Collaboration Archives - Page 10 of 20

Why I’m NOT Writing about Google Apps

Posted on February 22, 2007 ·

Of course it’s a significant move. Not that it happened today… or was unexpected. It’s been evolving in front of our eyes, the significant news IMHO is not the pricing, but the Service Level guarantee of 99.9%.

(Well, on second thought, there is a surprise: where is JotSpot?)

But is there anything else to discuss? Not really, already dozens of posts appeared, and before you know TechMeme will become useless for the next two days, as it will be completely overwhelmed with me-too posts on the Google announcement.

I’ve actually been planning a more speculative post on Google’s foray into the SMB Business Applications market, but that will now have to wait for the echo to die off….

Update: Hehe .. Robert got to the same conclusion.

Update (2/22): Sound of reality from Zoho’s CEO:

“Our business plan is not based on us beating Microsoft or Google, it is based on serving customers well enough to earn a profitable share of the market. Business is not superbowl, though it often appears that way in a 24×7 news cycle. It is perfectly possible for a smaller company to offer a compelling product to customers and earn a perfectly good living, without “winning” the market.”

Tags: google, google apps, echo chamber, techmeme, smb, SLA, SaaS, Office,

Zoho

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME, Software, Technology ·

Are You an A**hole?

Posted on February 8, 2007 ·

Apologies, I don’t mean to offend anyone… but there’s no other way to refer to Stanford Prof. Bob Sutton’s book, “The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t“.

The Harvard Business School Press refused to publish it, unless the title was changed to something more decent – so Prof. Sutton walked away. Ironically, now it’s the Harvard Business School Tech Alumni and my friend Chris Yeh who organizes a lunch discussion with Bob Sutton today, which I’m looking forward to.

Reading Bob Sutton’s blog I feel we’re witnessing a “No Asshole Cult” in the making. People contribute with stories, the “Rules of Engagement” are being adopted by businesses… etc.

My suggestion to Professor Sutton: open up the discussion even further by opening the No Assholes Wiki. The most recent example of a book being extended to a wiki is the Wikinomics Playbook where the public you and me …) gets to write an entire chapter. I tend to agree with Ross that sooner or later “peer production, a wiki for every book, will be common“. Considering the level of interest, this book would be a prime candidate to be wikified.

And now we’re getting to the title of this post: the button on the left takes you to the ARSE test. “The purpose of this self-test is to find-out if you are a certified asshole, at risk of becoming one, or a genuinely civilized person.”

Personally I find this the weakest self-assessment test I’ve ever seen – unless it was meant to be just a “prank” … a joke to see who wants to claim to be an a**hole. Self-assessment test are supposed to be constructed in a way that there are no clearly “good” and “bad” answers; the questions should be less direct so participants don’t feel inclined to answer the way they “should” behave: in other words since there is no easily recognizable, clear correlation to individual questions and the end result, they might as well answer honestly.

All the questions in the Arse test have a decidedly negative connotation, so you clearly know their impact on the final outcome. Now, doesn’t that mean that real a**holes will always click on “false” and come out with the best grades?

Update (1/8): After writing this I’ve found these stats: so far over 8000 people completed the test, yesterday’s average score was 7.29 which means: “5 to 15 “True”: You sound like a borderline certified asshole, perhaps the time has come to start changing your behavior before it gets worse.”

I guess people want to appear assholes

Update (1/9): Guy Kawasaki shows the current distribution chart on his blog.

Tags: bob sutton, hbstech, harvard, no asshole rule, asshole, arse test, self-assessment test, wiki, wiki books

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Collaboration, Misc ·

Box.net + Zoho: Another Step Towards Seamless On/Offline Computing

Posted on February 3, 2007 ·

Well, we did not have to wait long: barely two weeks after Omnidrive announced their integration with the Zoho online applications, competitor Box.net followed suite: they now support online editing via Zoho Writer. The result of the edit process will be saved back to your Box as a .doc file.

Box CEO Aaron Levie assures me this is just the start of many future integration projects, which is great. After all, it should not matter where a document starts its life: I should be able to access and work on it online or offline.

I fully expect other services to join the camp: For example, the better business-class wikis all handle document attachments, but to edit those docs you still need to download, edit, save, upload back up again – way too cumbersome, why not enable online editing? And if you read Tim Barker’s comments to my writeup on Koral, you can expect this amazingly easy content collaboration system to offer online editing soon.

