Jahia Releases Wise For Sharing, Socializing and Collaborating on Enterprise Documents

Jahia has just released Jahia Wise enabling document sharing and collaboration no matter what environment you’re working in.

Jahia Wise

That is to say that Wise works either as a standalone, or with Jahia’s Web CMS system, xCM, with the option to use it as an on-premises deployment, or in the cloud. In fact, Wise has been built to be as flexible as possible and designed to meet enterprise needs whatever those needs are.

CMSWire sat down with Jahia to see exactly what it offered and was impressed by its clean user interfaces, and agility. That, however, is personal opinion, and if you want to see more on that you can go back to the preview last month.

The official release is today (Thursday) and with it Jahia is able to shed some light on what’s under the hood of this comprehensive application.

Jahia Wise Document Collaboration
 

Jahia Wise Functionality

The first thing that Jahia is offering is an application which, it says, costs only a fraction of the cost of other, similar applications from proprietary vendors with the advantage — leaving aside the reduced cost element — of not requiring large integration projects to fit into the enterprise environment.

It comes with all the usual sharing and collaborative functions of the systems of competing vendors, but it does so straight out-of-the-box. Other features in Wise include:

• Document sharing: This comes with versioning and history as well as lock in/lock out, permissions, mass imports, drag and drop import and gallery display.
• Social Collaboration: Enables users to comment on projects, task assignation, auto tagging, collections, validation workflow, wikis, blogs, notifications and all the other social enterprise features users require for work now.
• Web content: Enables users to centralize any type of data and avoid the scourge of the development of uncontrolled content siloes. It also enables content clipping for pulling data into the system.

On top of this, Wise also comes with a new email feature that enables users to feed information into project information spaces through the use of email. This also enables the integration and synchronization of email discussions into the collaborative processes being carried out in Jahia.

While the features and interfaces will be what attract the business user, it is the flexibility that is the really strong point in terms of the build, making much of the modularity of the Jahia Content Platform.

Agile Jahia Wise

In fact, when we talked with Elie Auvray, CEO of Jahia, about Wise at the end of the summer this was one of the points that he was at pains to underline.

When it comes to enterprise collaboration and document exchange, companies expect more and more integration with the information they share online on their intranet or website. The result is that many solutions on the market are cumbersome, complex and costly — especially in terms of integration.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Collaboration and Communications on the Intranet

The five fundamental purposes to intranets are: content, communication, collaboration, activity and culture. Each purpose plays a key role in meeting staff and organizational needs and successful intranets maintain a balance between all five.

Intranet teams benefit from having a clear picture of the current focus of their intranets, highlighting areas of strength and weakness. By focusing on improving key areas, intranet teams can transform their intranets into valuable business tools.

This article focuses on two of the five purposes and looks at where intranets are in terms of communication and collaboration. 

 

Communications

Intranets can do much to support communication and collaboration, which are now seen as integral to the success of modern organizations. Over the past few years we have seen intranets evolve in these areas from just providing news on the home page and the odd project collaboration space, to delivering tailored news, giving staff the ability to comment on, like or add to news articles, and promoting the use of social and other collaborative tools.

In Step Two’s annual Intranet Innovation Awards we have seen improvements in these areas including innovative use of team-based collaboration tools, knowledge-sharing initiatives, integration of other communication channels and uses of technologies such as blogs and wikis.

Intranet Communications Tailored to User Needs

The intranet has a clear role to play as a corporate communication channel, one that reaches most staff across the organization.

On most intranets, this consists of one or more news boxes on the home page, publishing regular items of organization-wide interest. While the intranet’s role as a communications channel is well recognized, it only delivers on this objective when the site is being regularly used, and news alone isn’t enough to draw staff to the site.

We are now seeing a move to tailoring communications to the needs of the audience with home page news including corporate messages as well as departmental, local or role-specific messages. As the intranet delivers greater business value within organizations, we see more effective use of intranet news.

Microblogging and the use of activity streams within the enterprise were prevalent among this year’s Intranet Innovation Award entries. While this is becoming standard in many intranets, success is not as common. 

Collaboration

Historically, there has been little corporate recognition of collaboration, and teams and business units were left with just email and shared network folders. Intranets acted solely as publishing and news platforms, providing access to corporate documents but not directly supporting collaboration.

The changing organizational landscape has made collaboration an imperative, to support knowledge sharing, enhance service delivery and improve competitiveness. In this year’s Intranet Innovation Award entries, we saw the continuation of the key theme that intranets were becoming increasingly "social" and more informal.

We also predicted that they would start to add more business value and this appears to be correct this year too. However, there is some way to go before social tools are truly integrated into core processes and workflow.

