Enterprise Collaboration News, Reviews

Enterprise guinea pigs will soon be getting hold of the next big update to Microsoft's Office Suite, with the public promised beta access in the near future.

Since it was founded in 2008 in Ontario, Igloo has grown steadily in North America and the EMEA. Its growth has been aided by the confluence of cloud computing, social media, and mobile technologies. And this year, it's set to grow again and has raised C$ 5 million to push growth.

CrowdEngineering has put a patent on crowdsourcing. As you may remember, CrowdEngineering provides a platform designed to fully integrate existing processes and applications with the benefits of technical crowdsourcing. This week they put a ring on it, so to speak, by securing a patent that covers its core technology for enterprise crowdsourcing, the foundation of its flagship CrowdForce platform.

Yammer, the rapidly growing enterprise social network, exceeds 4 million corporate users and is rumored to be working on a US$ 40 million funding round.

2011 was the year of the Social Business. We saw employees across all types of organizations using both desktop-bound and mobile social tools to interact with the entire business ecosystem. But, while there's no question about organizations increasingly using these tools to collaborate and communicate, were enterprises truly able to capture their full potential? Let's take a look back at a few highlights from the past year.

There were no big Microsoft-based announcements for SharePoint this year. 2011 was really about proper planning and implementation practices for SharePoint 2010. And of course, it was about the partner ecosystem and all the good stuff it brought to the SharePoint platform. Here are some highlights, mixed in with a discussion about social business with Jared Sparato.

In these often-trying economic times, a tide of sometimes overwhelming change in technology and its disruptive consequences has begun rolling over our organizations. We've all seen it in the media, in our homes, at our workplaces. It's not too much to say that the entire landscape of how we work and live is steadily being transformed, one piece at a time. The root causes are fairly obvious because they're happening all around us: the Internet revolution, the smart mobile revolution, the social media revolution, the rise of the cloud, the vast new flood of information in our daily lives and the fact that we're getting more and more comfortable with technology being deeply embedded in our day-to-day activities, even if we don't always realize it. The same transformation is happening to businesses, just more slowly and often with a bit more turbulence.

2011 was an eventful year for the world of gamification. This year, the term itself finally went mainstream and started to make sense for consumers and business alike. Yet as we end the year and start another, what will gamification’s role look like in 2012? Will it continue to grow, or will it fall by the wayside like some other emerging industries have done in the past?

Telligent, provider of software for social business and communities, has closed its acquisition of Leverage Software. Why buy another social player? Here's what they got in the deal.

Avoiding the trough of disillusionment beyond the peak of inflated expectations*

So your enterprise jumped on to the bandwagon of enterprise social software in 2011 with the hopes of fostering new innovations, breaking down organizational silos and establishing a sense of social communication for your geographically distributed staff. Predictably, a large number of people signed up in the first few weeks, a few enthusiastic ones posted blogs, formed communities around domain and business, a senior business leader perhaps even attempted to make this the mainstream platform for her organizational change process. However, as the year draws to an end, the over enthusiasm of a few lighthouses seems to be tapering off, user adoption has slowed down, people are getting back to old ways of working. In summary, the trough of disillusionment is not very far if corrective actions are not taken.

The further Box.net moves into the Enterprise, the greater the need for better security and management features. Today the company aims to give its users just that with the release of three new security adds for business users. 

Email isn't dead right? Enterprise collaboration vendor Huddle acknowledges this and has provided a way for organizations to manage their email by integrating it with its collaboration platform.

You're probably well aware that companies across the globe are making a beeline to cloud computing systems, but do you know what happens once they get there? Business technology company CSC surveyed IT decision makers from eight different countries in order to determine these outcomes, and the results are likely to surprise you.  

When you spend US$ 8.5 billion on a company, you'll want to start earning some of that back someday, Microsoft thinks it has that figured out.

While it's always fun to make predictions for what the next year holds, it is rare when someone returns to those predictions to see how the fantasy held up to the reality. That is exactly what David Coleman does with this piece: Reviews his predictions for 2011 with the benefit of hindsight.