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Posts Tagged ‘Collaboration Software’

RIM and IBM Load up the Blackberry with Lotus Collaboration Applications

IBM and Research in Motion (RIM) announced a partnership today to sell Blackberry devices fully loaded with IBM’s collaboration software. This is the first time IBM has sold Blackberry devices into its business channel.

Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections will both be available on the Blackberry. Lotus Quickr is an IBM document sharing application. Lotus Connections is social software technology that helps find people with a particular expertise.

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The two companies are long-time partners. For the past nine years, IBM’s Mobile Enterprise Services organization has worked with clients on integrating the Blackberry Enterprise solution.

On its surface, this latest alliance looks like a smart one, combining Blackberry’s dominance in the corporate market, with Lotus Connections, IBM Software’s fastest growing product. This will add to an existing integration between Blackberry devices and Lotus Sametime, another collaboration software from IBM. Lotus Sametime gives users the ability to see if others are online. it also includes instant messaging and calendar functions.

The alliance is strong but a big issue is the viability of applications on Blackberry devices. Blackberry applications have had little pick up in the enterprise. The applications are pricey, too, costing $10, $20 or more.

But it is interesting to note that IBM will be selling the Blackberry devices already fully loaded with the Lotus software. This means the applications will be immediately available to customers. Corporate IT has to this point been reticent about allowing access to applications on Blackberry devices. This may make for an easier sell by combining the hardware and software into one package.

A major hindrance is Blackberry’s core functionality as a messaging device. It is not designed to serve applications. The iPhone and the Nexus One both have an optimized touch screen interface that makes the devices better suited for applications. The Blackberry’s keyboard makes it ideal for email and text messaging.

We expect the Lotus applications will be primarily used for viewing documents. Writing to documents on a Blackberry device seems like it would be quite laborious. Emailing comments to the collaboration environment would be more suitable, playing to the strengths of the Blackberry device.

It’s unclear how fast the enterprise will adopt mobile applications but all signs show huge interest in smart phones by business users who want access to corporate application whenever or wherever they may be. According to Forrester Research, IT managers are dramatically underestimating the demand for mobile in the enterprise. Forrester expects that perception will undoubtedly change as demand for access to corporate applications soars over the next two years.

But RIM does look like it is on the right track with the choice in applications. According to Forrester, mobile collaboration technologies are just beginning to grow in usage by smart phone users. Adoption will increase as more collaboration vendors make its applications available on mobile platforms.

Forrester:

“So what are employees doing with their smartphones? They mostly do basic things to stay productive: email, contact management, and calendaring. Productivity tools — the ability to open, view, and perhaps mark up documents — comes next, followed by a slew of specialized applications and one important nugget: team collaboration applications. Why isn’t team collaboration adoption level higher? Because few companies are currently making applications like Cisco WebEx, Microsoft SharePoint, or Lotus Connections available to mobile devices.”

We are seeing partnerships emerge that combine hardware and software technologies. Last week, Microsoft and Hewlett–Packard announced a $250 million partnership that will feature Microsoft software on Hewlett-Packard hardware to sell into data centers and cloud service providers.

Further, Google is now offering its own smart phone. HTC manufactures the device. An enterprise phone is in development. It will undoubtedly feature Google Apps as the collaborative software built into the smart phone.

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OfficeMedium: Intranet for the Small Business User

We write a lot about the battles for the enterprise, the merits of Sharepoint and Google’s pitches into the corporate world.

But it’s always good to watch the new players who use existing open-source software to build something pretty quickly that people can use. OfficeMedium is a service that is a fit for the small business user with just enough social features to give it a decent chance of winning over companies looking to establish a community platform for their users.

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OfficeMedium is a web-based, intranet and collaboration software. It’s developed on the Drupal platform so you know it has every possible module available to it for adding on if needed.

Overall, OfficeMedium is a clean, easy to use intranet software. In the new world of the enterprise, every employee will create their own media. OfficeMedium provides an environment to fit with this emerging trend but with enough hooks to satisfy the needs of a business where keeping people in the loop is often mission critical.