Social Tools Positioned Around how People Work

We are starting to see the use of social tools being positioned much more around how people work, than the value of the tools themselves. In this year’s awards, both Stockland and Coca-Cola Enterprises delivered new iterations of their intranets that integrated social tools into their homepages.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Google+ Gets Closer To Enterprise Social Networking With Google Drive Sharing

In a week where we talked a lot about collaboration, it is probably appropriate to wrap up with a small announcement from Google Drive that should make Box or Dropbox pause for thought.

The announcement appeared on the Google Enterprise blog during the week and concerns file share between Google Drive and Google+. In fact, what it says is that from here on it will be incredibly easy to share files from Google Drive into the Google+ social network, taking Google+ another step further towards making it a truly collaborative environment.

Google+, Google Drive

Collaboration, however, only becomes attractive when it is easy to do, and this addition is just that. As of this week users who want to, will able to share everything stored in Google Drive with selected recipients. This includes documents, photos and even videos which can be played directly in Google+.

While at face value this doesn’t look like much of a change as there has always been the possibility of sharing between the two, it’s not just sharing this time; now, users will also be able to access all this content in Google+ itself.

Think of what this will mean. It basically offers collaboration and sharing of all content inside a social application to everyone that has signed up with these Google apps. In some cases, this will undoubtedly make them think twice about signing up to Box or Dropbox for at least some users.

Google + 

And it really is easy to use. To get started, Li-Wei Lee, Software Engineer with Google explains in a blog post that users only have to click the Google+ icon when they are sharing from Drive, or copy-and-paste a link to a file from Google Drive into one of  their Google+ posts.

Google Drive, Google + file sharing
 

Google+ contacts will be able to click on a thumbnail within the Google+interface and open the file in a separate browser window.

If you are using Google Apps for Business, Education or Government, posts can also be restricted to ensure that the conversation only lands where you want it to.

On top of this, each file share in Google+ carries with it the access settings that have been given by the owner on Drive, so the content that is to be shared can be defined and limited by the file owner.

While this is a big plus for Google+ it is still not a fully-fledged enterprise social networking (ESN) app, but it is getting close. It is unlikely that Google will just leave it at this and it's just about certain that Google will continue to add functionality until it has to all intents and purposes become a ESN. More on this as it happens.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Huddle Security Measures Earns Company ISO 27001 Certification

Huddle, a provider of cloud-based content management and collaboration technology aimed at government agencies and large enterprises, has been awarded certification to ISO 27001, an international standard for information security management.

ISO 27001 covers areas including risk management and security, as well as business continuity management and compliance.

“ISO 27001 certification is part of our obsession with providing enterprise-class service,” Huddle VP of Enterprise Simon O’Kane told CMSWire during an interview. “It’s an emerging global standard as a benchmark for security processes, especially for delivery of services over the Internet.”

O’Kane said the British Standards Institution (BSI) certified “everything” in the Huddle organization, including customer-facing services as well as back-end development. Huddle determined about six months ago it wanted to achieve ISO 72001 certification and achieved it in about three months. “It was paramount for us,” he said. “Security is in our DNA.”

To that end, Huddle has also obtained pan-government accreditation in the UK.

ISO Certification Signals Security is Under Control 

According to Richard Edwards, principal analyst at Ovum, ISO 27001 certification sends a “clear signal that information security management is under control of management rather than an IT artifact.” Edwards said in a phone conversation with CMSWire that at many organizations, the IT department must shoulder the responsibility of maintaining IT security.

“That’s fine to a point, but IT security shouldn’t be an area exclusively handed off by senior management,” stated Edwards.

Edwards said that increasingly, major global players in the enterprise space such as Google Apps for Business, Microsoft Global Foundation Services and Yammer are obtaining ISO 27001 certification. In addition, many European companies, especially in the UK, and Japanese companies are seeking the certification. But US companies are lagging to their disadvantage.

“The US is slow to pick up ISO 27001, and the US will get blindsided,” said Edwards. 

Huddle Cuddles Feds

Huddle has been busy recently obtaining certifications that prove its dedication to security. In September, Huddle obtained certification by the Federal Information Security Management Act for a new cloud service for U.S. government agencies to communicate across the web.

Already widely used by western European governments, the secure Huddle platform is currently being developed for the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). This achievement for Huddle is down to a strategic partnership and technology development agreement with In‐Q-­Tel (IQT), a non-­profit, strategic investment firm that identifies solutions to support U.S. intelligence.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Harmon.ie Connect for SharePoint Aims to Cross Platforms, Devices

Enterprise workflow integration specialist harmon.ie is releasing Connect for SharePoint, a collaboration tool designed to create a single, unified user experience that crosses not only multiple devices but also the Microsoft and Apple platforms.

A Window on the Virtual and Mobile World

Connect for SharePoint allows document and social information from disparate sources and operating systems to appear in one window with a consistent user experience on both mobile and fixed devices. Changes immediately become visible across all connected platforms and devices, without any special setup or configuration.

