Collaboration News & Articles

In a continued effort to extol the virtues of the upcoming SharePoint 2010 (news, site) platform, Microsoft created a special competition for seven startups in their BizSpark program. The competition? In one week create an Enterprise 2.0 solution on the SharePoint 2010 platform. Here are the results.

"You know that feeling of never quite being caught up? That's called work.”

These are the words of Justin Yuen, the president of FMYI (news, site). His company, which offers a Facebook-like collaboration platform for the enterprise and, strangely enough, adamantly rallies against work, saw some mighty fine numbers in 2009.

In recent times the Bitrix (news, site) intranet portal has seen action of the collaborative variety, as well as some drag and drop business process design. Now, thanks to the company's latest addition of mobile instant messaging, users of the portal can enjoy its benefits from any location.

The Gilbane (news, site) San Fransisco conference is a few months away, but things are already starting to take shape. Depending on your area of interest -- web content management, enterprise content management, internet, intranet -- there will be something new for you to learn.

The pre-conference workshops have just been announced, here's a look:

• Insider's Guide to Selecting WCM, Collaboration, and Social Software: Join Tony Byrne of CMS Watch to get a better understanding of the converging marketplace, who the key players are and how to traverse the roadmap to making the right technology/vendor decision for your needs.
• Learn to Develop an Actionable Intranet Strategy: Scott Liewehr, a Gilbane senior analyst, will take you through the steps required to build an actionable intranet strategy
• Managing Smart Content: How to Deploy XML Technologies across Your Organization: In this workshop, Gilbane senior consultant Dale Waldt and other members of the Gilbane practice on XML technologies will talk about their XML experiences and provide practical usage strategies.
• A Methodology for Web Governance: Christine Pierpoint of WelchmanPierpoint, will guide you through the component of a Web governance lifecycle, take a look at the steps to create a Web governance framework and discuss best practices and model.

You can also take a closer look at the conference schedule which is broken down into tracks for Colleagues and Collaboration, Content Publishing, Customers and Engagement, and Content Technology.

The Gilbane San Francisco conference takes place May 18-20, 2010 at the West Market Street Hotel in San Francisco. Registration is open and every Conference Plus Package comes with a free Kindle.

Yammer (news, site) is attracting plenty of attention and new users. Now it has attracted further investment, as it picks up a fresh stock of capital.

In the world of Document Management two of the hottest topics are cloud computing and security. Interestingly, however, it seems that according to a report from Forrester we're not taking to cloud storage at all, and we also discovered that data security is increasingly troublesome. Could it be that there's a link between the two?

Continuing to build up on the bright developments that we saw in CQ 5.1 and 5.2, Day Software (news, site) released the newest version of their Communiqué Web CMS/DAM/Social Collaboration product.

Day’s CTO David Nüscheler and CMO Kevin Cochrane gave us a tour of the top new features in CQ 5.3.

We continue our weekly SMB Tech Rollup this time with the news that many SMBs are getting worried about IT security, but are happily embracing the cloud.

In addition, Microsoft and Intuit are getting together in the cloud, HP and Cisco could be helping SMBs with new pricing arrangements, and Spigit is focusing on better collaboration tools.

Following up on their plans to bring a little Web 2.0 into the enterprise space, the Sage team (news, site) has announced the upcoming release of the new Sage Enterprise Webtop. Designed to operate on the cloud or on premise, the tool represents the company’s shift toward an all out user-centric good time.  

Up and coming Irish company Goshido, found a smart way to raise funding to prep for the forthcoming launch of its focused project collaboration tool.

In the land of SDL (news, site), today is extra special. The Global Information Management solutions provider is launching their own consolidated brand.

Translation: all business units in SDL -- SDL Tridion, SDL XySoft and SDL TRADOS Technologies, SDL Enterprise Technologies and SDL Language Services -- will be referred to as divisions of SDL in a move to unify the company.

The five specialized business divisions are:

• Structured Content Technologies
• Web Content Management Solutions
• eCommerce Technologies
• Language Technologies
• Language Services

As we were just saying, SDL has made been making moves all over the life cycle map, including their recent dabbling in eCommerce via the acquisition of Fredhopper. For those that wondered how the company would maintain consistency after such a branching out, this is it.

Said Mark Lancaster, CEO and Chairman of SDL:

This is an important move for SDL in ensuring that we provide one unified and consistent message to the market. This does not change who SDL’s customers talk to in the different divisions, nor does it change our products or goals. This re-naming of the different divisions as part of SDL only affects the way we refer to the different solutions we provide.

Got a one goal, one mission kind of mindset? Keep an eye on SDL. 

Next month will see the first of Salesforce.com’s 2010 releases with the launch of Spring ’10. Of the changes, a new interface will combine much of the old with an updated look and feel that is designed to make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.

British software company Yuuguu hits the market with a messaging platform for all seasons offering a range of collaboration and communication tools.

SDL Tridion (news, site) has spread its Web Content Management wings right on over to the Land of the Rising Sun, thanks to partnerships with Japan based companies Nihon Unisys and TAKT Systems.

The Nihon Unisys Group has been a provider of IT solutions since 1958. In 2008, the company started building their Internet Data Center (iDC) for hosting, ASP and SaaS businesses. Tricked out with SDL Tridion, the model offers Nihon Unisys’s customers a central Web CMS as well as the high quality maintenance and services Nihon Unisys postulates.

TAKT Systems will also be standing by with SDL Tridion, ready to work with consulting and content creation agencies for website implementation.

On a beeline for global domination, SDL Tridion also recently acquired European eCommerce company, Fredhopper. The significance of getting hands-on with a Dutch eCommerce provider like Friedhopper lies not only in the expansion to new territories, but the obvious move in a new direction as well.

With a hold on Global Information Management, and what looks like a promising dip into the online shopping pool, we’re going to guess that it would be wise to keep an eye on these guys.

Want to know what the next generation of collaboration software looks like? Hmm...so do we. It looks like IBM (news, site) is going to tell us.