This front page has a clean UI with clear demarcation for recent content added or updated; comments; a calendar; a “shoutbox,” for quick messages and a basic activity stream.

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The profiles we looked at have just a few fields for web sites but included a blog, personal and miscellaneous sites that the user may include. We’d add several more fields to this section to reflect the real media presence of the user.

The blog environment has built in notifications that may be sent to users. Comments can be turned on, off or set to read-only.

Overall, the social features are pretty decent but could use some improvement. For instance it’s difficult to find tags that are associated with the user or the company. A nice, robust cloud tag would be excellent to have front and center on every page. The navigation down the right column clearly identifies what the system can do but we wonder if this could be consolidated in some manner to provide a richer activity stream.

We’d also like to see rich media integration. Services like OfficeMedium can be fertile places for training and sharing marketing materials that may include videos. To have a place for them on the service would be quite handy.

But on a basic level – OfficeMedium works. Perhaps what we suggest is beyond what the small business user is looking for in an intranet. But overall, they do a good job of covering the basics. Here’s a summary of what they offer:

• Task and Event Management
• Personal and Group Calendars
• File Sharing, Storage, and Organization
• Contact Management
• Archiving

Further, the service provides the ability to integrate external parties with controls so the outside user can only see what is intended for them. That’s a big plus as more often than before, users work pretty closely online with outside parties.

OfficeMedium is $8 per user per month and $1 ore gigabyte. The first 512 megabytes are free.

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Salesforce Poaches Cisco’s Collaboration Guru

Doug Dennerline spent ten years at Cisco and was most recently Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Collaboration Software Group, making him the man in charge of WebEx and other popular offerings. He was also the one spearheading a rumored move by Cisco to make an online competitor to Microsoft Office and other Web-based collaboration suites.

But today Dennerline is departing the company for CRM- and platform-as-a-service company Salesforce, where he’s becoming its head of enterprise sales in the Americas. Before heading up the SaaS wing at Cisco, he was a senior VP at the commercial and enterprise sales groups.

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Dennerline will become the Salesforce executive vice president of enterprise sales in the Americas, meaning that he’ll be moving further away from the kind of product strategy work he did as VP at Cisco’s Collaboration Group.

Salesforce recently posted a 20% increase in revenue for its second quarter, bumping it up to $316.1 million. But in the long term, the company is still facing some competition from both Microsoft and Oracle in the CRM space despite its current dominance. It has also moved into different territory with its Force.com cloud platform for both applications and sites. For both areas, bringing in a leader in sales from Cisco who really groks cloud computing and collaborative software is a serious win for Salesforce.

As for the “why” of the matter for Dennerline, there’s been no comment so far from either Salesforce or Cisco. Whether it was just a case of better opportunities and compensation or something more cultural, it’s unclear at the moment. What is clear is that Cisco is losing a real veteran in a rapidly evolving and lucrative space.

Image credit: Cisco

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Assembla Adds Private Installations to its Collaboration Platform

Assembla, which makes collaborative workspaces for software development teams, has added a version you can download in order to run private installations. Every day, more pure play SaaS vendors in the collaboration space appear, but Assembla is a startup that also offers a robust self-hosted version as well.

Assembla is a wide-ranging software package for distributed teams: there are browsers for Git and Subversion code repositories, project management, activity streams, as well as ticketing, bug tracking, and issue management. In addition to the download that’s now available, you can get a free public space or a private instance on EC2.

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The downloadable package runs as a VMware virtual appliance and includes the full source code and development kit. It’s also the only option with LDAP integration and unlimited project spaces, which should make it extra appealing to development teams in larger enterprises.

The new private offering by Assembla mimics the strategy that some of the most successful vendors of collaboration software — such as Atlassian, Jive, Socialtext, and Mindtouch — are taking with their products. By providing the full range of choices, from free and public to behind the firewall, Assembla is making a smart choice.

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