SAP Unveils Windows Phone 8 Apps & New Enterprise Security App For Windows 8 #SAPTechEd

Enterprise software and software-related services company, SAP, has released changes to the SAP Mobile Platform, security features for SAP Afaria and a new product: SAP 360 Customer Solution.

Over the last year, SAP has introduced new employee collaboration and social enterprise tools, such as the social collaboration strategy "Project Robus" and Jam, a product that aims to improve how enterprise social software works. 

Apps and Windows 8

This week at the SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd event, SAP unveiled new products and mobile updates. One of the updated features includes advanced security and authentication features for the SAP Mobile Platform. With these updates, the product will not only be more secure, but have user/device/app provisioning, and push notification.

The company has also announced six new mobile apps for Windows 8 users. These apps are are based around enterprise functions and aim to help companies with their training, recruiting and sales departments. The apps are expected to be released as both full and trial versions available from the  Windows Store and SAP Store. They include:

• SAP WorkDeck: This apps gives employees the chance to be more interactive with their managers as they will be able to initiate requests, oversee events and monitor event progress. For managers, they have the tools to look over and process workflows when they are away from the office.
• SAP Manager Insight: SAP Manager Insight is an employee profile app that gives managers and HR departments access to relevant data such as employee profiles, diversity in departments and employee talent by location.
• SAP Learning Assistant: Learning Assistant is a training app that gives workers access to online classes.
• SAP Interview Assistant: With Interview Assistant, managers will be able to easily manage and prepare for interviews, while having access to relevant candidate information.
• SAP Customer Financial Fact Sheet:  This is a ‘customer profile’ app geared toward account executives, as it provides financial data, invoices and important sales orders.
• SAP GRC Policy Survey: Policy Survey gives employees to access to changes in company policies and respond with any questions they may have.

A More Secure SAP Afaria

The Mobile Platform isn't the only product from SAP that is becoming more secure. It has been announced that SAP Afaria, an enterprise security product, is now available for Windows 8 and is able to support intel-based tablets with the new operating system.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Making the Most of Your Marketing Funnel #rdm12

The impact changes in the consumer marketplace and technology are having on the marketing funnel and how marketers can adapt were major themes in early sessions of the Revenue Driven Marketing Summit hosted by Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA.

New Technology Empowers Customers, Creates ‘Hidden Sales Cycle’

Trip Kucera, Senior Research Analyst, Marketing Effectiveness and Strategy for Aberdeen opened today’s program with an introductory talk about what marketing is experiencing today. “There are new technologies, new mediums and new targets,” he said. “You’re engaging with empowered customers in both the B2B and B2C marketplaces. “

In response, Kucera said marketers are “digitizing processes from the top of the funnel to the topline. There is much more data, and more buzz around Big Data but probably more action around predictive analytics.” In addition, Kucera said a “hidden sales cycle” has entered the traditional funnel of lead generation, lead management and opportunity management. This hidden cycle, which often occurs later in the buyer’s journey, consists of influences like social media, communities, content and peers. “You need to put your listening ears on,” advised Kucera.

Turn Your Funnel into a Pipeline

Following Kucera’s remarks, Russell Fujioka, VP of Enterprise Solutions and Business Marketing, Dell, urged marketing and sales executives to move beyond current best practices in order to reshape their funnels into free flowing pipelines. “If you’re at best practices right now, you’re probably behind,” stated Fujioka. “If you haven’t met a mathematician lately, you need to go hug those folks.”

Fujioka said there is so much data now available, tools alone cannot do enough to uncover actionable information. “Algorithms can determine cause and effect,” he said. “Some tools can’t answer why certain things work. But there are some people at MIT that probably can.”

Fujioka said that by changing its marketing model from quickly providing customized hardware to delivering full-scale IT solutions and developing ongoing customer relationships, in three years Dell has increased marketing-led revenue by 125% every six months and increased the growth of social media-driven dollars in the marketing pipeline by 20% every quarter, among other results.

Fujioka also focused on the funnel and how marketers can alter its shape from a typical “cannoli” (he gave a nod to the world-famous Mike’s Pastry in Boston’s traditionally Italian North End neighborhood) to a more streamlined “pipe.”

“The key part is the fulcrum,” he said. “What are the pressure points, amplifiers and things getting in your way? If you keep filling the left side with fuel and your win rate doesn’t improve, you won’t be more successful but will spend more money.”