For mobile users, harmon.ie says Connect for SharePoint makes the iPad “enterprise ready” to enable secure document creation and sharing directly from the iPad platform. The solution also supports mobile device management (MDM) for mobile distribution and provisioning. 

Harmon.ie Follows Gartner’s Advice, Targets BYOD Users

In May 2012, harmon.ie made the list of “Cool Vendors in Social Software and Collaboration” compiled by Gartner. Harmon.ie received kudos for addressing the "hurdle" of collaborating without having to leave email, but Gartner warned that the company must expand beyond the narrow range of email and document collaboration tools it currently integrates.

Right around the time that report was released, harmon.ie was already starting to heed Gartner’s recommendation by debuting a new mobile SharePoint iPad app which provides iPad users with the social interaction and document collaboration power of SharePoint, but also adds the ability to share items via links instead of email attachments.

Harmon.ie is continuing to follow Gartner’s advice with Connect for SharePoint, which greatly increases the ability for employees to collaborate without worrying about device or OS specifications. The solution seems especially aimed at the constantly growing number of BYOD users who leverage an array of disparate personal devices from numerous vendors — running on both Microsoft and Apple operating systems — in their jobs. Allowing BYOD users to easily collaborate and share documents and information solves one key problem of BYOD, though others — such as security — remain. 

‘SharePointWendy’ Gives Thumbs Up

SharePoint blogger Wendy Neal (“SharePointWendy”) gives Connect for SharePoint a positive review. “(W)hen users are out of the office or away from their desks, they can still enjoy the same consistent user experience, and any changes they make to documents or interactions with colleagues are automatically synchronized across all devices and platforms,” states Neal. She also verifies that changes made on one platform or device will immediately be visible on the others and says the “iPad and iPhone versions look very similar to, and provide the same functionality, as the harmon.ie sidebar in Outlook, thus promoting consistency and familiarity across platforms and devices.”

Neal does mention one downside. Users of iOS devices “need to have some kind of app installed that allows you to modify Office documents.” She says harmon.ie expects to natively support Windows and Android platforms in 2013.

Harmon.ie Connect is available from the App Store or as an MDM package download. Stand-alone versions of harmon.ie are available for free via a mobile app available on iTunes and a desktop app from harmon.ie. 

 

 

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

Unison Releases 'Room'-Based Enterprise Social Network

There’s a new enterprise social collaboration product out. The New York City-based Unison Technologies has unveiled a new version of its service, a quick-to-launch social network based around virtual rooms. 

The company, which also has an office in St. Petersburg, Russia, is led by CEO Manlio Carrelli and CMO Rurik Bradbury, who founded and sold corporate email hosting company Intermedia. They’ve told news media that their goal is to “fix how people communicate at work, in a way that email can’t.”

Focused Around Rooms

Unison's service is aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses, runs on Windows and Mac computers, Android devices and the iPhone, and is also available as a Web app.

One of its key selling points is that it can be up and running in five minutes, with conversations focused in “rooms” instead of being sifted through streams of updates – a combination of a physical space metaphor with a virtual social network.

A user might create a room for a particular project or team, for instance, for posting documents, updates or comments.  

By entering a room, a user can see who’s there at the time and view the communications between individuals or among the group. Questions and documents can be posted inside the room, issues can be discussed in groups, room occupants can IM or use voice/video chat, and rooms can be open to anyone or closed to room members only. Conversations in each room update themselves, without page refreshes.

Users can easily create a room for a project or team.

External people, such as clients or suppliers, can come into a room, but they will only see content for which they’ve been given access. When you @mention someone, they get an alert about the referring comment. To find rooms where you were mentioned, click News in the side menu.

Room access controls allow users to determine how much content is shared within the group and with external people.

'Rooms' Reduce Clutter

Compared to other enterprise collaboration platforms, Unison said that it is the “only enterprise social network that is simple to set up and simple to use.” Its distinguishing characteristic, the rooms, is intended to create a communications workspace for each project or team, instead of the streams and groups that other business-focused social networking services offer.

By segregating teams and projects into analogues of the physical world’s use of meeting rooms, and by pushing a message directly to a non-room user, the idea is to avoid cluttering a user’s intake of information. 

The enterprise social collaboration space is booming with revived versions of established tools, such as Chatter, Salesforce's continuing social reinvention of its business platform, and a crop of new and newly-acquired companies, including Campfire, Convo, Socialcast (now owned by VMware) and Yammer (owned by Microsoft).

The Unison service uses a “freemium” business model, in that a simple social network is free, while a premium version, which adds administrator controls for adding and removing users or administering room ownership, will be available in fourth quarter at an as-yet-unannounced price.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Jive Software to Drive Engagement with Badgeville Game Mechanics

Jive Software has announced the integration of Badgeville game mechanics into its social collaboration platform, an effort to increase engagement and adoption among those using the system on a daily basis.

