November 21st, 2008

Enterprise 2.0 solution reduces email abuse

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 7:19 am

Categories: Mobile, Office productivity

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Solution, E-mail, Online Communications, Zack Whittaker

We now live in a day and age where we can expect to get dozens, if not hundreds of emails a day. Most of these you’ll find are replies and forwarded emails - emails which you have already responded to and are following up, or emails which have been passed onto you because you’re more of a relevant person to deal with it.

Taglocity works on Outlook 2003/2007, and works as an Enterprise 2.0 solution, allowing the user to prioritise email, and deal with email in a more productive way. Instead of abandoning and forgetting about email days down the line, this solution allows even the most busy of people to organise, prioritise and deal with email.

Being unique in business practise isn’t always useful. Using bad practises of email management has become a social norm, and are more than happy to hit that “reply all” button, even though those people don’t need to see it. People are thinking too socially and less business like; replying to everyone so “everyone can get the message plus smiley face”, when a single email to the sender of the original message is all that is needed.

This not only clogs up your email, it clogs up your business day. Everyone wishes they had more hours in the day, and at times you’ll find you’ve got more coming in than you have going out. Oh trust me, whilst saving the world in my day job and university student the rest of the time, I know how that feels.

Every time you get an email through, simply create a tag for it and a whole load of options are available for it. You can mark them all as read, set appointments and flags for the message, move them, delete them, and even allow them to “travel with you”, so they can be aggregated on other Outlook screens. These can be shared with others, and search all of your tags with smart folders.

From the website:

“From ‘push’ only to ‘push’ and ‘pull’ thereby giving people more control over their own attention and enabling on-demand knowledge discovery and sharing to all stakeholders. In addition to being able to quickly find needed information, information should also ‘find’ people based on their criteria and terms.”

It’s a brilliant little tool which uses little-to-no memory, and has saved me hours already, especially with the amount of crap I get in my inbox.

October 13th, 2008

Egnyte: using and sustaining Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 2:03 pm

Categories: Mobile, Office productivity

Tags: Apple iPhone, On-demand, Server, Enterprise 2.0, Egnyte, Backup Facility, Storage, Backups, Hardware, Zack Whittaker

Egnyte, in a nutshell, is a software as a service, cloud storage application. But it’s a lot more than just that. It feels like your online home of files, storage and where you put your valuables.

Egnyte started out because the small business, which is roughly between 1 and 250 employees is a unique market and sensitive to investments, but generally there seems to be a low IT competence. With the advancements of technology and broadband getting faster, storage seemed less of a commodity. The world is getting more mobile with working from home, tele-working and commuting twice a day. The enterprise and small-medium market is accepting a more on-demand solution, and with this, Egnyte was created.

The service is an on-demand infrastructure with increased mobility, Web 2.0 sharing, virtual collaborative teams and on-demand storage. A unique solution is needed to support complex business needs and expanding business model.

If you read all that and thought, “yawn, you mentioned business related words, I’m switching off”, it bores me too. However take this on board instead. It’s basically Live Mesh but so much better and will probably always be better. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed using Egnyte, which is something I can not always say about every product I’m pushed.

Egnyte is primarily an on-demand file server. In an ordinary on-site enterprise you’ll get sharing issues, backup issues and disaster recovery, security flaws which need patching, remote access violations and all other kinds of crap a workplace doesn’t need.

Egnyte eliminates the need for:

• physical servers
• backups
• added hardware
• maintenance overheads, as after all, a small-medium business doesn’t need these clogging up the workplace, as well as the financial impact.

It works excellently, if not specifically, for branch and distributed geographic offices, includes secure desktop and web access, has built-in disaster recovery, works incredibly well with sharing large files through direct transfer or hotlink sending and has a comprehensive auditing capability.