In addition, Fujioka said marketers must closely analyze the right side of the funnel. “Those things that made it through got there for a reason,” he said. “Predictively analyze why they did.”

By properly analyzing what happens in the fulcrum and why some leads are converted, Fujioka said marketers can create an “aspirational” funnel where targeting is so good the lead-to-success ratio can wind up being “something like two to one instead of 10,000 to one.” And in the future, “the right side will be wider.”

Fujioka gave two final pieces of advice to marketers seeking to create an aspirational funnel. One is to create the position of vice president of customer success. “If you don’t do that, you don’t have a chance,” he said. The second is to remember that word of mouth always has been and always will be the strongest influencer on consumer decisions.

“It doesn’t matter what the audience or product is,” he said. “The difference is we now have tools to amplify word of mouth so instead of telling two friends who tell two friends, you can go on LinkedIn and pretty quickly spread the word to 25 million contacts.”

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Cisco Takes WebEx to the Private Cloud, Expands Hosted Collaboration Solution

Cisco announces changes to its collaboration portfolio, with a strong focus on improving collaboration in the cloud.

WebEx Heads to the Cloud

Let's start with the web conferencing. Customers now have choices for how to support their meeting needs. Prior to this release, WebEx was an on premises solution for organizations. Many organizations also used the Cisco Public WebEx cloud offering (usage has increased 38 percent year over year according to Cisco). But for those who want to take advantage of the cost efficiencies of the cloud and keep control of their own content, something new was required.

Cisco has announced the Cisco WebEx Meeting Server built to run in private cloud environment where organizations can ensure data privacy. It's also a great solution for those who are still tied to a capital expenditures model as opposed to the new utility model that comes with cloud-based hosted solutions. This is a virtualized server solution that is designed for the Cisco Unified Computing System, so deployment and management is simplified.

If you also have Cisco Unifiied Communications Manager, you can extend IP telephony to your web conference. And this is a nice capability coming in January of 2013: if you are doing an IM session using Jabber, you can quickly turn that into a web conference directly from the Jabber interface.

Cisco Host Collaboration Solution

Whether you have the entire Suite of capability or only a couple of modules, there are some updates to the Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) that you will be interested in hearing about:

Telepresence capabilities have been enhanced: This includes enabling partners to conduct meetings at any time without a reservation, expanding intra- and inter-company collaboration with video experiences. The Cisco TelePresence Exchange (CTX) is now integrated into HCS which means partners can manage their infrastructure across all their customers. It also means that customers can now connect multiple locations at the same time.

HCS for Customer Collaboration (Contact Center): The workflows and management capabilities for each customer contact center can now be integrated together offering a more seamless way to support clients across the board. This includes a new Web 2.0 customizable desktop that supports call center agents.

Advancing Unified Communications: Enhancements for HCS here include supporting third party SIP endpoints and an expansion of the IMS Jabber integration to support third party phones in the Cisco UC environment.

Taking Collaboration to New Levels

Sometimes we talk about collaboration like it's something we've not been doing for years. The tools have changed though to support quicker ways to work together, often more efficient ways. And that's what we are seeing with much of the Cisco announcements today. This "collaboration" as Cisco clearly notes is not just internally focused, it's something we need to get better at with our partners, our suppliers and our own customers.

Much of the functionality announced today is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

What a Difference 30 Years Makes: Megatrends Redux

It’s been thirty years since John Naisbitt published his landmark book, Megatrends, exploring a number of major changes in society, ten to be exact, likely to impact the way we live, work and govern ourselves. Looking back across those three decades, it’s clear that Naisbitt got a lot right and a few things wrong about the information society whose arrival he recognized.

What may be useful to us, however, are the trends he saw in the early 1980s, the variables he expected to shape and balance the resulting changes and the reasons some of those variables didn’t behave as he predicted.

Industrial to Information

First, to his credit, Naisbitt saw and made his first chapter about the rise of an information society in place of the industrial society we had been living with since the end of WWII.

Although the personal computer had only just made its appearance in the late 1970s and while many commentators were still grappling with the end of the industrial age, seeing nothing coherent on the horizon, Naisbitt recognized that information would become the critical resource and wealth in a new “information society.” He reasoned that society would need a new knowledge theory of value to replace earlier labor-based theories because, he also reckoned, we would “mass produce information” the way we used to mass produce hard goods.

