Thanks to a partnership that’s been announced today with Citrix Online, Skype users will later this year get web conferencing functionality. By making use of Citrix’s popular GoToMeeting conferencing product, Skype users will be able to easily quickly set up online meetings. Read more »
Cisco today announced Cisco Jabber, a messaging app that brings together presence, IM, voice and video, voicemail, desktop sharing and conferencing into one product that will be available across a swathe of desktop and mobile devices: PC, Mac, tablets and smartphones. Read more »
Over the weekend, Google apparently accidentally deleted some 150,000 Gmail accounts. We’re all growing increasingly reliant on the cloud. If a cloud vendor accidentally deleted your data, locked you out of your account, or shuttered one of your favorite services, what would you do? Read more »
One of the challenges of working with a remote team is making sure that everyone has the various tools they’ll need. One solution is bulk installing tool Ninite, which makes setting up your remote colleagues with the standard tools they need a snap. Read more »
Socialtext, an enterprise social networking tool that we’ve written about previously, is being updated. The company hopes the new release will help to make corporate intranets more social, and move away from being static sources of information to become places where people interact and share knowledge. Read more »
Cisco today announced a range of new initiatives aimed at boosting production video, most interesting of which is the new integration of its TelePresence Content Server with the its Show and Share service, which should make it easier for users to record and share telepresence sessions. Read more »
TheDeadline is a collaborative task management app. While there are a bunch of great to-do list apps available, like WWD favorite Remember the Milk, what makes TheDeadline worth checking out is its Twitter-style input mechanism, which makes entering to-dos and sharing them intuitive and fast. Read more »
One of the problems faced by many remote teams is the need to send files to colleagues and stakeholders. SendGenie is a service that’s currently in beta for Windows and Mac that makes sending large files as easy as dragging and dropping them on a widget. Read more »
Google Docs Viewer, the handy online document viewer that enables you to view Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and PDF files online without having to download them to your machine, now supports 12 new popular file formats. The list of supported file types now includes: Read more »
In my recent post about ClipCube, I said it was missing a couple of features: the ability to handle images and keyboard shortcuts. One of our readers, Brett, helpfully noted in the comments that he uses Ditto, a similar open-source tool with the missing functionality. Read more »
There are now plenty of places where you can find a workspace outside of the home office, ranging from coffee shops with Wi-Fi to dedicated coworking centers and office space sublets. However, it’s not always easy to know where to look for them. Read more »
Clipboard management tools are really handy, especially if you often end up copying and pasting many different snippets of information. I’m particularly fond of Mac app Jumpcut. However, I hadn’t managed to find a Windows clipboard manager that I liked until I stumbled across ClipCube. Read more »
New data released today by online work marketplace oDesk shows that small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) are making use of freelancers in record numbers. oDesk says that the data points to an increasing number of SMBs using contract staff to grow their businesses. Read more »
Many collaboration tools have very similar feature sets. But to find a really good app, you need to look beyond the basic features of a particular tool and delve more deeply into the value, experience and knowledge that its vendor brings to the table. Read more »
TaskUnifier is a desktop task management app that’s designed to work with the Getting Things Done (GTD) system. While it has a functional and unattractive UI, it’s free, has all of the features most people will need and is fairly easy to use. Read more »
Adobe’s Flash-based enterprise web conferencing app, Connect, now has multi-user XMPP chat support, available as a “pod” and enhancing the product’s potential as a collaborative tool, as it can now integrate with a much wider ecosystem of apps, including many widely-used chat clients. Read more »
Although Dropbox encrypts your data, to be completely sure that it is secure, you need to encrypt it yourself. Up until now that’s been a fairly laborious process. Enter BoxCryptor, a Windows-only tool that can encrypt Dropbox files in a completely seamless fashion. Read more »
Looking for a way to keep your team up-to-date with project data when they’re out of the office? Wrike, a well-designed project management tool that we’ve written about previously, has announced the availability of new mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry. Read more »
Despite a fairly weak jobs market overall, freelancers should be optimistic. Online labor marketplaces oDesk and Elance have both released data showing strong growth in demand for freelance workers over the past year, with both sites reporting a large increase in the number of jobs posted. Read more »
ShareYourOffice is a new website that wants to act as matchmaker for office space, hooking up people looking for desk space and companies that have spare space available. The idea behind ShareYourOffice is to create mini-coworking centers everywhere there are firms with spare desk space. Read more »
