Enterprise collaboration is a dubious pursuit. You can almost sense its impending failure the minute it gets introduced to a workforce and becomes just another tool that employees are supposed to use.It doesn’t help when CIOs downplay the value of collaboration tools by simply procuring something that meets the lowest common denominator and enables them to check another item off their to-do list.
More like this
6 IT leaders share tips to drive collaboration
How Mobile, Social Tech Elevate Enterprise Collaboration
CIOs Need to Snap Out of Complacency
on IDG Answers
How to retrieve data lost from Outlook address book after creating a shortcut?
State of the CIO 2015
More than 500 top IT leaders responded to our online survey to help us gauge the state of the
Read Now
“There’s a lot of failures in enterprise collaboration, loosely termed, because people don’t really know what they’re aiming for so obviously they don’t hit it,” says Joel Confino, CEO and founder of the enterprise Q&A platform Haydle.
15More
shared by Gary Edwards on 13 May 15
- No Cached
Why CIOs can't sell enterprise collaboration tools | CIO - 0 views
www.cio.com/...prise-collaboration-tools.html
collaboration Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity-Platform wordsdk
![](/images/link.gif)
-
The promise of collaboration is to replace face-to-face communication, but if the implementation isn’t well-planned, it can’t become something extra that people have to do, Confino says. Collaboration also has to perform better than the incumbent, which is email for most people.
-
CIOs can’t merely launch a tool and tell employees to go forth and collaborate. The C suite needs to lead by example and use these new tools to accomplish meaningful business objectives.“The majority of these implementations are underperforming and plenty of them are just outright ghost towns,” says Confino.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
Why these tools are failing to supplant a technology as static as email is a question vexing the minds of countless IT managers. The reason for enterprise collaboration is still so hazy that relatively few CIOs agree on what challenges lie ahead.
-
CIOs and other IT decision makers face a host of challenges in their pursuit of enterprise collaboration, some of which are ingrained into the culture of their companies. Resistance to change is the obstacle facing CIOs at most companies and the reasons could include anything from workplace culture to perceived cost and complexity, says Scott McCool, group vice president of IT and CIO at Polycom.
-
One of the biggest challenges is determining how to implement enterprise collaboration in cross-functional manner, says John Abel, senior vice president of IT at Hitachi Data Systems,“Teams are pretty good at communicating within their own group but when it comes to integrating across departments silos tend to happen, which ultimately becomes problematic when each team needs to align on certain campaigns or key topics,” he says.NetScout’s CIO and Senior Vice President of Services Ken Boyd says the landscape of collaboration tools available today makes it difficult to pick the best ones for a specific workforce.
-
“Locating a collaboration tools provider that can offer the right balance for the needs of our enterprise users can be a significant challenge,” he says. There are many point solutions for voice, video, chat and document collaboration, but splicing together those solutions from multiple vendors isn’t always the most productive or cost -effective method.
-
“There is an atomic shift taking place in how the enterprise operates, and so the CIO and CIO's team must decide whether [on-]premises and cloud-based collaboration tools can and will address the needs of the enterprise users -- anytime, anywhere, and on any device -- plus smoothly work between business and consumer applications,” says Boyd.
-
CIOs must also navigate and please the different age groups, says Chris McKewon, founder and CEO of the managed services provider Xceptional Networks.
-
Millennials are more comfortable with video, short messaging and have embraced newer collaboration tools like Slack and HipChat while older execs are still trying to master WebEx and GoToMeeting, and unfortunately there’s no common ground, McKewon says.“CIOs need to shift their mindset, strategies and projects to be more inclusive and collaborative,” says Shamlan Siddiqi, vice president of architecture and application development at the systems integrator NTT Data.
-
The biggest challenges, according to Siddiqi, are organizational buy-in on major transformational decisions, employee adoption, sustainable engagement, security, content quality, standardization and tool selection.
-
Brian Pillar, IT manager at the software firm TechSmith, agrees that adoption is a major challenge. Enterprise collaboration tools rarely come cheap, so making sure the organization rallies around the new platform is key.Organizations will never realize their return on investment for collaboration until individuals or teams stop creating workarounds to avoid an enterprise collaboration tool altogether, says Pillar.