He was right of course, and we are mass producing information, or at least data, in volumes that even he couldn’t have conceived. However, the fact that so many information utilities, social media and search engines most notable among them, still rely on advertising for their revenue suggests that we haven’t quite yet solidified that new theory of information value.

Searching Isn’t Always Finding

Use a modern search engine and you will see that the creation side of the information equation is charging ahead full steam. But try finding a complex or subtle item of information on the Internet and you will also see a location side still struggling. As the glut of content mounts, the need for a comprehensive and universally understood way of identifying information so that it is easily available and not buried in a gazillion search engine hits, grows with it.

The brick and mortar library world addressed this problem as early as 1876 when Melville Dewey came up with his decimal classification system and in 1908 when the Library of Congress adapted Cutter’s dictionary cataloging scheme. The process of assigning classifications to content was further organized with the 1967 publication of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules or AACR.

But with the rise of automation in the 1960s, the library world panicked at the thought of those new computer people invading their sandbox and much of the momentum and progress was lost, sending the content world essentially back to square one trying to figure out what an effective cataloging scheme should look like — working for Xerox Education Division back then, I witnessed some of this happen and it wasn’t pretty.

Complicating the process were multiple schemes, developed by different players with different perspectives, different funding, even from different parts of the world, but all convinced that they were right and none much interested in consensus.

The search engine world hasn’t helped either: after all, effective content cataloging reduces the need for their systems by providing pre-configured paths to information and if you don’t need to search the entire Internet to find information, you likely won’t see or respond to the ads that provide the lion’s share of Google’s (et al) revenue. So we spend most of our time searching through everything for tidbits of information that often exist only in a few places.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

35,000 Foot View of SharePoint 2013 for End Users

This is the last article of a four-part 35,000-foot overview of some of the major changes expected in SharePoint 2013. What's in store for the end user?

What’s New for End Users?

When end users begin using SharePoint 2013, they will notice additional collaboration features, as well as an increase in social components.

Collaboration

SharePoint has always been a tool for collaboration, but SharePoint 2013 promises even more robust collaboration tools. SharePoint 2013 has added new features to increase collaboration, including:

• OneNote Notebook included in the Team Site for taking and storing notes locally
• Share Dialog Interface, which allows users to quickly add people to list and share content even between site collections
• Callout Feature for managing Items in List or Library
• Drag and Drop Between Sites or between SharePoint/Desktop allowing you to quickly move documents between sites or between SharePoint and your local environment.

Video and Rich Media Improvements

Video and rich media is invading the business world, and SharePoint 2013 is striving to make it easier to organize and access this form of data. Improvements related to video and rich media, include:

• Videos have video pages that contain metadata to improve the search functionality.
• Users can now preview videos from the search results before spending valuable time downloading the video.
• Users can now search for videos by length or by date.
• HTML5 and Silverlight Players are Supported in 2013 for viewing.
• Improved refinement options when it comes to SharePoint 2013 from end user perspective.

Records Management and Compliance

There are improvements to the records management functionality that help meet compliance requirements you may have in your organization, including the following:

• Site-Based Compliance — SharePoint Sites are now integrated with Team Mailboxes in SharePoint 2013, which means that any time an end user is preserving content, both the SharePoint Sites and the Team Mailboxes are searched.

• In-Place Records Management — SharePoint 2013 still has In-Place records management, but now it preserves content that has been modified. So if a user has put a lock on the content, it allows other users to make a change to the document, but it keeps a copy of the content as it was prior to the modification.

  Documents, list items, pages and Exchange Server 2013 mailboxes can be preserved. The preservation of the information is done at the site level but you can use filters to avoid preserving the entire site or mailbox.

• Enterprise-Wide e-Discovery — SharePoint Server 2013 introduces a new site for managing and holding your discovery cases. Within this site collection you can perform e-Discovery queries across multiple SharePoint farms and Exchange servers and preserve the items that are discovered.

  You create a new site for each case using the eDiscovery Center site template. This site creates a portal through which you can access discovery cases to conduct searches, place content on hold, and export content. To implement e-Discovery across the enterprise, configure SharePoint Server 2013 Search to crawl all file shares and websites that contain discoverable content. You can then export the results of an e-Discovery search for later import into a review tool.

