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.

November 12th, 2008

JobBlogs: Facebook for business

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 2:38 pm

Categories: Office productivity, Social computing

Tags: Facebook, Software-as-a-service, File Server, Workspace, File Servers, Software As A Service (SaaS), Team Management, Cloud Computing, Blogging, Storage Management

I’ve been a little busy over the last few weeks, but it hasn’t all been drinking and partying. I’ve been looking into JobBlogs, which has a highly innovative SaaS appliance, which blends together customer relation management and project management, with social media within business as a main selling point, into one central application. As they so delicately describe it:

“It serves up an intuitive, comprehensive and fast workspace tailored to meet universal team challenges. Contacts, plans, activities, tasks, documents and schedules, are easily organized and tracked throughout the work flow.”

But it’s not just that. It feels, from the very beginning of using this application, like an online operating system; a mesh for the masses, or a screen away from your computer. The user interface is fantastic. It has a very Windows-style feel to it, making sure the user feels safe and comforted knowing the environment even before they use it. You can even customise the wallpaper that you have - a very un-business like quality, but gives it that edge over other competing products.

It’s a fresh way to look at things; integrated blog management to keep on track of projects and let others know how things are stewing. You can create and manage workspaces, tags, business processes - someone even quoted this as being “like Facebook for business”. It also boasts:

“…customer relationship management (CRM), intranet, contact database, content management system and file server requirements.”

It runs within your browser with a SaaS element to it, is incredibly easy to set up and worth the cheap cost to run it all. This could well be a user integral part of any organisation - keeping people connected, up to date, understanding and safe knowing their storage is secure.

It’s worth looking into at very least. This’ll be something I’ll personally be keeping in my bookmarks for a later date.

November 7th, 2008

Would you flip to Microsoft?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 10:41 am

Categories: Development tools

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Mike Arrington, Internet, Tools & Techniques, Desktops, Open Source, Management, Hardware, Dennis Howlett

The announcement of BizSpark didn’t get a huge amount of attention and I’m not surprised. After 24 years of running Wintel based systems I flipped to Mac and have never missed anything Microsoft offered. OK - I’m an edge case that wants to run as much as I can in the Internet cloud but as someone who has invested in startups the last couple of years I can confidently say that no-one I personally know is building on the Microsoft stack. That’s not to say they don’t exist.

I recently spoke with ThoughtFarmer. They’re betting that organizations wanting to replace intranets will be more willing to do so if the offering is built on Microsoft technology. I see the wisdom in that (more on ThoughtFarmer next week.) Despite all the column inches that open source, Mac, Ubuntu and the like generate, the fact remains that Microsoft still ‘owns’ the enterprise. That may not matter for departmental solutions owned by users or those deployed over the Internet but it sure as heck matters internally. Especially if that means support.

Mike Arrington declares Microsoft’s BizSpark initiative as ‘brilliant’ and when you look at it, that’s easy to understand:

What startups get: a free, tech-supported alternative to open source software. Microsoft gets to train a new crop of engineers on their software and services, and lock these guys in after three years when fees start to be charged. Brilliant.

The question for startup developers is whether they trust Microsoft not to gouge them when the deal expires or before they’ve hit enough revenue to afford the services.Most of the folk I know give a collective shrug but then I only know a fraction of 1% of those in the developer community. As Jason Harris said on CMS Newsire:

In many cases, running Microsoft software doesn’t even enter the minds of those building solutions in a start-up environment.

It will be interesting to revisit this in say a year and see how Microsoft is doing. In the meantime, if you’re a startup, would you go for BizSpark?

November 4th, 2008

Trade show horrors

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 9:30 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Booth, Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Sales, Dennis Howlett

The global sales VP of an enterprise software company once told me that 70% of his salesforce are D-graders the company had to constantly winnow. Tip up at a trade conference and you’ll see them in abundance.

A guest column over at Sandhill by Elizabeth Cook points up some of the horrors she saw at the recent Oracle OpenWorld trade floor:

• The Slump: Booth staff slumped over, focused intently on their handheld devices. No acknowledgement of passers-by. Some sat hunched in a chair, others stood back to the aisle. A widespread problem.
• The Texting Talker: One representative came to the edge of the booth to talk with me, then repeatedly checked his messages. “Don’t worry, I’m still talking to you” he said as he started texting a reply. Don’t worry – I’m outta here.
• Cell Phone Snobs: Also a widespread problem. No one stops to talk to someone who is clearly too busy to be bothered.
• Eaters: Even if you are the only representative from your company, you don’t eat in the booth during the peak traffic time. If you have more than one person at the show, take turns and eat away from the booth – during a slow time.
• The Huddle: Groups of company representatives, huddled in conversation, paying no attention to passers-by, often with backs to the aisle.
• The Glazed Gaze: Too bored, disinterested, or hung-over to put on a game face.
• The Clearly Uncomfortable: Some people are just not suited for booth duty. Even if you have a technical product, selling to a technical audience, your programmers may not be the best representatives on the trade-show floor.

Keep in mind, these are behaviors I observed during the peak-traffic times. And I couldn’t make this stuff up.

On the other hand, some companies got it right. Interestingly, the market leaders had buttoned up, professional operations.

So true. As the conference season starts to wind down, I see these kinds of thing all the time. They’re enough to make any CXO weep. How the heck are you supposed to get  a sales person’s attention when he’s shoving burritos down his neck or yabbering into a Crackberry? That’s assuming the person isn’t showing obvious signs of recovery from the previous night’s party?

Hungry companies don’t do this kind of thing. They may not have the best sales pros but they sure as heck know how to give attention. That above everything is what prospective customers want. Whatever your stage in the startup game, don’t get into bad habits. They’re costly.