Cloud Productivity Platform Wars

"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. "

"Cloud users want the freedom to move their apps and data from one cloud to another. Cisco Systems, with its Intercloud strategy and new software for cloud-to-cloud portability, thinks it can help make that happen. Cisco is now offering the production version of its Intercloud Fabric -- software that lets customers migrate workloads between different public, private and hybrid clouds -- in a move the networking titan says will continue to evolve its Intercloud strategy from vision to reality. Intercloud Fabric, which in September became available to a select group of customers through Cisco's Early Customer Success Program, enables what Cisco calls "hypervisor-independent workload portability" across various public and private cloud platforms, including those from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. The rollout of Intercloud Fabric comes one year after San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco unveiled its vision for Intercloud, a global network of connected private and public clouds. That network consists of both Cisco's own data centers, and those of its service provider partners."

"TECH More: Twitter Nuzzel We talked to the CEO who some people think owns the one thing Twitter needs most JIM EDWARDS JUN. 18, 2015, 12:11 PM 973 1 FACEBOOK LINKEDIN TWITTER EMAIL PRINT Nuzzel / Jonathan Abrams Jonathan Abrams, founder and CEO of Nuzzel. A few days ago, the Silicon Valley investor Chris Sacca was talking on Periscope about Nuzzel, the newsgathering app. He said Twitter should just go ahead and buy Nuzzel outright. It would fix a lot of problems for Twitter. That's because Nuzzel does the one thing that Twitter doesn't do: organise content in tweets based on their importance. Looking at your Twitter account is often a random experience, a stream of consciousness of what your friends have on their minds right now, interesting or not. "Random" is not the same as "useful."  So Nuzzel takes that feed (and feeds from Facebook and other social media) and only shows you the news stories your friends are sharing. The result is amazingly interesting, and requires zero effort: You get a feed of headlines that feel much closer and more relevant to what you're interested in, because they're being tweeted or shared by friends, family, and coworkers. Nuzzel's friends-of-friends feed is often even more interesting because it surfaces stuff from further afield, stuff you didn't even know was news but is buzzing on the outer edge of your social sphere Sacca - who is one of Twitter's largest investors, and who recently wrote a manifesto about how to fix Twitter - sees it this way: "Nuzzel makes Twitter better." He is not alone in that opinion. Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal recently wrote, "Before I ever open Twitter, I open Nuzzel, a Twitter client app that digests my Twitter feed for me, showing me the most popular links in my network in the past 24 hours. Nuzzel can be tuned in a number of ways, but this default behaviour more than suffices. By putting an algorithm between me and the firehose of Twitter, Nuzzel makes Twitter usable

"Cloud-based platforms such as Google for Work and Microsoft Office 365 are far from ubiquitous in today's workplace, but they're seeing rapid adoption, and that trend is going to continue. In fact, more than half of the small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs) queried as part of a new survey from BetterCloud plan to run all of their IT services in the cloud within five years. 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 The corporate adoption rate of complete IT-in-the-cloud infrastructure will more than double during the next two years, according to the 1,500 IT professionals surveyed. Today only 12 percent of the respondents run all of their IT in the cloud, but that number will increase to 26 percent by 2017 and nearly 70 percent by 2025, according to BetterCloud, which sells IT administrative tools for both Google for Work and Microsoft Office 365."

"Chat - Reach And Be Reached In Real-Time Chat is half of what makes up a flow. It is where your daily conversations live. Discuss, clarify, notify teammates, share files - on the desktop and on the go."

Add on for Outlook to manage native documents

"The Documents app for iOS allows you to access the files stored in your ONLYOFFICE account on your mobile device, view and edit existing text documents, create new ones and organize them. Supported devices The application runs under iOS 8.0 or higher. Documents will open in the editing mode on iPad Air and later tablet models. On older tablet models and iPhones, documents will open in the viewing mode only. Application sections Tap icons at the left panel to switch between the Documents sections. ONLYOFFICE for corporate use contains the following sections: My Documents is a section that contains your personal documents; Shared with Me is a section that contains documents that were shared with you by other portal users; Common Documents is a section that contains files and folders available to all portal users; Project Documents is a section that contains folders corresponding to existing projects from the portal 'Projects' module; Recycle Bin is a section where all deleted files are stored and can be restored or permanently deleted later."

