Collaboration News & Articles

There's no sign of enterprise content management investment decreasing in the coming year. At least not according to new Forrester (news, site) research.

On July 17 Open Atrium (news, site) was introduced to the world. The software is a distribution of the popular open source Drupal CMS framework (news, site) packaged up in the form of an intranet and knowledge management tool.

A mere 75,000 downloads later, Open Atrium now support 31 languages at varying levels of translation. The team behind this social business software used by small groups working together as well as large, geographically distributed organizations, has some firm ideas about the future.

Nstein (news, site) recently stepped up their relationship with evolve24, an analytics research firm in St. Louis. The collaboration gives evolve24 access to Nstein’s handy Sentiment Analysis module, allowing them to quickly determine an article’s overall tone for key insight into a company’s representation.  

"Reputations are built over time and are the response to actions taken by a corporation,” explained Scot Wheeler, Vice President of Strategy & Client Services for evolve24. “For example, reputation can be hurt by unaddressed negative responses to products and services, including poor customer support, regulatory or legislative issues, insensitive ad campaigns, or any perceived affront to an audience, while a new product announcement, a viral campaign or launch of user groups may create highly positive coverage in influential publications and blogs which will help build reputation.”

Wheeler estimates that one person at peak performance can detect the tone of 25 articles per hour. Nstien's technology will reportedly boost that number to tens of thousands of pieces of content per day and still require only one person to manually test and verify results. 

“We are thrilled that evolve24 continues to expand its relationship with Nstein”, said Nstein CTO Jean-Michel Texier, “This collaboration allow us to deepen our knowledge of marketing decision support systems and accelerate the reinforcement of our technological offering in opinion mining and automated brand monitoring.”

Want your reputation measured? Check out evolve24's site here. 

"With the EContent 100 list, we name the companies that we believe demonstrate continued leadership in the content industry, as well as those whose innovation foreshadows all that digital content has to offer," said Michelle Manafy, Editor-in-Chief of EContent Magazine.

As usual this year's lot includes a ton of familiar faces. As much as we'd love to cover everyone's viability in the market, we simply haven't the time, but here's a quickie on some of the names and categories that stood out: 

A new simple hosted web content management system that has been in private beta for the past three years and which focuses on usability and simplifying processes has just been release by Arizona based Ixpleo.

Long has there been discussion about which is better, Google Sites or SharePoint. Google aims to come out the winner, as it adds new functionality to Google Sites in the form of functionally designed site templates.

Browser-based collaboration for anyone to use is the basis of Ubidesk, a new SaaS solution to the growing group-working conundrum.

Tune in to your company's social media using nGenera's Collaboration Server, linking social sites and your company's SharePoint and email systems. 

All the potential advantages of a service-oriented architecture are out the window if developers lose sight of the forest for the trees. Adjoovo has come up with an ingenious registry solution to keep businesses out of the potential pitfalls of the service-oriented approach: metadata cataloguing and Web 2.0 visualization.

While enterprises continue to grab up various social software solutions for their internal environments, Socialtext (news, site), a provider of such solutions, is working to increase the business value of their offerings.

Designed to ensure partner success, their new Services Partner Program gathers participants that specialize in different strategic practices for deploying social software. According to Socialtext, the benefits of joining include:

• Technical support handled by Socialtext,
• Training on Socialtext product and methodology for organizational traction; access to dedicated secure hosted appliance for internal training purposes; full access to proprietary Socialtext training and rollout materials
• Opportunities to jointly develop thought leadership, references, and speaking engagements
• Offer added value by integrating Socialtext and other enterprise systems. Easy integration with legacy systems via ReST API and Open Social widgets

So far, Socialtext's service partner party includes Future Changes, Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0, SiftGroups, SpanStrategies, The Adoption Council and Winkwaves. The company hopes that bringing these folks together will result in more depth and value for customers who either use or want Socialtext to dress up their workflow. 

"For too long, people have missed opportunities because they didn't know which of their colleagues might have information that could help solve a customer's problem or adapt to a change in the market," said Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext. "These service partners will help you get up-and-running on our platform in no time, and assist with cultural assessment, project selection and prioritization."

For more information, or to start the certification process, shoot an e-mail over to partners[at]socialtext[dot]com, or check out the partner program website. 

Hot new service Glasscubes (news, site) which launched officially in October, now offers online editing for its collaboration suite thanks to a tie-up with Zoho.

"Some tipping point has been reached with enterprise 2.0," explained Andrew McAfee, a Principal Research Scientist from the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, at this year's Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

McAfee explained that while he used to see potential customers approach enterprise tools with skepticism, he's recently noticed a significant shift in attitude. In 2009 alone, McAfee's seen apprehension migrate to some flavor of acceptance or resignation. And though he feels the shift is an overall positive one, in his book there are still a few pesky warning signs that have the potential to cause some struggle:

Seems increased competition with Google is making Microsoft look twice at its pricing for online services such as SharePoint (news, site) and Exchange.

The company has reduced the monthly rates for its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) which includes SharePoint from US$ 15 to US$ 10. They also dropped the monthly subscription for Exchange Online from US$ 10 to US$ 5.

In addition to the price reduction, BPOS is also available in Singapore, and soon India. BPOS will be available in over 36 countries by the end of this year and there are a number of new high profile organizations using the service. Trials are slated to begin in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania and Taiwan.

It's this adoption that is pushing the price of the online services down. According to Microsoft specifically, "“rapid customer adoption, global scale and improved efficiencies from new software such as Exchange Server 2010."

Microsoft is committed to adding new capabilities to the online services every 90 days. In October, they increased their support to 30,000 users and added some new admin capabilities.

At the SharePoint Conference, they also announced SharePoint Online for External Websites and are still working on pricing for Office Web Apps.

Is it all enough to take on Google and the increasing adoption of Google Apps for Business?

In the first upgrade to its enterprise 2.0 social software product TeamPage since last March, Traction Software (news, site) has taken TeamPage on the road for the release of v4.2.

Not literally ‘on the road’ -- although the company is currently exhibiting at the Enterprise 2.0 conference currently underway in San Francisco -- but it has added new features that gives users the ability to post content and comments on company wikis or blogs ‘on the road’ with simple, secure two-way email based collaboration.

 Well, when Box.net and Salesforce.com announced their partnership last week, we said it illustrated a growing trend toward providing applications on existing Software-as-a-Service platforms. Here to back us up this week is another Salesforce.com partnership, but this one might have a bit more volume, as it's with Adobe (news, site).

To put it simply, developers can now create applications featuring their Salesforce.com data using Adobe Flash technology. Adobe Air is available for desktop applications as well. Apply the popularity that desktop applications such as Tweetdeck have received to an an application that can utilize the vast amount of information available in any given Salesforce.com account, and things get pretty interesting, right? See here for a demo:

But don't got too excited just yet; the fruit from the Adobe/Salesforce.com womb is still in its preview stage. There's no doubt, however, that this particular combo is going to give developers a new and very exciting reason to flex their talents.

From another angle, it's also interesting to see Adobe making moves toward what looks like a business-centric style (remember their gobbling up of Omniture). If you've got your head in your hands over it because you're trying to figure out what it all means for the bigger picture, don't worry, we're in the boat with you.

For now, it's safe to say the Enterprise is about to swell with third party applications, much like our social and browser environments. How will it pan out? Well, keep up with us here and let's find out.