It's not that Jive isn't so appealing to people, but by offering rewards for sharing information, for example, companies have another tool to make new workflows a bit less painful to introduce.

Rewards and Reputations

Simple psychology tells us people like to be acknowledged for the work they do. They like knowing the work they do matters. Game mechanics or gaming principles give people instant feedback and rewards for performing desired behaviors. With Badgeville's system of leader boards, levels, achievements and of course badges, Jive Software customers have an inventive way to make collaborating a bit more interesting.

Rewards for filling out a personal profile are a popular gamification technique.

Jive Integrates Box File Sharing

Jive also announced a new Box file sharing feature called Box Embed. It gives access in Jive to Box features via an API. Box files can be up and downloaded from Jive, documents can sync across both systems and there is also a cross system search feature. Social collaboration always becomes much more productive with document sharing abilities, and with Box, a powerful ally is added to an already impressive Jive system.

Gartner researchers again pointed to Jive as a leader in Social Software for the Workplace in early October. Jive ecosystem and vision for social were cited as strengths.

Two of the newest social tools Jive showed off before this week were its intelligent activity streams and Jive Anywhere integration. Both of these features kicked off during the summer, and they are no doubt part of why Gartner continues to rate Jive so high. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Jahia Wise Preview: Versatile, Streamlined Document and Social Collaboration

At the end of this month Jahia will introduce a new open source solution called Jahia Wise that combines document management and social collaboration. Easy to use, it has all the functionality required to enable workers to integrate all their information sources and populate their websites or intranets with enterprise content.

Jahia already offers a number of solutions for working with data (including documents), but this solution is designed to make it easy for business users to share documents, exchange them, work on them collectively, and ultimately publish them in a controlled and ordered fashion.

Jahia Wise has been doing the rounds of some of the tech shows, particularly in France. Recently, Elie Auvray CEO of Jahia and Anne de Forsan, director of Communications, sat down with CMSWire and gave us a look at the new product.

Jahia Wise: Gallery View
 

Jahia Unity, Jahia Wise

Jahia is keeping some of the functionality under its hat until the product launch, because, Auvray says, some things are unique and well, why give competitors a chance to pre-empt you?

But that’s all by-the-by. When Jahia Wise is released it will have been in the works for about a year, according to Auvray. The driving principal behind it, he says, is the same principal that drives all Jahia’s other products — notably, unity.

Expanding on the concept of unity, he pointed out that Jahia has, as its driving principal, the delivery of agile open source technologies. This delivery pushes enterprise application convergence as far as it can possibly go by pulling together web, search, document, social and portal technologies.

And Jahia has already managed to achieve this, he says, with some of their other products — like their content management system eXtended Content Management (xCM), their visual experience builder Jahia Studio, their content core platform and a number of other JahiApps (Jahia applications).

When it comes to enterprise collaboration and document exchange, companies expect more and more integration with the information they share online on their intranet or website. Many solutions on the market are cumbersome, complex and costly — especially in terms of integration.

Jahia Wise: Secure Collaboration

Jahia Wise Evolution

Jahia Wise offers an alternative to this complexity, Auvray says. It is the first time that Jahia has produced a product focused entirely on the document, file sharing and social collaboration market. It is a completely new product, based on the same underlying platform as xCM is, but has evolved to ensure that the distribution of content across the enterprise is easy and intuitive. To do that it comes with numerous modules and packages.

While Jahia Wise can work as a complementary product to the core platform, it does have a separate installer, which means that it can also be set up and run independently of the core platform for enterprises that are looking for a distribution platform on its own.

It evolved in this way, Auvray says, because when they went looking at distribution management systems they saw a wide range of products that can manage a wide range of content. However, they also found that once an enterprise started building an intranet based on existing company information, located in different silos, the nightmare of integration began.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

WoodWing Enterprise 8: New Collaboration Tools, Support for Adobe Creative Suite 6

WoodWing's Enterprise 8 multi-channel publishing system has been released. It includes new collaboration features, performance updates, and support for Adobe's digital publishing system.

Because WoodWing is popular among newspaper and magazine publishers, support for Adobe Creative Suite 6 — particularly its two key components, InDesign and InCopy — should be welcome.

New Features + Future Release Teased

One of the main highlights of Enterprise 8 is an annotation feature that will look very familiar to long-time users. Commenting on in-progress documents is now possible, notes can be approved or rejected, and comments can be answered. 

New collaboration features like commenting on in-progress documents had been requested by WoodWing customers.

Under the hood, performance updates have made uploading large files into Content Station up to three times faster. That's because WoodWing has added the JSON and AMF protocols in Enterprise 8. AMF is the format used by Adobe Flash, and that means Enterprise 8 can build Flash movies across all devices.  