"Workflow, Quick and Easy Decide, drag, drop and you're done. Individual users and workflow professionals alike can automate processes in minutes using an intuitive, easy-to-use, browser-based, drag-and-drop workflow designer that reduces the work involved in building, using and improving processes."

"Cisco's latest round of partnerships and support highlight how important the company's channel will be in getting enterprise IT shops to see the networking giant as a cloud player. Cisco added 35 independent software vendors to its Intercloud Marketplace, which is expected to be available in September. Most of the partnerships are centered on developer platforms, big data analytics and the Internet of Things, and partners include Apprenda, Docker, Chef, Citrix, CloudBerry Lab, Cloudera, Cloudify, F5 Networks, Inc., Hortonworks, Informatica, MongoDB, Panzura and others. In addition to the moves higher up the stack, Cisco extended its ability to manage cloud infrastructure with support for KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V. It also extended its zone-based firewall services to support Microsoft Azure with Intercloud Fabric, the company's hybrid cloud management product, and customers can onboard and manage VMs from Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. The slew of partnerships and added support doesn't include anything show-stopping or outside the realm of what other cloud vendors offer, but it is a positive step for Cisco's Intercloud strategy, analysts said."

"Nintex has partnered NEC Australia to provide customers with the company's workflow and forms solutions. The partnership with NEC Australia will allow Nintex to provide additional support to the many customers looking to boost their workplace efficiency and effectiveness. Nintex has a strong presence in Australia and is continuing to evolve its partner network in the region to ensure customers have the best possible experience with Nintex's workflow productivity platform. The rise of organisations focusing on streamlining and automating their business processes demonstrates an increase in partners looking to Nintex to provide a value-added offering around workflow automation to their services and solutions, according to a company statement. NEC Australia partner alliance practice lead, Tim Pagram, said he had seen businesses across the board experience significant gains in productivity and customer satisfaction by using Nintex technology."

"We just published a report on the state of adoption of Office 2013 And Productivity Suite Alternatives based on a survey of 155 Forrester clients with responsibility for those investments. The sample does not fully represent the market, but lets us draw comparisons to the results of our previous survey in 2011. Some key takeaways from the data: One in five firms uses email in the cloud. Another quarter plans to move at some point. More are using Office 365 (14 percent) than Google Apps (9 percent).  Just 22 percent of respondents are on Office 2013. Another 36 percent have plans to be on it. Office 2013's uptake will be slower than Office 2010 because fewer firms plan to combine the rollout of Office 2013 with Windows 8 as they combined Office 2010 with Windows 7. Alternatives to Microsoft Office show little traction. In 2011, 13 percent of respondents supported open source alternatives to Office. This year the number is just 5 percent. Google Docs has slightly higher adoption and is in use at 13 percent of companies. "

"Flow, Microsoft's lightweight email/chat application that looks as if it will debut on iPhones, seems to be just one of a number of new mobile-first productivity apps the company is building. Microsoft also is believed to be working on a lightweight collaboration and document-sharing app (which may be using "Flip" as its working name), as well as a lightweight project-management application, (which may be known as "Highlander"), according to sources of mine who asked not to be named. Flow, Flip and Highlander are all productivity apps that are aimed at mobile users. My bet is they're all the handy work of the "Do More Experiences" team that is part of Microsoft's Applications & Services group, as that team is focused on redefining productivity and building "next-generation experiences" for mobile platforms, including phones and tablets. One of my contacts said Flip may include some of the features that will be part of the Flow email/chat application, but will go beyond Flow by offering document viewing, editing and collaboration features. Highlander is meant to provide lightweight project management for smaller-sized projects, making it easy for users to update tasks and watch projects' progress, that same contact said. Microsoft already sells a more fully featured project-management application, Microsoft Project."

