Collaboration News & Articles

Nuance has announced a new update to its PDF converter software, and the Enterprise 8 version is available now with new real-time collaboration tools like chat and simultaneous editing. 

Can an enterprise content management system promise to delight end-users and keep the company CEO out of jail at the same time?

The Intranet is dead! Long live the Intranet! ...so the refrain goes.

The promise of the Intranet was that it was going to liberate content and spread the wealth locked inside information repositories, closed networks, siloed file systems and even physical file cabinets. In many ways Intranets -- when done well -- have improved life behind the firewall.

However, we are far from the holy grail.

A Forrester Research survey found that just 43% of enterprise employees access an intranet every day. Worse, 35% don’t even use their intranet on a monthly basis.

The fact is that Intranet promises have not been fully realized, and this is exactly where the power of social comes in.

Social Intranets - The Promise

Social Business technology supplies the essential functionality missing from conventional intranets and turns them into the dynamic collaborative environments known as social intranets.

The promise of Social Intranets is to build on the successes of the original Intranet vision, but add these benefits:

• Open up content creation and curation to the full enterprise, leveraging the wisdom of the crowd
• Break down the walls between people, groups and departments via tools as simple as the @joesmith reference.
• Utilize internal social graph intelligence to enhance the relevancy of the intranet experience, improve search results and reduce the time to task completion
• Efficiently capture ideas and harness the innate innovation found in your workforce, leading to a more robust and streamlined ideation process

To learn more about how these benefits are being realized in practice, you can join the upcoming social intranet panel discussion on May 30th (live and online).

Infographic -- The Benefits of a Social Intranet

Join the Social Intranet Best Practices Panel Discusion

On May 30th you can join in for a live, online panel discussion focused on current trends and best practices for designing, implementing and succeeding with a Social Intranet.

Panel members include:

• Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group will discuss at a high level, the latest industry research and trends on how leading companies are revamping dusty, soul-sucking intranets, and giving employees a social, collaborative, engaging experience that drives productivity, fosters innovation, and yields staggering results.
• Tyson Cornell of PricewaterhouseCoopers will dig a level deeper, into the strategies and processes that global enterprises are using to deploy Social Business Software -- both to drive business transformation, and to add value to existing communication and information infrastructures.
• Tiffany LaBanca and Kristen Ritter of News Corporation will round out the panel, sharing a case study of how their company is becoming a social-powered organization. News Corporation's OurNews Social Business Network is changing the way the company communicates, collaborates, and innovates -- connecting more than 50 businesses and 15,000 employees on a unified global platform.

If social intranet success is your curiosity or mandate, sign-up for the online panel discussion here. 

This article was sponsored by Jive Software.

Although many businesses agree that enterprise social networking platforms improve knowledge sharing and collaboration, many do not properly track benefits of social to overall business impact and value.

Change control can be an issue if you’re managing a project largely using email. SharePoint Online contains robust out-of-the-box change control capabilities to help you keep project documentation manageable and clean.

Many companies have by now heard the much vaunted benefits of social business software and want to, or have already started to implement these tools. Studies support this. Forrester Research forecasts that enterprise social software will grow into a US$ 6.4 billion market by 2016.

But first some murkiness needs to be cleared.

This article focuses on how corporate websites and web channels are being affected by various factors such as the ubiquitous presence of smartphones and the influence of social media. It also suggests possible actions CXOs can take to retain their customers and if possible, to also attract new customer segments. Finally, it points out the birth of a new sibling to web channels, namely, the mobile channel.

Media workflow/marketing solutions provider ADAM Software is partnering with collaboration platform vendor ConceptShare to develop cross-media collaboration solutions. The companies hope to aid marketers in communicating faster and more efficiently around media files.

This is the third article in the series “What is This SharePoint Thing All About Anyway?” and in this article we are going to be looking at the concept of SharePoint Communities and how you could use them to improve your current working environment.

Dashboards are a pretty hot topic these days in online applications. Dashboards let you place frequently accessed information all on one single page and lend themselves particularly well to placing graphical info about your project in one place where it affords your team and senior stakeholders the ability to grab visual info quickly.

Imagine being in the throes of an exceptionally busy time at work, only to have your email box regularly deluged by a multi-week series of alerts regarding feminine napkins. Yes, this is a true story.

Seth Godin describes a Linchpin in his best selling book "Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?" as:

the person who is indispensable, because they refuse to become an interchangeable part, someone who merely follows the manual...the linchpins leverage something internal, not external, to create a position of power and value.”

If a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire can appreciate how difficult it is Being Human, so can a BPM practitioner” -- Anonymous  

How important is the human factor in driving meaningful process improvements for your business?

The social enterprise has the potential to transform the business landscape. New ways of communicating and collaborating are helping to break down the barriers between functional silos and geography. The end result will be more agile businesses fueled by better decision making and more efficient processes.

Microsoft has found itself a big market for cloud services in India's national government. Starting this year, the Indian government will deploy Microsoft Software-as-a-Service solutions to about 7.5 million users in the education market.