Additionally, Enterprise 8 has made some internal changes to accommodate any future upgrades or support for publishing industry requirements. Woodwing has hinted that those future updates could include better reporting and digital asset management tools. 

Also inside Content Station, the Planning Tab has been extended to allow issues to be created across channels. This should speed up starting tasks and creating dossiers (what WoodWing calls articles or stories). The final new feature is a tool for setting up a specific workflow for archive files (such as zip files) or presentations that may have an alternate route in the workflow.

Adobe-WoodWing Partnership

For the past year, WoodWing has been an Adobe partner on its Digital Publishing Suite, and that is one reason for the tighter integration of Flash and InDesign. However, with the addition of the JSON protocol, Enterprise 8 is also more extensible with other third-party software. That means any of WoodWing's authorized partners can integrate Enterprise 8 and Content Station with their preferred add-ons.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Want More Productive Workers? Adjust Your Thermostat

If your office is a meat locker in the summer and a sauna in the winter, your employees' productivity and collaboration suffer--probably more than you think.

Some years back, the Campbell Soup Company stumbled upon a marketing insight worthy of Don Draper.

If you want to predict when people will buy soup, the reasoning goes, you have to look beyond the product. It’s not about the depth of the soup’s flavor, the color of its packaging, or even its price. In fact, it’s hardly about Campbell’s at all.

It’s about the weather.

Consumers buy more soup when conditions are cold, damp, or windy. The question facing Campbell’s was this: How do you leverage this information into sales?

So they did something brilliant. They linked the frequency of their radio buys to the weather of each station. To determine when ads would be purchased, they developed an algorithm called the “Misery Index,” which uses meteorological data to track weather patterns. To this day, if you’re hearing an ad for soup on the radio, there’s a good chance you’re either carrying an umbrella or wearing a coat.

The rationale behind Campbell’s Misery Index is simultaneously clever and obvious, a hallmark of game-changing ideas. But it also raises an interesting question.

If a drop in temperature changes what we buy, what does it do to the way we think?

Typing With Gloves

If you sit near a vent, share legroom with a space heater, or use your desk to store outerwear, the question warrants serious consideration. One of the painful ironies of office life is that we can never quite get the temperature right. We spend our summers shivering in meat lockers and our winters sweating in saunas.

Central air hasn’t made us comfortable, so much as made us uncomfortable in a different way.

The experience isn’t simply unpleasant. It comes with a real financial cost.

To find out just how much, Cornell University researchers conducted a study that involved tinkering with the thermostat of an insurance office. When temperatures were low (68 degrees, to be precise), employees committed 44% more errors and were less than half as productive as when temperatures were warm (a cozy 77 degrees).

Cold employees weren’t just uncomfortable, they were distracted. The drop in performance was costing employers 10% more per hour, per employee. Which makes sense. When our body’s temperature drops, we expend energy keeping ourselves warm, making less energy available for concentration, inspiration, and insight.

Feeling Cold? You Might Just Be Lonely

And it’s not just performance that dips. It’s our impression of the people around us. In a fascinating study reported in the prestigious journal Science, psychologists uncovered a link between physical and interpersonal warmth. When people feel cold physically, they’re also more likely to perceive others as less generous and caring.

In a word, they view them as cold.

When we’re warm, on the other hand, we let our guard down and view ourselves as more similar to those around us. A forthcoming paper from researchers at UCLA even shows that brief exposure to warmer temperatures leads people to report higher job satisfaction.

Why the link between physical and mental warmth?

Psychologists argue it has to do with the way we’re built. The same area of the brain that lights up when we sense temperature--the insular cortex--is also active when we feel trust and empathy toward another person. When we experience warmth, we experience trust. And vice versa.

Neurologically, it seems we have our wires crossed. Except it’s not a coincidence.

There’s a reason we associate warmth with trust, and it’s because doing so promotes our survival, especially early on. As infants, keeping close to our caretaker is vital to staying alive, which is one reason we’re programmed to seek out warmth. Throughout our lives, we associate warmth (a hug) with affection (this person loves me). It’s a connection that grows stronger with every intimate embrace.

Why Lonely People Take More Showers

Because our minds unconsciously link warmth with affection, we’re more sensitive to cold temperatures than we think.

Research shows that when we experience cold temperatures, we’re especially likely to feel isolated. In fact, countering the experience of isolation is one reason people spend more time in the shower when they’re feeling down.

The unconscious desire for physical warmth is thought to be the reason lonely people bathe longer, more frequently, and use higher temperatures.

The Warmth-Productivity Link

We know that cold temperatures worsen productivity. What new research is showing is that it can also corrode the quality of our relationships.

And this, ultimately, is why office temperature matters.

Great workplaces aren’t simply the product of good organizational policies. They emerge when employees connect with one another and form meaningful relationships that engender trust. What’s often overlooked is that connections don’t operate in a vacuum.