   

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

A Little Birdie Told me Twitter was Doing Product Strategy via API

Late last week, Twitter announced a series of API changes that it plans to launch in the upcoming weeks. The changes covered several different areas including changes to authentication requirements, changes to number of calls an end-point can make to Twitter in an hour (both up and down) and creating a series of binding agreements that developers and applications must adhere to. While the API will be released shortly, developers will have a migration period of 6 months before the old API is retired.

We Are The Knights Who Say Tweet!

While the individual changes themselves are indeed interesting, the fun stuff lies just beyond the surface in what the changes mean to both Twitter's business strategy and to its overall approach to product strategy and development as well. These changes are not random demands for "shrubberies" but rather a fully acknowledged attempt to encourage and discourage specific partner and developer behaviors when integrating with and leveraging Twitter's platform. In other words, Twitter has fully embraced the idea that its API is a product to be designed for a specific set of consumers along with a specific strategy in mind (something predicted in these pages earlier this year).

Twitter is still in the throes of figuring out how to fully monetize its immensely popular micro-blogging platform and has made these changes with an eye towards furthering its profitability goals. By throttling smaller apps and unleashing larger ones, twitter has furthered its ability to charge enterprise media partners for access to the firehose of tweets in search results and also for trending topics.

The authentication, partnering and rate limiting changes will directly go after data scrapers in two ways (also predicted in these pages earlier this year):

1. The lower rate limit (more than five times less than its current amount) will make it harder to do mass scraping and will force any programmatic scrapers to identify themselves with a license key.
2. The upper rate limit (just over twice the currently supported amount) will give scrapers a legitimate opportunity to abandon scraping and legitimize their use of twitter data.

No One Expects The Twitter Inquisition!

Another big shift is Twitter's move from display guidelines to display requirements along with a certification requirement for certain Twitter apps. Twitter will now require its developers to adhere to a specific set of rules to standardize appearance and functionality. Twitter has justified this change by citing that it will give a better, and more standard, interface to its end users and has reserved the right to revoke license keys from any non-conformists. Some developers have cried foul citing that this will limit the individual Twitter-client developers ability to differentiate their user experience and their overall ability to make money. Well duh! Twitter basically said that in its blog post by specifically saying that it was trying to discourage developers from making new differentiated client apps for consumers.

In case it is not obvious to the solo developer community, Twitter really does not care whether you make money. Twitter cares whether Twitter makes money. In order for Twitter to make money, Twitter needs consumers to engage with Twitter on the Twitter site as much as possible. Twitter's value prop to developers is a free, functional and highly available micro-bloging platform that can easily be integrated into your site. If that is not good enough, build and market your own platform and see how much money that makes you.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Twitter Tightens API Rules: Increases Authentication, Decreases Requests Per Hour

Twitter plans to release version 1.1 of the Twitter API in the coming weeks, and it involves a number of new user restrictions. Changes will include required authentication on every API endpoint, a new per-endpoint rate-limiting methodology, and tighter “Developer Rules of the Road,” especially around applications that are traditional Twitter clients.

Seeking Authenticity

In version 1.0 of the Twitter API developers have access to certain API endpoints without requiring their applications to authenticate, essentially enabling them to access public information from the Twitter API without Twitter knowing who they are other than their IP addresses. To prevent what Twitter calls “malicious” use of the Twitter API and to gain an understanding of what types of applications are accessing the API, in version 1.1 the company will require every request to the API to be authenticated.

For developers who are already using OAuth when making API requests, Twitter says all authentication tokens will transition seamlessly from v1.0 to v1.1. If an application is currently using the Twitter API without using OAuth, developers will need to update it before March 2013.

Rate-Limiting Endpoints

Twitter will cut the number of authenticated requests applications can make from the current 350 calls per hour to 60 calls per hour per-endpoint. According to Twitter, analysis of current use of its API shows this rate limit “will be well above the needs of most applications built against the Twitter API, while protecting our systems from abusive applications.”

There will also be a set of high-volume endpoints related to Tweet display, profile display, user lookup and user search where applications will be able to make up to 720 calls per hour per endpoint.

