Document Collaboration News & Articles

Huddle (news, site) has entered in the hybrid cloud space by offering a private cloud version of its enterprise collaboration platform. It's just what the government ordered.

Huddle (news, site) calls itself the "#1 alternative to SharePoint in the cloud". It doesn't compare apples to apples with the entire SharePoint platform, but it does offer a user friendly alternative to SharePoint for enterprise collaboration and basic document management.

Cisco (news, site) announces today some enhancements to its enterprise collaboration solution, Cisco Quad, along with its availability as a hosted managed service.

Alfresco (news, site) offers an enterprise content management solution aimed at large enterprises (hence the word enterprise), but it decided it was missing a key segment of the market -- departments and SMBs. Today, they resolve this with the addition of a new subscription offering -- Alfresco Team. And it has some new functionality you won't currently find anywhere else.

Cloud-based social collaboration platform Central Desktop (news, site) has recently added new features to its collaborative suite. New features include presence detection and polling, which will enhance the way collaborators engage with each other online.

It's been said to be the alternative to SharePoint in the UK, especially since it has a new single pricing agreement with the UK government. Whether that's really true or not, Huddle's (news, site) adoption rates are high, and it has added a new 100% adoption guarantee to back it up.

This week, Forrester answers one of the questions we have been looking at for some time, notably, whether enterprises are taking to MS Office alternatives; Cabinet NG releases v7.0 of CNG-SAFE; Workshare releases an upgrade to its collaboration solution Workshare Compare; eGistics adds to its cloud storage capabilities and CloudMagic searches Gmail and Google Docs.

In my experience, you need to keep six things in mind to get SharePoint right the first time:

1. There’s no such thing as out of the box SharePoint
2. One size does not fit all
3. If you build it, they will not come
4. It’s never just about SharePoint
5. SharePoint is not an IT thing
6. SharePoint is not an Office product

Let’s take a detailed look at each of these in turn.

Are documents still relevant in the world of Enterprise 2.0? Web 2.0 pundits have argued that wikis, activity streams and real time status updates will soon replace the “archaic” document concept. But they’re wrong, and here is why…

Box.net (news, site) has come a long way in the last couple of years, from a small little known cloud-based document storage and collaboration provider to a potential contender in the content management arena. And like every other contender, it's not enough to simply offer your wares, you have to play nice with the others.

The technology adoption lifecycle is a usable model to gain understanding into the adoption process of a new technology or product within a certain population or culture, such as an organization. What it doesn’t tell us, however, is what value it creates as a result of technology adoption. To understand that, we need to look at how the use of a new technology or product affects the ability to perform tasks and achieve goals. Let's look at this specifically in the context of enterprise collaboration.

Metadata, a key component of any document management system. Everyone needs it, but getting it set up and having it used are two completely different things.

With the Bing spat still ringing in our ears, the next little tiff looks set to be about Google’s Cloud Connect for Office and Microsoft’s response to it. Email use is exploding, while eXpresso is offering document collaboration on LotusLive. LibreOffice has also been busy.

In the SMB space this week, a look at research that confirms what many have suspected: The cloud space in the SMB sector has yet to be fully exploited. We also find out that Facebook is the principal online market tool for small businesses, while Openbravo offers SMBs the agile ERP.

In November, collaboration specialist eXpresso (news, site) announced that it was no longer offering its services directly, but instead that it was teaming up with IBM (news, site)  and others. There was speculation that it might be some time before anything was heard from them, but here we are only three months later and it has announced that its document collaboration software is now available on LotusLive.