It seems obvious that the temperature of a restaurant or theater can alter our experience. So why do we continue to neglect it in the workplace?

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Huddle Cuddles the Feds for Secure Collaboration

 Is there such a thing as secure collaboration? That's what Huddle is aiming for with a new FISMA-approved cloud service for U.S. government agencies to communicate across the web. 

Collaborating Behind Closed Doors

Being certified by the Federal Information Security Management Act is a great way to open doors within government, even if they slam tightly closed again once you're through. Huddle has a version of its popular collaboration platform approved and certified for this level of use, allowing the U.S. intelligence community and other agencies to worth together and share information across the cloud in a secure fashion. 

Already widely used by western European governments, the secure Huddle platform is currently being developed for the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) and  the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). This achievement for Huddle is down to a strategic partnership and technology development agreement with In‐Q-­Tel (IQT), a non-­profit, strategic investment firm that identifies solutions to support U.S. intelligence.

Developing for the Man 

Of course, the battle for government money is intense and there are plenty of competitors in the secure space, with IBM's SmartCloud for Government (which is also FISMA compliant) a major player. Of course, this market isn't all hush-hush as Google and Microsoft had a good old argument about the level of accreditation for their products last year. 

While likely a tiny drop in the $78+ trillion Federal IT budget, (you can view more on that mammoth entity at the Federal IT Dashboard), these deals will help raise Huddle's profile and help it secure further government work. 

As government departments move away from developing or contracting for their own costly, non-functional solutions, and start adopting and adapting off-the-shelf products that can be fortified to suitable security levels, more and more cloud services could play a part in helping make the government more agile and communicative among its departments. 

Back in the Enterprise

For the rest of us users, Huddle keeps on updating its core products with new features and improvements. Most recently, we've seen the addition of a single view of files for enterprise users, and the arrival of the inevitable iPad app. 

This comes on the back of a recent funding boost back in May, that gave the company an additional US$ 24 million to work with. As M&A activity starts to rise after Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer, will someone major now be looking at Huddle as a cloud collab partner?

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Collaboration Startup ClearSlide Aims at Sales Teams

Shopping around for an online collaboration suite just got a little more interesting as startup ClearSlide has raised nearly US$ 30 million in new funding.

The slide sharing and web based meeting platform is geared toward sales teams, but it could be an intriguing option even compared to industry mainstays like WebEx and GoToMeeting. 

Love Those Videos

Who doesn't love to watch videos online? What about videos of your coworkers during meetings? Not quite the same thing, but for people who need to take video meetings, share documents, make presentations and generally work together from a distance, this kind of tool is quite powerful.

Because there are so many options out there for videoconferencing, anyone looking to implement a new system at their company is probably looking for something very specific. This is actually pretty important, and searching for which system to use can get confusing fast if there arent particular tools that are needed or even known about. 

In fact, that's one reason why systems like WebEx are so popular. Companies have been using it for years and have a level of familiarity that breeds both contempt and satisfaction. WebEx is great for things like screen sharing, and even desktop remote control during a training session, for example. WebEx has native apps for BlackBerry, iOS and Android for those who need to meet with customers, partners or coworkers on the go.

ClearSlide also offers web based video meetings, but it adds lots of support for sales teams with things like highly integrated email, analytics and tracking. The Live Pitch feature allows for presenting to prospects without having them download anything and the ability to jump between slides and websites.  

Analytics and Prospecting

Clearslide offers Salesforce integration, detailed reports and public links to share with prospective new clients. WebEx doesn't go quite as deep on the analytics, but it does offer up to 720p resolution during video calls. It's not clear what kind of video quality ClearSlide is offering at this point. 

For GoToMeeting, there's also less of a focus on the analytics and reports. However, Citrix, the company behind GoToMeeting has recently acquired collaboration suite Podio, and it's now integreated with GoToMeeting for a more robust workfow and productivity oriented package. 

Pricing and Other Features 

ClearSlide appears as the much simpler solution compared to WebEx or GoToMeeting. It's more focused on one particular thing, and that's helping companies close sales. That might be good for them as they try to disrupt the web conferencing business, but for potential customers, it may not be quite the right fit. For example, WebEx integrates with Microsoft Outlook and GoToMeeting has the Podio ingegration mentioned above.

Furthermore, in June Cisco announced WebEx Social, an even more ambitious project that will integrate more social media features and document collaboration couresy of Microsoft Office. Both WebEx and GoToMeeting have US$ 50 per month packages, but ClearSlide pricing is not given on its webiste. There are free, trial and enterprise level packages available. 

It comes down to what exact features a company might need, and no doubt all three platforms will continue to evolve. For those companies already doing business with either Cisco or Citrix, breaking in might be a bit tougher for ClearSlide, but then again, those companies may really like the mix of features ClearSlide offers. Tell us in the comments what collaboraton tools you use and what you like or don't like about them. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Drupal Gains Steam at DrupalCon Munich 2012 #Drupalcon

My travels from Austin to Munich all in the name of DrupalCon did not disappoint! Once again, it was filled with incredible speakers and collaboration. While there, the Drupal community saw another significant merger of leaders in Drupal, new products and proof that the community is just beginning to hit its stride.