SaaS, security and file storage –>

September 17th, 2008

Boingo - a traveler's lifesaver

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:00 am

Categories: Mobile

Tags: Boingo Networks, Network, Laptop Computer, Notebooks, Networking, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Dennis Howlett

I’ve been road testing Boingo on both my laptop and N95 the last few months. It’s great. In short, Boingo provides subscribers with an easy way to avoid all those ludicrous $X per day charges that hotels and airport operators try to gouge out of you when on the road and especially when out of range of your home network provider.

In my case that means any airport in Spain plus the rest of the world, especially if I want to use the laptop rather than simply collecting and answering email over the N95. Given that I make a foreign business trip almost every month, that can quickly add up to a lot of money. As an aside, remember that Blackberry is not as popular in Europe as it is in the US where every other business person I come across seems to be thumbing their Blackberry.

Boingo’s attraction comes in two forms. First the laptop subscription cost at $21.95 per month after the teaser rate of $7.95 for use in the US is easily recouped against hotel and airport charges. The $39 global rate is even better value for money when you consider that a hotel in Amsterdam can charge as much as €24 ($34) per day and one in London £12.00 ($21)per day.

Second, the Boingo network is growing well with more than 100,000 locations spread around the world. So for example last week, I was able to connect at an Ibis Hotel in the UK - something I would normally have done directly through the Orange network. If I’d had time, I would have checked out the connection at Manchester airport. While on a layover in Atlanta, I noticed that Boingo is the preferred partner for a number of alternative providers at the airport.

The proof of the pudding comes in the quality of the WiFi connection. So far I’ve experienced no problems. This is in sharp contrast to the issues I usually have at conferences when WiFi networks are under provisioned.

My one nit is the fact I need separate subscriptions for laptop and the N95 which comes in at $7.95 per month. I’d prefer to have an all-in-one deal but I guess that will come in time as the network expands and Boingo is able to bundle services more cost effectively.

Finally it’s worth thinking about the loyalty angle. Many of my friends detest their day to day provider. This is because they get stung with roaming charges out of all proportion to the value they deliver. Network of network providers like Boingo offer a different, more convenient experience. I sense that is likely to keep customers more loyal, especially for the increasing numbers of road warriors and Starbucks style startups.

August 11th, 2008

Unique corporate service relies on good human nature

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 6:00 am

Categories: Mobile

Tags: phone, mobile, service, yougetitback, o2 bluebook, advertising & promotion, marketing, zack whittaker

Last week I was on a call with Frank Hannigan, Managing Director of YouGetItBack.com, and quite possibly the best thing to come out of Ireland since Guinness.

YouGetItBack is a lost and found company, the idea created in 2004, probably from a drunken argument about losing a prize-winning sheep. While it took until 2006 for the company to thrive, during this time they researched every point, angle and perspective, and concluded that losing your stuff is a universal, worldwide problem. However, finding your lost things is a much bigger issue.

Business partners and customers end up losing things in hotels, airports, train stations, taxis - the stats are absolutely huge. He told me there was an estimated 1 billion items lost last year, usually a laptop or a mobile phone, with just over 1 million mobiles being lost or stolen in the UK alone. The bigger problem is the data stored on these devices; potentially the biggest problem is the data being lost forever or getting into the wrong hands.

In his illustrious Irish accent (seriously, I love it), he told me:

“The cost of lost property is immense; not only to the individual but to the businesses as well. The service we have connects people together with their lost items - the two main items of course, being the laptop or the mobile phone.”

“We started out with stickers, key-fobs, things you can physically attach to the device. The more we progressed; we designed an application that sits on these devices. This essentially creates a network of lost items which then, we can connect it all back to the owners.”

Over the time that the company was finding its feet, mobiles essentially became “old news” when the BlackBerry came out. You could topple a company with the information from a stolen BlackBerry, but not a mobile phone as such. With the application they’ve created, it gives peace of mind to the owner and the businesses - it protects the data, it takes a snapshot of the data and uploads it to a server, but also connects it to part of a global recovery system. He explained, “there’s around 8/10 chance you’ll get your Blackberry back, but all of the time you’ll get your data back.”