P.S. Aaron, I’m still waiting for that sync

Additional posts: /Message, CenterNetworks, Web Worker Daily,

Tags: zoho, box.net, omnidrive, on/offline, wiki, koral, collaboration, online backup, online storage, office 2.0

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·

Zoho Announces Multimedia Notebook at DEMO

Posted on January 30, 2007 ·

(Updated)

The Zoho folks will be announcing yet another product at DEMO – this time it’s a multimedia NoteBook. Since whenever they release a product, the Microsoft / Office analogy is quite unavoidable, let’s just get it out of the way: this is Zoho’s “OneNote” – and a lot more. (Bias alert: I am an Advisor to Zoho).

Notebook is an online application to create, aggregate, share, collaborate on just about any type of content easily – all in one place, without having to switch applications. You can create multiple books and within that multiple pages. There are a number of page-types to begin with, including Sheet, Writer, Calendar, Contacts, Planner, Task – these correspond to Zoho applications – or simply start with a blank page.

You can easily create any type of content within a page: text, image, drawings, audio, video – these could be embedded youtube videos or record from your own camera / microphone directly into Notebook. Place your content anywhere in the page by freely dragging it around, resizing, reshaping it. Aggregate content from multiple sources: embed Show, Sheet data, web pages, RSS feeds, file attachments. IE and FireFox plugins allow easy clipping of web-content.

If it’s Zoho, it has to be collaborative; but this time NoteBook brings real-time online collaboration to a new level: you can share book-level, page-level or individual object-level information. This means you can selectively collaborate with certain users on your text, while sharing the chart with yet another group, and hiding the rest. Updates to any of these objects are reflected in the NoteBook real-time. Integration with Skype allows Skype presence indicators in the individual shared object as well as direct IM-ing over Skype. Needless to say, version-control is taken care of at the object-level, too.

Now, for the bad part: NoteBook is currently in limited Alpha mode … so hang on for a while ..

and in the meantime, enjoy this demo video:

NoteBook is unquestionably the sleekest of all Zoho apps, and a technological marvel. There are clearly specific target demographics, like students, where an All-In-One notetaker is the killer app. In a more typical business environment one might wonder where it fits in the range of products available, and what application to use when. Update (1/31): Dennis lists much better use-cases:

“I can see huge potential for this among those professionals who need to assemble audit and M&A resources for example. It makes the creation of a multi-disciplinary team very easy with the ongoing ability to collaborate as projects evolve while remaining in an organised, controllable environment.

I can see other use cases arising in forensic work, planning, budget management, time and expense management – the list goes on. In this sense, Zoho Notebook could become the de facto desktop for knowledge workers because you don’t need to leave the service to do pretty much all the tasks you’d expect a knowledge worker to undertake. I can also envisage some interesting mashups using accounting data from a saas player that gets pulled into Notebook on and ad hoc basis. Does this mean Notebook is a ’silver bullet’ application.

I’m going to stick my neck out and say a qualified ‘yes.”

About a month ago, while reviewing then new Zoho Wiki I expressed my hope to see tighter integration to the Zoho Suite – specifically Writer, Sheet and Show. Well, now it’s here, albeit in a separate application. Ideally I’d like to see the wiki equipped with Notebook’s powerful editing /collaboration options – or is it the other way around? If you take NoteBook, and allow linking between pages/books … well, that’s quite close to a wiki.

. Update (1/31): In the same post I’ve just referred to, Dennis says: “Zoli Erdos has an interesting take on whether the collaboration features put Notebook in the same class as a wiki.”

Let me clarify my point: I’m not comparing NoteBook to Wiki as it stands now. What I do believe is that the feature sets of the two should be merged somehow. Combine the “digital dumping ground” as Dennis says, i.e. the absolute flexibility of creating/aggregating any type of info with the linking, back-linking, navigation, search in the wiki, and you have a truly killer business app.

Zoho has a tradition of initially developing products individually, but share the code-base early, and integrate them later. What do you think? Should Wiki and NoteBook be merged to create the super-product, or is there a need/ market for them to be independent in the long run?

Update (1/30): See related posts on TechCrunch, Read/Write Web , Zoho Blog , Scobleizer, /Message, CMS Wire, InformationWeek, PC World.

Update (2/1) : Robert Scoble’s summary: ““cool” has different meanings: 1) That it’ll change how you work. Zoho’s Notebook wins here.

Update (2/2): The video of Zoho Notebook’s launch at DEMO is now up here.

Tags: zoho, zoho notebook, zoho wiki, wiki, collaboration, multimedia, multimedia notebook, onenote, ms onenote, microsoft office, microsoft onenote, skype

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME, Startups ·

Koral – Collaborative Content Management without the Hassle of "Management"

Posted on January 29, 2007 ·

My regular readers know I’m a big fan of wikis. There is just no better way for collaborative group work. If I started a company today, we’d have a wiki from Day 1. Gartner predicts 50% penetration to business by the end of 2009 – that’s Gartner, that’s only 50% and that’s 3 years away. That leaves a large number of businesses unserved, and a huge opportunity to enable them to collaborate without changing the way they work.

