In a research study we did last spring of over 1300 small businesses we were not surprised to find that most of them did not use CRM because of the expense and the overhead of data input (two most popular reasons). When questioned further we found that most small businesses did not see CRM as critical, although tracking their customers and prospects was. The focus in small business is on the customer experience and not reporting to upper management (which is where most CRM systems excel). A focus on project and task management was seen as more important than reporting.

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This is a first look at a new collaboration application from OpenACircle.com

After 20 years of looking at collaboration applications, and having seen thousands, when a vendor tells us their new application is not only easy to use, but a Web 2.0 application built for small teams (under 12 people) and that it seamlessly integrates synchronous and asynchronous collaboration functions, we at Collaborative Strategies were a bit skeptical.

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I have been at the Dialogic analyst conference for the past day or so. Last night they took us to Yankee stadium, which I had not seen since my grandfather took me there to see a baseball game as a kid. It did bring back some old memories. Speaking of old memories, my Dad did pass on today at 12:04 pm.

Meantime back to the Dialogic conference. I normally would not cover Dialogic as they are normally seen by CS as an infrastructure company, and by their statement they make building blocks (gateways, media servers, IP PBXs, etc.) that support collaborative applications. So is that reason enough for me to be here… I think it is.

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I have not blogged in almost a month, which is unusual for me, but some unusual things have been going on. A week or so ago, my Dad (82) had a stroke. He walked into the emergency room with his girlfriend and was able to talk at that time, but as the bleed in his brain got progressively worse so did the paralysis and brain damage, until a neurosurgeon saw him a day later and said not only was there no hope of his recuperating, but that he would die any day… that was over a week ago.

I flew to NY on Tuesday to be with him, and even though he is unconscious, I have been sitting by his bed everyday talking to him. Trying to forgive him before he transitions, and letting him know it is OK for him to go. Because I think about collaboration trends and technologies a lot, it seemed natural to think about this also while sitting at his bedside.

I am working on a current project for a client who has had a Notes environment for a long time, and it seems to serve the company well. They are looking to either upgrade to Notes 8 or move over to a Microsoft stack, and the testing will go on through the summer.
What does Notes/Exchange have to do with my dying Dad, well both are in a great state of transition. My Dad leaving this body and moving on to whatever is next for him, and my client company, also like a caterpillar in a chrysalis ready to become a butterfly. What is the role of collaboration in such a transition?

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After 16 months the recent release of Google Sites was disappointing on many levels. There is no API, where there was one in JotSpot (before Google bought it). JotSpot was built as a wiki application environment (another that we know of that includes collaboration functions is GroveSite). I realize that Google had to re-write much of JotSpot over the last 16 months (at least we hope that is what they were doing) to make it fit with the Google architecture, but in the re-write they not only lost a lot of functionality, but many of the functions that are available either don’t work or don’t meet the usual Google intuitive UI standards.

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