Drupal E-Commerce Gets a Boost

Drupal for commerce made another breakthrough with a big announcement from Paris and Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Commerce Guys. The company kicked it up a notch with the launch of their Commerce Kickstart 2.0 — an accelerated launch pad for the open-source e-Commerce framework Drupal Commerce.

Mike O’Connor, president of Commerce Guys North America had this to say about it, “The new Kickstart is all about creating enterprise-level Drupal Commerce sites. It’s designed to provide a multifaceted, out-of-the-box baseline of functionality as a starting point for e-Commerce sites. It’s a great advancement for Drupal and our team.”

Dev Cloud Free for All

Acquia did not disappoint to bring more to the community at Munich. They announced a new pricing structure, if you call free a pricing structure! Acquia says their Dev Cloud will be permanently free for developing sites. The developer accounts will include all the great features of Acquia Cloud: automated developer workflow, separate development, staging and production environments as well as backups, SSH access, Drush integration, Cloud API and Cloud Hooks for continuous integration and more.

Women in Drupal

The Drupal project keeps its promise with diversity. To enhance networking and build a community of women Drupal experts, the Women in Drupal Facebook page launched at the Con with over 100 members in the first couple of days!

To boot, during Munich, the number of Drupal developers crossed the 20,000 mark.

It was another great Con — Auf Wiedersehen!

Editor's Note: Another article by Ben Finklea from DrupalCon:

Enterprise Drupal Takes Big Step Foward with Four-Day Merger #DrupalCon
 

About the Author

Ben Finklea is the CEO of Volacci, the leader in Internet marketing for Drupal-based Web strategies, and the chair of the Drupal Branding and Marketing Committee for Drupal Association. He is a serial tech entrepreneur, author and SEO thought leader.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Forrester Wave: IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce Build Online Collaboration Lead

Yesterday we took a look at the first part of the Forrester Wave: Cloud Strategies Of Online Collaboration Software Vendors, Q3 2012, report where we saw that many enterprises are concerned about the feasibility of using online collaboration services, Today, we will take a brief look at the companies and products that made it into the this Wave.

Leading Trends

The interesting thing about this Forrester report is that despite all the talk in the market place about collaboration and even online collaboration there are only eight vendors that made it into the Wave, of which five made it into the Leaders segment: Box, Cisco Systems, Citrix Online, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and Yammer.

It is hardly surprising, then, that this market displays all the hallmarks of one that is only starting to evolve. It is currently in a state of flux where vendors are still refining, tweaking and improving their offerings with a number of clear leaders and the rest following in their wake.

IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com

IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com are leading the field, using their previous experience in the enterprise collaboration space to develop strong strategies for their online collaboration offerings. Both Microsoft and IBM have long histories in collaboration, while Salesforce is the pioneer in SaaS enterprise-grade collaboration, building on top of its customer relationship management and PaaS offerings.

Box, Yammer, Google

All three bring consumer experience to the enterprise with many collaboration service providers finding their way into the enterprise through knowledge workers who were adopting the tools to solve very specific problems. All three rode this wave with tools that were easy to use. Box and Yammer help potential customers to adapt to this kind of collaboration by providing easy integration into on-premises systems, while Google is making it easy to drop on-premises systems completely.

Cisco Systems and Citrix Online

These final two both possess collaboration portfolio’s that are still evolving. Both have evolved and are moving from purely conferencing services to fully fledged collaboration services. This has required a change in the way they think about collaboration and issues like integration, customization, access controls and encryption. Cisco is dealing with this under the WebEx brand while Citrix is beginning the collaboration journey as it integrates its recent ShareFile and Podio acquisitions.

Before diving into the report, Forrester recommends that potential customers look at all offerings and not just those that are in the Leaders segment. It is often the case that specific functionality will be found in the portfolio of vendors that fall outside the Leaders category.

Forrester Wave: Online Collaboration scores

Online Collaboration Leaders

IBM

IBM has been working for some time on integrating internal and external collaboration and appears to have found the right mix with the rebranded SmartCloud for Social Business offering. With it users can choose between a multitenant, and dedicated offering from a globally distributed data center. A significant part of its functionality can be accessed through most mobile devices and platforms, including iOS, Android and BlackBerry. Its Social Business Toolkit can both customized and extend its online portfolio.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Forrester Wave: Enterprises Concerned Over Cloud-Based Collaboration Feasibility

There are a number of surprising takeaways from a new Forrester Wave report that should force many collaboration vendors to think through their development strategies twice. Not least of these is that despite all the progress that has been made, many IT leaders are still questioning the feasibility of cloud-based collaboration tools.