Today the #1 productivity platform in business is still Microsoft Office. A typical “knowledge worker” creates documents, spreadsheets, presentations on her/his desktop, tries to maintain order by diligently filing them under an ever-growing directory-structure and shares the information by emailing the files around. When several co-workers need to contribute to a document, version chaos ensues. Document management systems are supposed to ease the pain, but they are big, expensive, and surprisingly (?) only 5% of office workers actually use them.

Koral, a content collaboration startup debuted a few months ago has a strong change to change it all. It pursues a very simple idea: allow users to share information, give them access to the most recent version of all documents, whether the latest update is on their desktop or someone elses, and guide them with several popularity/ usage indicators, i.e. most accessed documents, most active contributors, best rated experts ..etc – do it all without forcing users to change how they work today.

They can continue individually working on their desktops, and all they have to do is drag the documents to be stored into Koral’s drop-box on their desktop. The document is instantly uploaded, fully indexed, auto-tagged based on content, and for certain document types (for now PPT) flash previews are generated. The user does not have to be logged on to the web-based system, although doing so allows for additional categorization, tagging, permissioning:

All this information becomes the foundation of easy document retrieval. Gone is the directory jungle where files are replicated and lost: it’s all about tagging and powerful search. Search, which can based on simple keywords, boolean expressions, or multi-step, clustered search where a friendly interface helps the user create further filters based on content, file formats, tags, categories, author ..etc until the number of matching documents comes down to a handful – at which point the online previews come handy.

Once you found what you’re looking for, you can download your document, or subscribe to it, giving you alerts any time the document is updated. The subscription mechanism goes beyond just notification: it’s the foundation of document synchronization. Koral places a tracker the local (desktop) document, so it will know who has what version at any time. When you access a local document – open it, or even attach it to an email – Koral will warn you if you don’t have the most recent version (i.e. someone else has updated it online) and of course offers to replace your old copy.

Sync goes a step further: how often do a few “core slides” get replicated in dozens of corporate presentations? Or a key spreadsheet embedded in various other documents and slides? Koral can refresh all these second-generation documents when the core slide/spreadsheet changes – i.e. your numbers are magically updated.

Stepping beyond traditional document management there are a number of social networking / bookmarking features: documents can be rated, commented on.

The document summary page above shows the average rating, number of users who rated the document, number of downloads and subscribers, and comments, on top of the standard document attributes like creation date, author, version number.

Koral is currently piloting a version with select customers where they can provide ranking statistics based on some of the above information: most frequently read, downloaded, subscribed document, most discussed document, most popular post or author, most popular tags ..etc. Needless to say you can subscribe to authors, tags, categories, not just individual documents. All this essentially supports better information discovery rather than just explicit search for information you already know exists.

Finally, some of the best applications are when you don’t even notice you’re working with Koral: users of Salesforce.com can discover related documents and attach them to the lead / opportunity record without ever leaving the salesforce.com environment.

Talk about mashups …Koral itself is a “bridge” product, enhancing the productivity of largely offline users (working in MS Office) by offering an online service. I would love to see them move further on the offline/online continuum by offering online tools to not only preview but actually edit documents online – the recent Zoho-Omnidrive mashup is a good precedent to follow.

For additional information, check out the demo video by Tim Barker, VP Products, and Robert Scoble’s interview with CEO Mark Suster.

Tags: koral, microsoft office, ms office, ecm, content management, document management, content collaboration, collaboration, saaS, search, content discovery, salesforce.com, zoho, office 2.0

Filed Under: Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Startups ·

Google Groups Out of Beta – Again

Posted on January 24, 2007 ·

It’s not everyday that a Google product announcement goes largely unnoticed. That’s exactly what happened yesterday when Google announced a “new version” of Groups.

The reason for no fanfare is that it isn’t exactly a new version… well, there is a new version, just not now, but in October. Back then, when it was really new, I enthusiastically welcomed the change:

“Wrapping it up, in a major step forward, Google Groups which so far has been just a group email mechanism, becomes a mini community/collaborative platform, likely attracting previously “email-only” users to the native web-interface – and we all know why Google loves that. “

Google Groups may very well be the only (?) product that entered Beta stage twice – back in October, when all the goodies were added, Google re-labeled their upgraded product as “Beta”. Today, with this new announcement I’m not finding any new-new features. I suspect all that happened was Groups grew up again, and left the Beta stage. Funny that the word “beta” is not once mentioned the announcement, but comparing the logos, that’s the only conclusion I can draw.