-
Ruven Gotz, director of collaboration services at the IT solutions vendor Avanade, says collaboration is about helping people work together to achieve more meaningful and impactful outcomes.As such, the biggest challenges lie in approaching collaboration with the right mindset, he says.“Technology is an amplifier of human touch and interaction. Its effectiveness in enabling collaboration is entirely dependent on achieving results with methods that make sense to the way people actually accomplish work,” says Gotz
-
“You really have to understand the true nature of the business results you seek to achieve,” says Gotz.If you can’t see the business result you seek to achieve, take the time to stop and find it. If you can’t rationalize a process that is simple to understand, don’t try to automate it, he says.“Understand what the tool imposes on the experience,” says Gotz. “Don’t let the tool bind natural human interaction.”
1More
The Mind of Marc Andreessen - The New Yorker - 0 views
-
An amazing article about Marc Andressen and his a16z VC firm on Sand Hill Road. Covers the entire story and provides a great insight into how Silicon Valley and VC industry work. It's long, but nevertheless a must read. Very enjoyable! " At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out "what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years." CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents' Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world's most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road's newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm's deal team and its seven general partners-the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can't help but think of words like "jumbo" and "Grade A." Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes's Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He's an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon
10More
Pssst! Office 365 customers pay Microsoft up to 80% more over long haul | Computerworld - 0 views
-
Transactional customers buy Office once every five to seven years, said Hood. But by convincing businesses to subscribe to Office 365, specifically the E3 plan, Microsoft can realize an 80% increase in revenue over the years-long relationship. Office 365 E3 includes the core Office application suite, as well as cloud-based Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business, shifting those services from on-premises systems to Microsoft's servers.
-
One expert scoffed at Microsoft's multiplier, which he said was actually a low-ball estimate. "A 1.8x multiplier? How about a 6x or 20x multiplier?" said Paul DeGroot, principal at Pica Communications, a consulting firm that specializes in deciphering Microsoft's licensing practices.
-
DeGroot's point was that Microsoft rakes in much, much more than just an additional 20%, 40% or 80% by pulling customers to the cloud. "I think those numbers are conservative," DeGroot said in an email. "
- ...6 more annotations...
-
I always remind customers that Microsoft's internal rationale for the cloud is not superior technology or a better fit for customers, but that they can switch customers from purely transactional strategies -- where they wait for Microsoft to produce value before buying in -- or from standard EAs, where customers can stop purchasing SA but keep using the product -- to a subscription model where the customer owns nothing and must continually pay Microsoft."
-
DeGroot, like many licensing gurus, is often called in when a Microsoft customer grows weary of paying Redmond and wants ideas on cutting costs."We routinely reduce customers' payments to Microsoft by 40%, and the two most recent engagements were 75% lower," asserted DeGroot. The latter, he said, was accomplished by dropping the SA annuity when the customer had no plans to upgrade in the next three years, the length of SA contracts.
-
"Customers can drop SA but keep using the latest products in the full Microsoft stack for the next three years with very little downside," DeGroot added. "That's devastating for Microsoft's revenue stream. But if Microsoft can get them into [Office 365] E3, that can't happen. Microsoft will determine what features are available, when they upgrade to new versions, and how much they pay."
-
In her presentation to Wall Street, Hood also talked about even greater revenue opportunities based on selling more cloud-based services to Office 365 customers.
-
"There is additional 'yield opportunity,' in our language, to add lifetime value here, in addition to adding users," she said. For Hood, "yield" means, in her words, "selling more things on top of an installed unit."
-
the lifetime value of a customer. "When we get a cloud customer completely deployed and get utilization and consumption, it opens up with the first service, it opens up the ability for me to get the other services in there,"
-
"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."
1More
What's Wrong with Social Collaboration Tools? Everything - 0 views
-
"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."
1More
Working Remotely? Try These 27 Tools for Better Communication, Collaboration & Organiza... - 0 views
-
"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."