Cloud-based Online Collaboration

The report, Forrester Wave: Cloud Strategies Of Online Collaboration Software Vendors, Q3 2012, is based on research compiled by TJ Keitt and is the result of surveys sent to 2,438 IT executives and technology decision-makers located in Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the US working in everything from SMBs to large enterprises.

It identified what Forrester describes as eight significant collaboration services providers — Box, Cisco Systems, Citrix Online, Google, IBM, Microsoft, salesforce.com, and Yammer — that were scored on over 38 criteria.

Today we will look at some of the issues that this evaluation raised, while tomorrow we will look at the five companies that made it into the Leader’s segment of the Wave.

Forrester Wave Online Collaboration: Vendors included in the Wave
 

Before looking at it in detail, there are three main takeaways from the study that put the entire body of research in perspective. They include:

1. Business Agility

To address business problems enterprises must partner with a number of external groups outside the firewall. Cloud-based collaboration tools can be delivered to both PCs and mobile devices and enables the free flow of information.

2. Cloud-based Collaboration Feasibility

Despite the massive strides in security and compliance and the fact that more than half plan to use online collaboration tools in the next two years, many IT leaders still don’t trust online services.

3. Vendors Reassure IT leaders

Following on from this, then, it makes sense that successful vendors in this space are those that can reassure businesses around these issues. Successful vendors in this space will be able to provide the flexibility enterprises require to achieve business goals.

Online Collaboration Appeals

While there is considerable competition in the online collaboration market, Forrester says that the rush to get products to the market is not vendors trying to one-up each other, but reflects a very real and expanded demand for products. More than half of enterprises survey said that they are or will be using SaaS collaboration technologies in the next two years. Business leaders believe SaaS offerings will offer them the following advantages:

Responsiveness

Customers that are increasingly informed and empowered can force an enterprise to change its strategy to suit. Business leaders believe that they will be able to respond to this with technologies that enable easy information flow, and a space outside the firewall where the enterprise can collaborate effectively with clients.

Feature Upgrades

Traditional on-premises software that depends on a three-to-five year refresh cycle prevents enterprises from changing and upgrading outdated software. Online services update themselves, a factor that was mentioned by 60% of those in the survey.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Collaboration Circus

Is collaboration in your organization like a 3-ring circus? Are you the ringmaster or the clown; the trapeze artist or the animal tamer? 

Some of these questions were brought up because I just saw Cavalia (Cirque du Soleil with horses) recently and so the circus metaphor was on my mind.

Most enterprises are going through a vast transformation around collaboration. No longer are the 1.0 tools (SharePoint, Exchange, etc.) meeting the needs of the line of business or those with collaborative needs in sales, marketing, support, R&D, etc.

Since most collaboration tools are in the cloud, they are just going out and finding their own "acts" so to speak in new collaborative solutions more tailored to their specific problem or context. 

Trying to keep the old collaboration tools going is the ringmaster’s role, the trapeze artist is a group looking at new tools and trying to strike a balance between the old and the new. The lion tamer is a group that has adopted a new collaboration tool whether IT approves or not, and the clown is off in left field looking at new collaboration technologies with no eye towards their appropriateness within your enterprise.

Which role are you?

The Ringmaster

These days IT is in a tough place trying to hold it all together and keep things secure. Many of the IT groups we talk with are still trying to put the horse back in the barn (to keep with the horse metaphor), and that just does not work. Most of the conversations we have with these ring masters are very emotional. It really is not about the technology, but is about control.

Who wants to be told that over the last few years they have spent millions on SharePoint only to have people use it as a document repository, and a poor one at that! Microsoft sold SharePoint with the promise of true collaboration and when it did not quite work out that way, different groups went off to find their own solutions and became the trapeze artists, the lion tamers and even the clowns!

The question for IT today is do we continue with these big monolithic systems that are based on pre-Internet architectures, or do we cut our losses and go with something more modern? I currently have 208 apps on my iPhone. I paid nothing or little for each of them. I did not spend millions, need to create an infrastructure, get new hardware, negotiate licenses and assign a skilled person to keep things running. I just download and use them.

A few apps together can do much of what the big monolithic systems can. Instead of Exchange I can try to cut down on my email and use Box or Dropbox for content storage, sharing and synchronization. I use Meetin.gs for my calendaring and scheduling (ok, their native app is not quite out yet) I can use Gdrive to share a spreadsheet of receivables with my operations person … you get the idea.

Emotions and Control

When I was doing some work for a client a few years ago, I had an interesting experience that repeated itself over and over at different companies. In this case we had decided on a Unified Communications and Collaboration strategy by doing lots of interviews of all different roles at the company, as well as looking at a variety of vendor offerings (they were using Notes and the CIO wanted to move to SharePoint).

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com