Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Collobration News & Articles

IntraLinks has announced the release of Connect, an enterprise-class solution that deals with two of the biggest problems in providing collaboration for its users. The problems in question are collaboration with contacts beyond the firewall, and the related problem of providing security for data that is moving in and out of the enterprise.

Enterprise social networking provider Yammer may only be four years old, but it has a huge allowance and lots of friends. Yammer, which has been adopted by over 4 million corporate users, announced a significant influx of new cash from its fifth round of funding.

While we might expect social within the enterprise to be easy as Facebook or Twitter, it’s not.  Deploying social technology within the enterprise is a journey filled with organizational hurdles that include compliance, security, culture change, executive sponsorship, budget and integration challenges to name just a few.  In some organizations, this social journey begins when the business wants to embrace social before corporate IT is ready.

For so many years, the round trip of information between company and customer has been an arduous process of exchanges from designer, to engineer, to manufacturer, to marketer, to sales person, to customer, to market research and back to the designer.

Remember the manila envelope with the column grid on the front, filled with names (most crossed off), as a way of circulating inter-office information? When that envelope hit your desk you opened it, read the note inside, signed or took what you needed from the envelope, tied it back up, crossed your name off the grid, and passed it to the next person on the list. That was before email. It was simple. We all knew what to do with the envelope. It was every organization’s cultural legacy. But it had real limitations.

With a single sign-on, Podio users have access to their Box accounts and collaborate in the cloud. Also, a Box customer study shows iPhone remains dominant, but Android adoption is accelerating in the enterprise.

Last week I emptied the contents of my community manager’s toolbox to showcase a few of my favorite tools and apps. Since then, a few other social media management tools crossed my feed, both coming with recommendations from other community managers.

In last week’s Social Business blog, I wrote about building the culture for Social Business. For companies to successfully become social businesses, they must implement core processes and gain organizational buy-in dedicated to supporting knowledge transfer. However, culture is not enough in and of itself. To optimize Social Business, companies must also use the proper tools associated with high value collaboration.

Impressions from a Social Media Week that shook up New York.

Will eight be great? Now is your chance to find out as Microsoft unveils the consumer preview of its next operating system at Mobile World Congress 2012, highlighting how important the OS is to Microsoft's future in the mobile and tablet market.

While there are many benefits to Facebook’s Timeline feature, a prominent byproduct allows us to more easily have access to those incriminating posts we made back when we were much less savvy about sharing our thoughts and opinions than we are today (hopefully). Yes, we can block others from seeing them, but we know that they are there. Well, now thanks to DataSift, brands can have access to tweets from as far back as 2010 — back to a time when we thought tweeting about our breakfast was exactly what our followers wanted to know.

WebDAM Solutions and Box have joined forces to bring digital asset management and collaboration to the cloud. The WebDAM app for Box is available starting today.

It wasn't quite like Apple buying NeXT computer to get Steve Jobs to come back to the company, but Dropbox said it will buy Cove, a Silicon Valley collaboration startup, in part for the strong leadership it can bring to the cloud-based data storage company. The move brings two former Facebook icons, Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi (director of engineering and principal product manager respectively), to join the Dropbox management team.

As we learned in last Wednesday’s Social Business TweetJam, creating a social business requires a unique combination of people, process and technology. For SharePoint users, the technology is the easy part, but getting the people and process in place can be challenging.

You may have heard about how more Facebook users are unfriending each other. While some have decided that this is a very unfriendly action, it may suggest that after five years, users are becoming more savvy about how to create, connect and collaborate socially online. A recent study by Pew Research suggests that people are also becoming more savvy about protecting their privacy online.

At the huge Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain today, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor took the stage announcing the social web giant is backing initiatives to "standardize" mobile web browsers to help deal with what Taylor characterized as "…rampant technology fragmentation across mobile browsers." 

Last year Microsoft acquired Skype to widespread groans from users and competitors, but it doesn’t seem that  Microsoft is second guessing its decision. Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft announced the release of a beta version of Skype for Windows Phone, and it looks different than any version of Skype we’ve seen before.

In my previous article, I shared the first five tips and recommendations for getting started with social business:

1. Social is the new normal
2. Target the social ecosystem
3. Social isn’t a destination
4. Facebook, Twitter and other social media
5. Strategy, not technology

As promised from the last article, I have compiled five additional recommendations to help those looking to integrate social into their existing business.

In March last year, Alfresco and Jive announced they were getting together to bring content management and social business software together. Today, they have announced the release of Jive Connector for Alfresco that enables cross-platform publishing between the two.

 The term "smartphone" just doesn't do the category justice now, as the world's biggest mobile show in Barcelona is being used to unveil a host of super-computers in your hand, radical redesigns, media super-devices (like a 41 megapixel camera) and much more. Check out what's at the show from the likes of Sony, Nokia and others as the show gets underway.