1More
8 Free Online Courses to Grow Your Tech Skills | CIO - 0 views
-
"Free Online Tech Courses At one time, universities and colleges were institutes of higher learning for those who were passionate about acquiring knowledge. Today, education discussions tend to to center around how much individuals can make with their degree. Thanks to the Internet there are still places that offer open learning initiatives designed to help a new generation of technologists succeed. If money was the only thing holding you back from learning more about technology, we've got good news for you. There are many places offering free online tech training that while may not be degree/certificate driven can still give you a leg up on the competition. While many of the courses listed here offer either a certificate or credit for a fee, they also all are free for those who just want to learn about technology or add a new skill to their "toolbox.""
8More
802.11ac - CES 2015: D-Link attempts to break 1Gbps Wi-Fi speed barrier | ZDNet - 0 views
-
D-Link isn't using the current 802.11ac 2013 standard for its new line of high-speed routers; instead, it's using the latest Broadcom chipset based on the still unratified 802.11ac 2015 standard, aka Wave 2. This new wave of technology pushes the theoretical limit of Wi-Fi to 7Gbps.
-
In addition, Wave 2 supports multi-user MIMO, which enables simultaneous multiple spatial streams to multiple clients. Multi-user MIMO is seen as being as big an improvement for Wi-Fi as the jump from shared to switched Ethernet was for wired networking.
-
Multi-user MIMO, however, won't be supported in the AC3200. You'll need to wait for the next two models in this new Wi-Fi router family to appear later this year for that.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
A D-Link product manager assured me at CES that this router, and its two forthcoming even faster brothers -- the AC5300 ULTRA Wi-Fi Router (DIR-895L/R) and AC3100 ULTRA Wi-Fi Router (DIR-885L/R) -- would be brought up to code with firmware upgrades.
-
D-Link promises that the three routers in the ULTRA Performance Series will deliver "chart-topping wireless speeds up to 5.3 Gbps ." I'm not so sure about that last boast, but what I do know is that in order to break the 1Gbps barrier you'll need to use D-Link's ULTRA AC1900 Wi-Fi USB Adapter (DWA-192) on your existing laptops and desktop PCs. Even a brand new computer with an 802.11ac Wave 1 chipset won't be able to crack the high-speed wall.
-
Besides sheer speed, these new routers also feature Wireless 11AC Beamforming to enhance signal strength and throughput; Smart Connect to automatically assign clients to the wireless band providing the best bandwidth; and an advanced QoS engine with a drag-and-drop UI to provide an easy way to prioritize applications and devices.
-
The D-Link AC3200 ULTRA Wi-Fi Router is available now for $309.99. The other two routers and the AC1900 USB adapter won't show up until the second quarter, and pricing has yet to be announced.
-
"Ever since 802.11ac started appearing in routers we've been dreaming of getting honest-to-goodness 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) Wi-Fi speeds. Ha! The fastest 802.11ac router CNET or ZDNet has seen to date, the Asus AC2400 RT-AC87U Dual-band Wireless Gigabit Router delivers 504 Megabits per second (Mbps) to clients. D-Link's new AC3200 ULTRA Wi-Fi Router (DIR-890L/R), introduced at CES, promises to deliver speeds of up to 1.3Gbps."
8More
Download & Install Android 5.0 Lollipop on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux PCs / Laptops - Tut... - 0 views
-
Android Lollipop 5.0 SDK (software development kit) and official system factory image files are now publicly available by Google for Nexus smartphone and tablet devices, but these files can also be installed on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. We are sharing a step-by-step guide and tutorial on How to Setup, Config, Install and Run Android Lollipop on Your Windows, Mac and Linux PCs and Laptops.
-
sers are required to install Java Development Kit, Android SDK (x86 32-bit / x64 64-bit) computer architecture hardware and Android Lollipop Emulator, which are meant for testing and experimenting purposes by Android developers. If you want to experience full features of Lollipop, then it’s better to get the Android 5.0 Lollipop compatible hardware smartphone and tablet device. So let's start the full tutorial and guide on How to Install Android Lollipop on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux PCs and Laptops below.
-
Compatible Windows, Mac and Linux OS for Android Lollipop Installation: Windows 10 Windows 8.1 Windows 8 Windows 7 Windows Vista Windows XP OS X Yosemite v10.10+ OS X Mavericks v10.9+ OS X Mountain Lion v10.8+ OS X Mountain Lion v10.7+ OS X Snow Leopard v10.6+ OS X Leopard v10.5+ Linux, Ubuntu v11.04+ or higher
- ...4 more annotations...