Tags: google, google groups, google groups beta, perpetual beta, collaboration, google page creator, file storage, google drive, gdrive, marketing, PR

Filed Under: Collaboration, SaaS ·

Group Collaboration is NOT Dead

Posted on January 23, 2007 ·

(Updated)
It’s become fashionable to beat up large corporations. I understand the feeling; having done my time in the corporate world I know I’m not going back … but that said, not everyone is a freelancer, startup entrepreneur or just “old-fashioned” small business employee. Most of today’s workforce are still corporate employees, and large companies produce most of our GDP, like it or not.

Which is why I don’t understand Stowe Boyd’s rant against group-oriented collaboration tools:

“The basic model of 90’s era collaboration, a la Lotus Notes, is all about the group. Information was managed in group-based repositories, then passed around for review, or published to intranet portals via customized apps. Information era workflows where people are first and foremost occupiers of roles, not individuals, and the materials being created are more closely aligned with groups than individuals.

Web 2.0 social tools — largely — work around a different model. Social networks — explicit ones like MySpace and Facebook, or implicit ones in social media — are really organized around individuals and their networked self-expression. I am writing this blog post, and publishing it, personally. It is not the product of some workgroup. It is not an anonymous chunk of text on a corporate portal. My Facebook profile pulls traffic from my network of contacts, sources I find interesting, and the chance presence updates of my friends.

I don’t need to participate in groups to exist or to share — or to matter — in this world.

On the other hand, Notes and Sharepoint, and even their webby second cousins, like Basecamp, are principally organized around groups. I have argued in the past about the work federation design flaw in Basecamp (see here: Basecamp and The Federation Of Work), but the basic problem is the wrong emphasis on belonging to groups instead of being connected to individuals. “

Well, Stowe may not need to participate in a group, being a successful freelancer, but the average corporate employee does, and they are IBM’s target market. Group-thinking, collaboration is as important as ever, not only to enable individuals co-create better, but also, as a secondary effect to preserve knowledge – should the individual leave, business does not come to screeching halt.

Quickr or Slowr, Lotus Connections and Sharepoint will make a killing this year. Personally, I’m quite happy I don’t have to touch them – but then again, like Stowe, I’m not a corporate employee. I just don’t forget about the majority of the world, who are.

Update (1/23): Stowe’s post stirred up a bit of conversation:

Social enterprise: Oxymoron or business logic? (Donna Bogatin @ZDNet)
Donna Bogatin on Social Enterprise: Group-First or Me-First? (Stowe Boyd)

Tags: ibm, lotus connections, lotus notes, ibm quickr, social software, collaboration, groupware, freelance, stowe boyd

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Social Networking ·

Zoho and Omnidrive Bring Seamless On/Offline Computing a Step Closer

Posted on January 22, 2007 ·

Omnidrive and Zoho took us a step closer to seamless on-and-offline computing by announcing their partnership over the weekend. The typical approach to editing online files is to download > edit > upload again. Better online storage services streamline these steps by auto-synchronizing your files, but editing is still a local operation.

Not anymore on (Z)Omnidrive: double-clicking on any Microsoft Office document will open it in the corresponding Zoho application, in the example below Zoho Writer. Currently Word, HTML, txt and ODT formats are supported using Writer, but later this week spreadsheets and Powerpoint files will also be available, through Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show. (Remember, although I am talking about applications here, all you need is the browser.) Thanks to Omnidrive’s sync-power the changes you’ve just made online will be reflected in the offline version of your document, too.

Creating new documents within Omnidrive is as easy as clicking File > New > Document type: Zoho Writer pops up, saves your document to Omnidrive, and voila! The Word file is on your computer.

I suspect this is just a beginning, and we’ll be seeing similar integrated offerings soon. For example I’ve long been saying that the attachment management functions the better enterprise wikis offer are nice, but they solve the problem based on yesterday’s technology. Instead of the upload>download>re-upload nightmare wouldn’t it be easier to work with the attachments directly online?

Koral, the innovative content collaboration service could also benefit from the Zoho API: it handles desktop Office apps like a charm, synchronizing, indexing, tagging …etc. them, but currently only has flash-previews for presentation files. A lot of extra steps could be saved by displaying / editing the documents online.

What other “candidates” can you think of?

TechCrunch, Omnidrive, Zoho, New Web Order, GizBuzz, Solo Technology, Webware,

Tags: omnidrive, zoho, open api, mashup, integration, online storage, synchronization, office 2.0, weboffice, zoho Writer, zoho sheet, zoho show, MS Word, MS Office, zomnidrive

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Startups ·