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Editor's Notes
Labor Day has arrived, and it is really the beginning of the business year. The kids go back to school, everyone buckles down at their desks and business goes into full swing, after recovering from the doldrums of August. Next stop Christmas (or Hanukah in my case), that’s when we will see the next big break in the busines routine. It is also interesting that the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashonah, September 22nd) comes so close to Labor Day, maybe those on a lunar calendar know when the year really begins?
Like everyone else, we at Collaborative Strategies have been beavering away. We have a new 5 stage model for adoption of collaboration technologies in the enterprise, as well as a roadmap to help organizations move through these stages. We will be talking about both the stages and the roadmap in an upcoming webinar on October 19th, stay tuned for your invitation!.
FREE webinar and white paper
We will be offering this white paper to those that register for an upcoming webinar that we will be doing in October. If your interesting in registering for this FREE webinar that Mike Dressler (Head of Advisory Services) and I will be doing in October. We will be sending out a mailing to register later this month, and their will also be a registration link on the CS home page.
This month's Guru's Corner focuses on how I see Social Networks and Online Communities (yes there is a difference) as not only a second order effect of the Internet (the first order effect was publishing), but as an enabling technology that will support sweeping social and political changes over the next few years (third order effect).
Christine Perey, a consultant to AMI, and an analyst in her own right, takes a look at what a business meeting in the future might look like in our Guest Editorial. She looks at AMI's use of machine learning, statistics and other core technologies to help understand the behaviors of people in meetings or even to use a "meeting agent" to help you attend more than one meeting simultaneously.
Smile, your on Candid Courtroom!
There is also an interesting case study of the Utah court system using secure video conferencing and a VTS (virtual team space) to cut costs and eliminate the transportation of prisoners to arraignments. Judge John L. Sandberg, Utah Justice Court Education Director, makes a strong case for using collaboration technologies in the court system read about it in the Collaboration Blog.
It being August we had fewer briefings than normal. This month we were briefed by: GroupMembersOnly; DimDim; Office.com; Medianet Innovations; WebTrain and OpenText on a new version of their First Class product. Our reactions to these technologies can be seen either in the "Technologies to watch" section. Others may be in the Collaboration Blog.
The Survey Says...
Our last survey looked at what stage your organization was in with collaborative technologies. Unfortunately, not enough people answered the question to draw any conclusions, so we will keep the survey up for a month to see if we get any more responses.
Free Copy of the 2006 RTC Report ($600 value)
Take our VTS Survey. We are currently doing research on VTS (virtual team space) tools, technologies, buying and use patterns. There is a drawing for a copy of the 2006 RTC (real time collaboration) report (a $600 value) for those that complete this 10 minutes survey. Click on this link to be taken to the VTS survey and… Thanks!
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=34892454893
CS Service Offerings
These services are delivered at a distance using collaborative technologies! If you prefer on-site delivery, please discuss this option with us directly. Contact: davidc@collaborate.com if you're interested.
Technologies To Watch:
CS analysts are always being briefed on new collaborative products, releases and services. In addition we are working on a directory of collaborative tools/services that will be available on our web site. Once in a while, we see some new or emerging technology that we think is exceptional, either in concept or implementation. We decided to start a list of these vendors and products, and the May, 2003 issue of Inside Collaboration, lists the charter members for the TTW list. Since then we continue to add one or two vendors each month, that show us technology interesting and unique enough to make the list. If you believe your company or software should be on our TTW list, please contact me directly to set up a briefing with one or more of our analysts at: (davidc@collaborate.com).
- WebTrain - A Vancouver-based vendor of RTC. They offer both a hosted and licensed version of their Communicator TM product. Web conferencing, VoIP audio conferencing, some video conferencing and chat (presence awareness) are all part of it, but what differentiates them from the 100 other web conferencing vendors is their ability to integrate with other applications and data sources (they have a 25 question template) and the ease of configuring the GUI. Easy enough for an end-user to do. WebTrain is known for OEMing the product (to a number of telecommunications companies).
- GroupMembersOnly - Became available in January of this year (2006) it is an online community that is focused in the non-profit space and has many features focused on collaboration and social networking. They support web and audio conferencing but don't have version control or check-in/out for documents. They offer a unique business model for non-profits and only charge 5% for financial transactions (membership or events).
- Dimdim - Is open source web conferencing that is both browser-based and free. It has many of the usual features such as screen sharing )presentations and documents), polling, whiteboard with annotation, audio and video conferencing, chat, and the ability to record the meeting. There will be a fee-based "enterprise" version out this fall.
- Office.com - They are the exclusive U.S. reseller of ContactOffice
- MediaNet Innovations - Offers secure web conferencing (similar to Viack with their Via3 product)
including two-way voice, video, secure data sharing, and chat. They are focused on regulated industries, where all commun-ications are systematically documented for complying with mandated storage requirements.
- OpenText First Class 8.3 - FirstClass has been around for 10 years and a few years ago was bought by OpenText and is now one of their specialty businesses. With an estimated 9 million users (70% in the educational market) FirstClass is popular with universities and SMBs because of its light weight administration, robustness and low price. It also runs in 4 interfaces (web, windows, macintosh and unix). It is a virtual team space (VTS) with e-mail and unified communications capabilities and can support PC-to-PC calling.
- ContactOffice - a full-functioning SaaS-based Virtual team space and office for SoHOs and small businesses that aids in many types of collaboration. I was particularly impressed with the connectivity to ContactOffice. You can get to it over the web or from almost any mobile device. They also “white label” their software and are resold be a number of other resellers like mobile operators in Europe who are looking to differentiate their service. They support SMS messaging on phones as well as RSS throughout the offering. Their calendar can connect with Outlook and supports the iCal standard, and in their next release they will integrate at a deeper level so that tasks in ContactOffice will also show up on your Outlook task list and vice versa.
Events worth mentioning in the Collaborative Sphere -> read more
News and Announcements
Events in the collaboration space that are considered relevent and analyzed by CS Analysts:
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Social Networks and Online Communities:
a Second Order Effect
By David Coleman
I have written before about first, second and third order effects of technology. The first order effect was to take things that were on paper and put them up online. This happened between 1995 and 2000 when publishing to your web site was king.
However, with the new millennium, people began to realize that the Internet was really an interactive rather than just a publishing medium. This was a second order effect of the Internet, and built on the first order effect, but takes it further.[read more]
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 The Future of Business Meetings
By Christine Perey
People, processes, and technologies we use in business meetings are continuously changing in order to increase efficiency in the workplace or enhance meeting productivity. How can the addition of more technology help more than it hurts? The goal of this article is to take what is currently known about meetings and to overlay a vision of the future, to see how the addition of these new technologies (based on advanced signal processing and information analysis) can have a positive impact on meet-ings.[read more]
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Collaborative Strategies makes every effort to bring you timely, accurate information on collaboration and knowledge management. However, we are part of a rapidly evolving market ourselves and events occur during the publication of this newsletter every month that we do not become aware of or that happen post-production. If you know of such events, please contact David Coleman at Davidc@collaborate.com so we can note these key events in the next edition of this newsletter. |