-
Prerequisites for Android Lollipop Installation: Download Java SE Development Kit for Windows, Mac and Linux Download Android SDK for Windows, Mac and Linux
-
How to Install Android Lollipop on Windows, Mac & Linux? Step 1: First, Unzip, Extract or Install Java Development Kit and Android SDK (software development kit) on your respective PC / Laptop to any location. Step 2: Now, Run "SDK Manager" application from your installed location.
-
Step 3: Android SDK Manager App will load and fetch all the Android SDK packages, wait for some seconds. Step 4: Now, under Packages tab, select "Android 5.0 (API 21)" and "Android SDK Platform-tools" under Tools tab. Step 5: Click on "Install Packages" button. Choose Agree to the License information to proceed, now wait until all the packages gets installed. Step 6: Close the window after installation, and Go back to the Android SDK installation folder and run "AVD Manager" application. Click on "New" and create a virtual device with details as mentioned in below image and click "OK" button.
-
Step 7: After completion, choose your virtual device from the list and click on "Start". Step 8: New window will appears, don’t change anything on it, and just click on "Launch" button immediately. Step 9: Android Lollipop Emulator will start after a few Command Prompt windows and while booting it will take approx. 5 minutes for first boot, wait for some seconds. Step 10: After completion of android booting, you will get the following Welcome screen. Now you can enjoy Android Lollipop on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. Congratulations!!
1More
shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Dec 14
- No Cached
Microsoft's Latest Buy, Acompli, is a Great Email App | CIO - 0 views
www.cio.com/...-app-is-a-worthy-download.html
Microsoft Acompli Office-Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform
![](/images/link.gif)
-
"Microsoft this week announced it had acquired Acompli, an email and calendar integration app for Android and iOS. Re/code reports that Microsoft paid "north of $200 million," a far cry from Facebook's nearly $19 billion buyout of messaging app WhatsApp. Still, Microsoft's acquisition raises two questions (at least) for mobile users: 1) With approximately 10 zillion email apps available today, why Acompli? And 2), is the free app worth a download? According to a Microsoft blog post, Acompli "provides innovative ways to focus on what's important in your inbox, to schedule meetings, and work with attachments and files. Users love how it connects to all email services and provides a single place to manage email with a focus on getting things done." Let's parse that paragraph to help determine if Acompli is worth a look."
1More
shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Sep 11
- No Cached
Social Wars: A New Hope - The BrainYard - InformationWeek - 0 views
www.informationweek.com/...social-wars-a-new-hope
Enterprise2.0 Venkatesh-Rao Enterprise-Sales-Cycle
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Excellent commentary describing how the Enterprise 2.0 IT sales cycle differs from legacy - enterprise 1.0. A must read for anyone in the software industry!!!! excerpt: If you think Enterprise 1.0 has been retiring gracefully, handing power over to Enterprise 2.0 in a bloodless succession, you haven't talked to a sufficient number of adequately liquored-up people in the trenches. Or you've been forgetting to take your Dilbert vitamins. To understand how individual battles are playing out in these early days of the war for the soul of capitalism, you need to look at the IT sales cycle, where much of the action is concentrated. Why is it important to look at the sales cycle? Because that's where the mix of privately believed and publicly paraded visions collide. It's where salespeople make the tough decision: whether to pander to customers' (or their own) delusions to close a sale, or make a sincere effort to work with prospects to discover the defensible truths, whether or not they help close the sale. The enterprise IT sales cycle used to have a certain leisurely, ritual-like quality to it. Vendors would slowly discover the organization through networking, build up good relationships with the purchasing and IT organizations, and get to know the middle managers of the organization they were targeting. They'd study the organization chart and figure out the best lines of access to the level at which the decision they wanted could be made. Usually, this meant senior executive: VP or higher.
