Collaboration Tools News & Articles

We all know that collaboration plays an essential role in enabling employees and companies to reach goals and milestones, effect change and, in general, step up productivity levels. Yet despite this, collaboration doesn’t come naturally to all. It often takes companies years to establish a culture of collaboration within their organizations, which is often hampered by internal and external factors --choosing the wrong or unstable tool(s), having too many tools, lack of enforcement or leadership on use, tough learning curves and, not to be overlooked: The human factor.

Web CMS vendor (and the latest J. Boye Web Idol winner) Sitecore (news, site) integrated its content management system with Telligent Community -- a platform for social content, interactive communities, collaboration and social analytics.

In the name of online engagement, community collaboration and traffic increase, Sitecore integrated with Telligent’s (news, site) functionality to allow for web content to be leveraged in online communities and to “…enhance the way Telligent Community enables organizations to interact with their customers,” according to Patrick Brandt, Telligent CEO.

On the Sitecore side, the integration package aims to provide centralized security (using single sign-on) and a way to manage content in both Sitecore and Telligent. Let’s note that both are technologically compatible, Microsoft .NET products.

The security integration allows for central user management: i.e. users only need to be created in Sitecore CMS and are automatically transferred to Telligent Community after their first login.

“Creating more channels for customer engagement is the natural evolution of CMS software,” said Darren Guarnaccia, VP product marketing, Sitecore.

The content management side of the integration allows users to mix and match social media applications and web content, while being able to repurpose content for Telligent Community’s online social networking, forums, blogs and multimedia galleries in Sitecore sites. Social content can be used as is, or filtered based on a user’s rights and group memberships.

Over the past month, many of us have discovered Creately, an online application for creating diagrams, flowcharts and wireframes. Nominated for best Rich Internet Applications of 2009 over at O’Reilly media, Creately has received some other attention, as well.

Creately lets users share and publish drawings with other users so as to garner comments and support. It boasts itself as easy and it's full of lots of features that make the chore of creating charts, site maps and other user-intensive models kinda fun.

For those seeking new file sharing and collaboration solutions on this lovely Tuesday, FolderMaestro has a new offering. Boasting unbeatable prices as one of their advantages over competitors, FileMaestro presents File Check-Out, a relatively inexpensive product that makes it easier to collaborate when you’re out of the office and on your laptop. They also seem to think they are taking on Microsoft SharePoint. How interesting.

In theory, these things strike many as a good idea. And, most notably, they might actually be. But they also strike fear in the hearts of CIOs world-wide. Is the cloud secure? Is the cloud compliant? Is the cloud performant enough not to frustrate the entire company?

And then beyond these questions, there are the economic realities.

SaaS vendors argue that their approach saves you money. Start-up costs are certainly lower, but long term TCO may be another story. The scenario needs to be modeled for your specific organization, if you want to decide with confidence.

SpringCM -- yes, a provider of SaaS enterprise content management solutions -- thinks they've got some valuable information to share. They're running a webinar tomorrow, called The Economics of SaaS vs. On Premises.

Topics include:

• How to measure the costs and benefits of a solution over time
• The case for SaaS payback
• Why a platform (vs a point solution) can save a great deal of time and money

One additional angle that we found interesting is their approach to dealing with on-premise SharePoint when the core Enterprise CMS infrastructure lives in the cloud. You might ask about this.

You can sign-up now. The event runs tomorrow, Thurs. August 6th at 1pm Eastern (10am Pacific time).