The system works like this.

Whether you’re a business or an ordinary consumer, even on the chance you don’t get your device back, there is a silver lining to it after all.

Read the rest of this entry »

April 1st, 2008

Controlling mobile costs with MobilityCentral

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 9:13 am

Categories: Mobile

Tags: Mobile, On-demand, MobilityCentral, Purchasing & Procurement, Advertising & Promotion, Business Operations, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

If there’s one thing that irks most of my Irregular colleagues, it’s getting hit up for long distance and roaming charges. The mobile operators offer a bewildering array of plans but it is all too easy for staffers to run up charges they didn’t know about or, in extreme cases, were just too careless to control. Visage Mobile hopes to end that with MobilityCentral, a newly announced on-demand service designed to help administrators keep on top of spend.

To date, most services have centered on the device. Visage focuses on the people. Key functions include: inventory tracking and control, spend and policy management. If all this seems too good to be true then you’d be wrong. The service provides an easy way for spend manager to for example expedite policy based provisioning based upon the criteria administrators choose to set. That means the right phone reaches the right perons on the right plan. Staff can send in requests for an exchange of phone, report lost or stolen and see reports on their usage. There is some integration to existing billing systems used by ATT and Verizon which in turn can be linked to procurement systems. This is a far cry from the plethora of spreadsheets and Access databases that characterize most organizations.

MobilityCentral leverages Active Directory, LDAP and HR systems to get at the initial ‘people’ data though the company admits the first data load is the most demanding, requiring reconciliation work. Once this is done, the system understands naming differences between say Tom, Thomas and Tommy. These differences are handles through a reconciliation system that allows for appropriate data matching.

For reporting, the system can spit out email via Outlook on a nightly batch basis at global, departmental and individual bases, depending on how the customer wishes to configure the system. For day to day administration, MobilityCentral includes a Flex graphics dashboard.

At the time of writing, early customers included Choridant, DemandTech and Visioneer. The company claims to have one customer with up to 50,000 users.

MobilityCentral is sold as an on-demand service with per user/per month prices starting at $5, but falling for volume.

While MobilityCentral won’t bring instant savings, it provides the kind of fine grained insight into how spend patterns operate which are essential to understanding which plan combinations are likely to be the most economical. Since its reports are exception based, disputes can be quickly picked up and processes inserted to ensure they are resolved before they get out of hand.

March 4th, 2008

Zoho exploiting Google Gears Mobile

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 5:46 am

Categories: Mobile, Office productivity

Tags:

As we start to see the convergence between online and offline world’s, Zoho is first out the office productivity gate with a use case for Google Gears Mobile.

Zoho is now supporting the Windows Mobile platform via Gears which allows it to work in both online and offline modes. There’s a slight gotcha in that it only offers ‘view only’ mode when working offline, having assumed that 90 per cent of people will only view in this mode. The first time you try this mode, users are prompted to install Google Gears.

In the current version, Zoho restricts users to loading the last 20 documents in online mode and five documents in offline mode. The company plans to give users the option to decide how many documents they wish to download for offline usage. I’d be more impressed if they provided the option to choose which documents need downloading. Add a touch of workflow goodness and documents could be pushed to the user.

Given that Phil Wainewright believes hell will freeze over before Microsoft puts a productivity suite into the Internet cloud, Zoho is now giving Windows Mobile users a solid reason to consider switching. The fact it is free will deter some IT departments but as Zoho continues to push ahead with development, I can see the potential for putting (some) large enterprise class capability in the hands of SMEs. Given this is the largest segment of business that remains largely untapped by the mega vendors, I wonder how long it will be before we see Zoho links to its applications being bundled into laptops and mobile devices?

There’s a nifty 5 minute video that shows how Zoho Writer works on mobile and Zoli Erdos has a rundown of the service.

Access to Zoho Mobile is available from this link.