Frame Box is a simple drag-and-drop tool for creating and sharing wireframes, which can be useful during the website design process to illustrate the structure of a page without getting bogged down in the details. I made a short screencast to show you how it works: Read more »
join.me, the impressive free no-registration screen sharing service from the folks at LogMeIn, now has an iOS app, which lets users attend a join.me meeting from anywhere over 3G or Wi-Fi. I tried it out and it works really well, with only a little lag. Read more »
Finding it hard to keep up with contacts spread across email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? Connected is a new service that connects to your various online accounts and consolidates your contacts into into a constantly updated online address book, with a single, easy-to-navigate interface. Read more »
Since Yahoo announced that it was planning to sell off Delicious, I’ve been looking for another bookmarking service. Today, I stumbled across a new useful social bookmarking tool: yummymarks. It’s a stripped-down service that simply enables you to save and access your bookmarks from your browser. Read more »
Mozy, a popular cloud backup service, has announced that it’s changing its pricing and dropping its MozyHome Unlimited backup plan. The company says that the change is necessary because its users are storing much more information now, but this represents a significant shift in the offering. Read more »
IBM is getting into the cloud-based office productivity suite market, with the announcement of LotusLive Symphony, a product that offers users the ability to simultaneously collaborate on documents. But is it too late, given that its competitors have such a head start? Read more »
Salesforce has made its Facebook-like enterprise collaboration app, Chatter, generally available at Chatter.com. The app was previously only available to Salesforce CRM and Force.com customers, but now anyone can get a free account simply by signing up using their company email address. Read more »
According to some new research issued by Forrester, desktop videoconferencing is not yet taking the enterprise by storm. It found that nearly three-quarters of business technology users don’t want to use desktop videoconferencing, and just 15 percent have access to the tool on their computers. Read more »
IBM’s new Virtual Desktop for Smart Business is a product that offers users secure access to their personal desktops from anywhere. It has self-configuring, self-managing and self-protecting features that enable easy installation and management and it can be administered via a web interface. Read more »
Tibbr takes a slightly different approach than the current crop of enterprise social networking tools: not only does it allow employees of a company to connect with one another, it also allows them to subscribe to information and events generated by their enterprise IT systems. Read more »
One of the problems with working remotely is receiving a file in a format that the apps that you use don’t understand. Fortunately there are several excellent document conversion apps available; for converting text documents, one of my favorite tools is Pandoc. Read more »
Box.net today unveiled the latest version of its cloud-based, file-sharing software. The service, which enables Box users to view and collaborate on files, has been rebuilt from the ground up with a greatly simplified UI, as well as offering new collaboration and real-time notification features. Read more »
Trunk.ly is a bookmarking app with a twist: It automatically gathers all the links you share online and makes them available via a searchable web interface. It can connect to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Pinboard via built-in connectors, and other services through RSS feeds. Read more »
Dealing with our overloaded inboxes takes time; anything that makes the email experience more productive has the potential for considerable savings for businesses. NEO Pro 5.0 is an add-on that promises to make the Outlook experience more organized and productive. Read more »
Users of Instapaper, a service that allows for the saving of articles to read later, should check out ChromaPaper, a Chrome app. It adds some extra features to the Instapaper website, but what makes it really useful is that it provides offline sync. Read more »
Driven by improvements in technology, particularly an explosion in the availability in mobile technology, and increased access to broadband, the world of work is changing rapidly. In my latest post for GigaOM Pro, I outline the trends in remote work to watch out for in 2011. Read more »
Looking for a full-featured tool to create mind maps tool to use on the go? Popular iPhone mind mapping app MindMeister, which previously cost $6.99, is free for a limited time over the holidays. It works well as a mobile companion for the web app. Read more »
The soon-to-be-defunct Google Wave has a huge number of available gadgets, which enable users to add useful collaborative tools to their waves. The good news is many of the more useful Wave gadgets will now live on in Shared Spaces, a Google Labs project. Read more »
Yesterday, Om reported that Etacts is to be shut down. While that’s bad news for users of the social CRM service, fortunately there are plenty of alternatives available. Here is a selection of the more useful social CRM tools that have been reviewed on WWD: Read more »
Firefox has an irritating habit of switching into “Work Offline” mode if it detects that the Internet connection drops. The good news is that there’s a new option that you can use to prevent the browser from automatically switching into “Work Offline” mode. Read more »
