Google looks at email, with a "consumer-first lens … We do it on a team basis. The fundamental philosophical difference is that team aspect that gets better and better as more people use it.""

Excellent article described the different ways web sites and user information can be hacked. "Website hacking is nothing new, but the techniques of a hacker are in constant flux. In an attempt to keep up with this ever-evolving digital dark art, the US government alone spent a whopping $14 billion on cyber security in 2016 - a year that will go down in hacking history."

"he Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) marketplace is ripe for disruption, but probably not via a huge technological breakthrough of some sort. EFSS options are maturing quickly and it's becoming quite commoditized. Consider that, according to Gartner, there are more than 140 vendors in the space - and that's too many. Sixteen of them meet the criteria for Gartner's Magic Quadrant (MQ) for EFSS. That's probably more than the market needs, but it's likely to be a problem that solves itself. Industry Consolidation Monica Basso, Charles Smulders and Jeffrey Mann, who researched and wrote the Gartner report, expect less than 10 percent of today's stand-alone EFSS offerings will exist by 2018. To be frank, not every vendor in the MQ wants to be classified as an EFSS player. Alastair Mitchell of Huddle has told me that he thinks of EFSS as an "albatross" and doesn't want his company to be known for "shuffling files back and forth." More on that in our next article. Gartner defines EFSS as a "range of on-premises or cloud-based capabilities that enables individuals to synchronize and share documents, photos, videos and files across mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets and PCs." The analysts noted that "sharing" can take place between coworkers, suppliers, customers and others, mobile devices and as content exchange between apps. "Security and collaboration support are critical aspects for enterprises to adopt EFSS," they wrote. The Gartner analysts also wrote that beyond standard EFSS functionalities, the vendors they selected might offer additional features around mobility, security, administration and management, back-end server integration via connectors to corporate servers (for example, SharePoint) and cloud services, content manipulation, collaboration and more. Software EFSS products may or may not have one main repository. Some products integrate with existing third-party repositories that are deploy

"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."

"It says something about the state of collaboration tech that the disruptors of a few years ago are at danger of being disrupted.  For example, take Google Hangouts. A novel development when it was released by Google in 2013, Hangouts can be used to message a friend or co-worker or up to one hundred people for a group chat. But now it could conceivably be displaced by San Francisco-based Slack Technologies, a workspace collaboration tool that has quickly grown in popularity as well as third-party features - and is now adding video and voice to the menu. So could Skype Technologies, for that matter, which Microsoft acquired in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Indeed, Google Hangouts was referred to as a Skype-killer when it was introduced some two years later. Spot the Pattern? New York City-based BetterCloud did and it discusses this trend in its unbelievably well-timed report, "Real-time Messaging Research and Comparison Real-Time Messaging: Data Unearths Surprising Findings on Usage, Distraction, and Organizational Impact." However, the report's finding take on a surprising twist. The disruptors-get-disrupted story line does not pan out. Instead it finds that, as of right now, there is enough room for multiple messaging apps in the enterprise and indeed, we can see with our own eyes that Google Hangouts didn't kill Skype.  More than likely, Slack is not going to turn out to be a Hangouts assassin. More than half, or 57 percent, of respondents told BetterCloud that their organizations use two more real-time messaging apps with little conflict."

"In a few years' time, you may have the opportunity to carry a device with you that authenticates your identity wirelessly to systems and mobile devices. And your employer may require you to carry a wireless authenticator to apply the same degree of access policies to your headquarters building as it does to your network. This may end up becoming the same device. There are folks who believe that should be the mobile phone, but there may yet be solid arguments against it, including this one: Do you really want your wireless carrier involved in your employer/employee relationships? Mapping the Future During an unscheduled demo at the RSA Conference here yesterday, senior officials from Google introduced a working model for a next-generation authentication device - a device to go beyond two-factor authentication systems, which have been exploited by "phishers." For now, this unnamed device provides an instantaneous second factor of authentication without needing to be plugged into a USB port, like current security keys today that follow the open FIDO U2F standard. Google first incorporated support for physical keys like Yubikey into its draft of FIDO U2F in October 2014."