"Like it or not, faxing is still alive and kicking. No need to get a fax machine though -- instead get any of these five apps for faxing and receiving faxes on your phone. FaxBurner If you don't send or receive lots of faxes, this iOS app is the one for you. There's a paid and a free version, but unless you do plenty of faxing, the free one will be what you need. With the free version you get a free fax number, although that number will be different every time you fax. You can receive 25 pages of faxes for free every month, but you can only send five pages total for free. After that you have to pay for it. The best plan is $10 per month for 500 fax pages sent and 500 fax pages received. eFax This one has apps for iOS and Android, and lets you do it from your desktop as well. It has plenty of nice extras, including annotating faxes and signing them. There are several levels of service, but your best bet is eFax Plus, which cost $17 a month and lets you send 150 pages or receive 150 pages. After that it's ten cents a page. FaxFile This iOS and Android app is a good choice if you don't want to pay a monthly fee, and instead prefer to pay for each fax you send and receive. You buy credits ahead of time and then apply them as you send and receive faxes. FreeFax This faxing app for iOS and Android lets you fax a single page a day for free. After that, you pay. A single page doesn't get you very far, but if you send very few faxes, it's worth a try. iFax This app is available for either iOS or Android. You won't get anything for free. Instead, you pay by the pages. For 99 cents you can fax up to five pages, and the price goes up from there. If you've got an Apple Watch you can view your faxes on it."

"Acrobat and Word for Commenting Part 2: Export PDF Comments Back to Word In Part 1 of this article, I wrote about exporting comments in a Microsoft Word document to a PDF file with comments when using Acrobat PDFMaker. When converting Microsoft Office files to PDF documents it is important, possibly even critical, to preserve as much information from the source as possible, and to have the option to be selective about it: Acrobat PDFMaker can help you there. But the really productive part is after you have received comments from others on a PDF version of the document, possibly via a Shared Review. That is the time you will want to apply - or integrate - the changes to the source Word document: you got it, Acrobat can help you out here too by exporting PDF comments from Acrobat back to Word. [As I stated in Part 1, this method applies only to supported versions of Microsoft Word on Windows. Apologies to my Mac brothers and sisters.] Before you get started, I suggest opening the PDF file with comments, going through the feedback and suggested changes from reviewers. This is so you ca determine what is exported to Word and then integrated for you [this is optional, but will save you some time later if you have a lot of suggested changes, some of which you know won't be integrated]. You can do one or both of the following: "

"Egnyte has been vying with the likes of Dropbox and Box for some time already in the cloud-storage arena, but on Tuesday it jumped on board the "mobile-first" train with a newly revamped version of its enterprise-focused app suite that's aimed squarely at mobile business users. 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 Now running on the Apple Watch and Windows tablets as well as Android, iOS and other Windows platforms, the new suite of apps is designed to let enterprise users on virtually any mobile device access, manage and share online and offline data from both cloud and on-premises storage. In addition to the expanded mobile-platform coverage, Egynte's new suite includes several new features, including the ability to organize files marked for offline access in a centralized view, thereby making it easier to coordinate offline and online content."

"Audit. Compliance. Team training. Process re-engineering. Every one of these activities requires that your team have accurate business process documentation in-hand to maximize success. Is it optional? Not really. For a variety of reasons, complex enterprises need to have a firm understanding of how they actually conduct business and "how things really work around here." And it needs to be written down in a way that your team, your auditors, your regulators, and your business analysts will understand and be able to use and customize for their intended purpose. Challenges. The problem is that generating and maintaining accurate business process documentation is a real pain because it's time consuming and difficult. The knowledge of the process has to come from business users and business analysts, whose time is expensive - and any time spent creating documentation takes them away from their primary mission of running the business. Even worse, once this hard-won information is captured, it can become out-of-date in a matter of days or weeks as business processes change over time. The cost of documenting your business processes can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct costs for consultants, interviewers, and document preparation - not to mention your team's opportunity cost which can be much greater. An Automation Path. If you've made it this far, it's because you're looking for a better way - and the good news is that automation provides today's most effective solution. With software for automated business process documentation, the business user turns on a process "capture" feature from their desktop toolbar when executing a business process in their enterprise application of choice, such as SAP or a web application. When the process is complete, they simply turn off the capture feature. Every business process function, keystroke, and transaction has been uploaded into the automation software. In this way, the softwar

"Research firm Gartner's annual report card on the public IaaS cloud computing market shows there is one clear leader - Amazon Web Services - and another clear challenger - Microsoft Azure. And then there is everyone else. "The market is dominated by only a few global providers - most notably Amazon Web Services, but increasingly also Microsoft Azure," Gartner researchers say, giving Google Cloud Platform an honorable mention. "Between them, these three providers comprise the majority of workloads running in public cloud IaaS in 2015.""

"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.   "