The Rules of the Road

Changes to Twitter’s official developer “Rules of the Road” will include a shift from display guidelines to display requirements (such as linking @usernames to the appropriate Twitter profile), requiring developers that are building client applications that are pre-installed on consumer electronics devices to have their application certified by Twitter and requiring developers to work with Twitter directly if they need a large amount of user tokens.

Bloggers Voice Displeasure

In addition to preventing misuse and gaining a better understanding of the API environment, Twitter says its new API guidelines are designed to encourage application development activity in areas such as social CRM, social analytics and social influence ranking, while limiting certain use cases for traditional Twitter cases and syndication.

However, not all observers are quite so positive about these planned changes. Computerworld compiled a list of negative postings from IT bloggers about the changes. Comments included: “[It's] disappointing to see Twitter turning its back on the…community that played such a large role in its…expansion”; “the new requirements…may make it more difficult for third-party clients to differentiate themselves” and a “translation” of Twitter’s “weaselese” that boiled down to “We look forward to forcing you to build a service, then destroy any chance of making money from it.”

Not every blogger was negative, however. One blogger wrote, “I was left thinking a lot of the changes were reasonable and made sense…With concrete rules we can always ensure we are in compliance.” There was a caveat of “My only request to Twitter is that they keep the lines of communication…very open.”

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

35,000 Foot View of SharePoint 2013 for Developers

Are you ready for SharePoint 2013?

This is the second in a four part series that provides a 35,000-foot overview of some of the major changes expected in SharePoint 2013. With this piece we will dive into what will be new for developers.

The series covers these changes as they relate to administrators, developers, designers and end users. 

What’s New for Developers?

There are lots of changes coming to SharePoint 2013 that developers will need to know about. 

Visual Studio 2012

SharePoint 2013 will include enhanced Visual Studio functionality. These enhancements include new Project/Feature/Package Properties, as well as new deployment options. Visual Studio 2012 also includes New Item Templates designed to work with SharePoint 2013, including SharePoint Applications (SPApps).

SharePoint Applications

SharePoint 2013 introduces a corporate catalog and a public marketplace, which is essentially an app store. Developers can now write applications that extend SharePoint sites using the new SharePoint App Model. In SharePoint 2013, SPApps can be SharePoint hosted using a client web part, Azure-hosted (auto-provisioned or on premises), or developer-hosted using Chrome Control or OAuth.

SharePoint REST (Representational State Transfer)

SharePoint REST is a new service in SharePoint 2013 that allows you to interact with SharePoint artifacts. It provides support for CRUD (create, update, delete) operations from SharePoint Apps, solutions, and client applications using standard OData and REST web technologies.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS)

SharePoint 2013 has made External Content Types (ECT) from external lists accessible via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services or OData. This helps users more easily consume and interact with external data sources located outside of SharePoint. External List Event Receivers and alerts are also now available in SharePoint 2013 along with filtering, sorting, and support for REST (Representational State Transfer).

Remote Event Receivers

In the past, Event Receivers ran imperative logic on the SharePoint server, but in SharePoint 2013 Remote Event Receivers handle events that occur on a list item, a list or a web in a SPApp. In addition, SPApp Event Receivers handle events involving the app itself, such as when it's installed or deleted. Remote Event Receivers can be created using the Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) and the JavaScript Object Model (JSOM).

Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) and JavaScript Object Model (JSOM)

SharePoint 2013 is all about hosting external application functionality in a SharePoint context. Those external applications (SPApps) will often need to interact with the SharePoint environment. In SharePoint 2013 CSOM has been greatly expanded to include the ability to access the query object model for online, on-premises and mobile development of search along with improvements in other areas. When it comes to JSOM, SharePoint 2013 includes support for JavaScript contexts, cross-domain queries and application programming interfaces (APIs) to access the workflow object model.

Workflows

SharePoint 2013 will include Windows Azure Workflow (WAW) Services, which is built on Windows Workflow Foundation 4. Don’t worry. The 3.x legacy is still there for backwards compatibility, which isolates logic into a service that is independent of SharePoint. SharePoint 2013 also includes the AppFabric Workflow Model, which provides a lot more flexibility on the scalability of workflows.

NAPA

SharePoint 2013 features NAPA, which is a browser-based environment that allows developers to build apps for the new cloud environment. It is an online companion to Visual Studio and can be used to create applications before fully migrating to Visual Studio.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com