5More
shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Sep 11
- No Cached
Former Apple HTML5 Leader Builds His Own Apps Platform - 0 views
www.readwriteweb.com/...er-apple-html5-chief-build.php
Charles-Jolley SproutCore Strobe Cloud-Productivity-Platform
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Most importantly, Strobe.js resolves the problem of scripting that applies to multiple domains simultaneously, leading to the kinds of cross-domain discrepancies that security tools presently associate with hijack attempts, and which newer browsers disallow. HTML5 developers will want their apps to include links to functionality from Facebook, Twitter, and other social services. These links seem simple enough, but their security protocols require logins and virtual sessions - which means the domains of these services' URLs must be addressed somehow.
-
Strobe.js creates a level of indirection, letting apps use Strobe servers as proxies to authenticate themselves on social services and use their APIs, without having to build OAuth functionality directly into their apps, or to force users to log in separately. This is the core of the Strobe Social add-on, which is key to the company's unique business model.
-
Strobe's business model relies on how much and how often deployed apps use Strobe's server-side API. "It works a lot like an analytics system, like Omniture," explains Strobe's Charles Jolley. "Every time you launch an app, it hits our server for an update to see if there's a new version available. That's an API call. If you turn on one of these add-ons to get the server to do social, that's an API call. You buy packages from us based on API calls."
- ...1 more annotation...
-
The first 10,000 API calls placed per month on a developer's account are free, as well as the first 10 GB of bandwidth on Strobe's servers. That's to give developers a leg up during the testing phase. Typically once apps are deployed, the bandwidth use will expand to a level worth charging for. Up to 1 million API calls per month, and 50 GB of bandwidth, carry a $19 monthly fee. API calls numbering up to 10 million per month with 250 GB of bandwidth, costs $95 monthly.
-
The articles about Charles Jolley and Strobe continue. This time it's ReadWriteWeb. They do a much better job explaining Strobe and the business model Strobe seeks to implement. IMHO, Strobe's concept for mitigating the exchange of data across server domains could be ODBC for Cloud Productivity. ODBC and OLE are of course inter-application processes essential to the desktop productivity environment and the creation of compound documents. I'll try to contact Charles and discuss this. "One of the big reasons I left [Apple] is because I really believe that the next great app ecosystem for mobile especially, but also for PCs and television, is going to be built around HTML5," Jolley tells RWW. "If you look at the people who are building mobile apps today, 70% of those people will say they want to use HTML5. But a lot of them don't make it to market, except for a few large companies like Amazon and Financial Times, most people aren't able to deliver HTML5 apps." The Apple platform for apps delivery is rich and compelling, Jolley points out. Unlike an ordinary "open" platform that, almost by definition now, is all self-service, Apple provides direct, personal business services to help developers organize themselves and get on their feet, even if their employer is already recognized around the world. Then Apple provides hosting and deployment services, managing user entitlements and licenses. It creates an ecosystem and then nourishes the entities that live within it, and that's why Apple's platform works as well as it does. "Apple makes it very, very easy for someone to build an app and take it to market. You have these small groups of one or two people who can create businesses around them. And today with HTML5, that's simply not possible," says Jolley. "Even though there's a huge benefit to HTML5 - you can be in any app store, you can go direct to the consumers, you can build any kind of business model you want - if you're going to reach all the 1.2 billion p
8More
shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 11
- No Cached
This 26-Year Old Box.net Founder Is Raising $100 Million To Take On Giants Like Microsoft - 0 views
www.businessinsider.com/lion-to-slay-the-giants-2011-8
Box.net Visual-Documents Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity MS-Live Google-Docs The-Great-Transition
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Within the enterprise, if you compare Box to something like IBM Filenet, or Microsoft SharePoint, you get almost a 10x improvement on productivity, speed, time to market for new products. So we saw an opportunity to create real innovation in that space and that's what got us excited
-
We think the market for enterprise collaboration will be much larger than the market for checking into locations on your phone."
-
What you saw with the suite product from Microsoft [Office 365], they're trying to bundle ERP, CRM, collaboration, e-mail, and communication all as one package.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
If you go to the average company in America, that's not what they've implemented. They've implemented Salesforce as their CRM, Google Apps for email -- a large number of them, in the millions -- they'll be thinking of Workday or NetSuite for their ERP.
-
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?