Collaboration News & Articles

Regardless of what executives or collective management think, social networks are already shaping how business is done. From how projects are managed to how customers interact with your company, social networks are here and can have a positive effect on any organization. Here are 4 practical reasons to jump on the bandwagon.

 What do you get when you mix an online storage service with customer relationship management superstar Salesforce.com? Integration that allows customers to access their files from directly within their CRM platform, that’s what.

Box.net (news, site) recently announced the launch of their handy new application, which also includes support for their OpenBox platform, granting users access to integrated services such as Zoho and eFax. Voila: 

Integration with Salesforce.com is nothing new, and Box.net's announcement demonstrates the growing trend toward providing applications on existing Software-as-a-Service platforms.  

Box.net is currently offering unlimited storage for companies that sign up for the service, and an Enterprise level account will run you about US$ 25 per month. 
 

What do you do if you run a small business, need a collaboration environment, but can’t afford SharePoint? Central Desktop (news, site) which provides a SaaS platform for small businesses, is offering such a solution to Intuit's Quickbook users by making it available through Intuit’s App Center.

For those not familiar with it, Central Desktop is a collaboration tool built on Web 2.0 technology for small business that is scalable and gives users a full range of collaboration tools including wikis, document sharing, task management and shared calendars.

Intuit’s App Center is an online market where users of Intuit’s business software Quickbooks Pro and Premier can trial and purchase applications that work directly out of Quickbooks.

While it is not clear how much users will be charged for using it on the IAC, Central Desktop has three different editions: Workgroup, Enterprise and Community.

There are a number of small differences between the three editions, but the only real difference is the pricing, which is based on the number of users. The Workgroup edition, which is for less than 25 users will cost up to US $99/ month, while the Enterprise edition for unlimited users costs US $10 per user/month. The community edition, again for more than 25 users, is US$ 3 month.

This is only the most recent addition to the Intuit platform. Earlier this month it went into partnership with Cabinet NG which extended Intuit’s own document management software.

For those interested in Central Desktop, if you sign up now you’ll get a full free15-day trial.
 

Endeca (news, site), the search applications company that kicked out an Information Access platform earlier this year, is stepping it up a notch.

Through the expansion of their Extend Partner Program, Endeca hopes customers will find it easier to integrate text analytics with said platform. On board with their endeavor is a name our readership might me more familiar with: Nstein.

The Cold War warriors will remember "glasnost" -- the term coined by the USSR's last head of state, Mikhail Gorbachev, that stands for transparency and openness -- as signaling a gradual end to the threat of thermonuclear Armageddon. Now, Glasnost 21 is the clever name for a new U.K.-based collaboration suite to open up those fusty communication channels.

Happy anniversary to the spreadsheet! That's right, thirty years ago today Dan Bricklin helped dream up and release VisiCalc, the world's original spreadsheet.

In the last three decades Bricklin has continued to exercise his love for cells and grids via the Product Lead position for SocialCalc. Socialtext's (news, site) spreadsheet solution is integrated in their suite and can link data from other spreadsheets and workspace pages. Like their name suggests, the tool also attempts to reflect the changing times by including various social features as well:

"SocialCalc is the next logical step for the spreadsheet," Bricklin said. "As we move into the social world, as typified by a wiki where there is one current copy that everyone can work from, the spreadsheet needs to move there, too."

To celebrate the concept's dirty thirty, the company has just stripped SocialCalc of its beta status. Existing Socialtext customers can get the tool for US$ 3 per month, while new customers can enjoy the tool free of charge for 2010. As usual, there is also a free trial version for all the skeptical. 

Having been live since 2008, Glasscubes formally launches this week to offer collaboration, document and project management, and Intranet without the complexity.

You are constantly being told that SharePoint is more than a simple document management and collaboration solution. It's a platform. Well here's an example of just what SharePoint (news, site) is capable of when it is leveraged as a platform.

Microsoft teamed up with Quark (news, site), a provider of publishing solutions, to demonstrate a new solution that supports publishers and multi-channel publishing.

Right now, most document management solutions work under the idea of many people making separate edits, locking the document to prevent edits stepping on one another. But what if you could all edit a document at the same time like you can in Google Docs and similar tools? That, in some ways, is the promise of Google Wave (news, site).

October is update month for SharePoint Online and there are a few new features that demonstrate Microsoft's desire to support larger organizations.

There are probably a lot of clients of the SaaS document management company NetDocuments (news, site) that will be glad that the company has decided to team-up with security giant RSA by entering the RSA Secured Partner Programme.

The long-running program established by RSA is a technology alliance that brings together over 300 companies with over 1000 complimentary solutions.

So what’s the big deal with NetDocuments, you ask? Well this partnership will add an extra layer of security to the already substantial security checks in place to protect documents that are being held by NetDocuments.

For My Innovation (FMYI) stepped into the ring to duke it out with fellow social solutions for the enterprise (think Socialtext) six versions ago, but this is the first time they've popped up on our radar.

In addition to some delightful, tree-hugging values, the FMYI package includes several features that are common in enterprise-level tools: a calendar, news feed, workspaces, the ability to post and share text, links, files, events and tasks, etc. Like its predecessors, version 6 of the app claims to go beyond work needs, but this time the company aims to make it fun. 

Box.net (news, site) has taken steps to up the battle for supremacy over SharePoint. They have acquired Increo Solutions, adding some capabilities to their online document management solution that SharePoint does not have.

Remember when Flypaper (news, site) was pretty much the only Flash-based CMS we covered? Totally not the case anymore. And perhaps it's in response to increasing interest around this particular niche within a niche that Flypaper  has recently gotten a little flashier.

Though not immediately available, the company announced that it will soon bi-directionally support Adobe’s XFL file format. For Flash developers, this means seamless creation and sharing of content between between Flypaper and Flash. 

As many of us wait patiently for the third beta of Movable Type (news, site) version 5, the team behind the popular Web CMS continues to tide us over with other updates.

Most recently they announced their partnership with Zemanta, a service that boosts content (blog posts, articles or web pages) by scouring the Web for related images, smart links, keywords and text,. The idea is that serving up these results to the user will enable them to enrich and inform their content in the most relevant ways. And by 'relevant; we mean Zemanta has indexed over one million popular media sources such as Wikimedia Commons and Flickr. 

"Using Zemanta is sort of like having a content servant at your elbow suggesting ways to make what you're writing more interesting and compelling through photos, videos, related articles, and useful tags," wrote Ginger Tully, Director of Marketing, Six Apart. 

Zemanta now comes built-in to Movable Type version 4.32, so if you haven't updated yet, now is a really good time to do so. Check out Zemanta's article about exactly how they're working with Movable Type here, then grab the newest version of the CMS and go content crazy.