The survey was conducted online in December 2010 by Harris Interactive on behalf of Intermedia. Respondents were employed U.S. adults who have a New Year’s business communications resolution.

We’ve written extensively on how to get more organized, how to tame your inbox, and how to improve collaboration, but we’d like to hear your ideas in the comments.

What are your New Year’s resolutions? How do you plan to manage your work life  in 2011?

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Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?
• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

I’ll be discussing this topic in depth at Net:Work with Gary Swart (CEO of oDesk) and Maynard Webb (chairman and CEO of LiveOps) in a panel called Managing Remote Workers: What We Still Need to Get Done; I’m really looking forward to hearing their expert insights. But as many of our readers either work remotely or manage remote teams, I wanted to get your opinions and ideas, too: How can we make the managing of remote workers more effective?

Join us at Net:Work in San Francisco on Dec. 9. Register here!

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Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Social Media in the Enterprise

We all use collaboration software in different ways, and the tools that we choose (or have chosen for us) will affect how we go about our work to some extent. I know that my workflows have changed quite a lot over the past few years, particularly as file and document sharing has got so much easier; I haven’t touched my FTP client in the last 12 months or so, for example. Perhaps more significantly, the tools I use to communicate have shifted, too, which has affected the way I communicate with my colleagues. Email and IM still dominate, but corporate social networking and microblogging tools have become much more important.

I thought it would be interesting to get the perspectives of the WWD readership on this topic: How are you using collaboration tools, and how have they shaped your work and your organization?

(If you haven’t secured your Net:Work ticket yet, there’s still time — register here!)

Photo courtesy stock.xchng user jzlomek.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Social Media in the Enterprise

• Foster innovation through third parties. Innovation doesn’t have to come solely from within a company. By having open and documented APIs, a vendor can encourage third parties to build upon and enhance their products.
• Release early; iterate often. The release cycles of traditional enterprise tools are too drawn out, which means that they’re not as nimble and able to respond to new techniques and technology.
• Freemium works well. The freemium model is good, because it allows businesses to “try before they buy,” allowing them to see whether the tool will fit into their workflow before committing to the cost. It’s also useful for the vendor, as it helps to get their tool exposed to an audience who may not previously have considered it.
• Ease of use matters. Some enterprise apps could be described as, well, a bit clunky, often requiring training to use. On the other hand, the consumer space is extremely competitive, and as a result, successful apps tend to be very well designed, with a great deal of care paid to making them usable.
• Use social features to encourage adoption. Users can be resistant to fitting new tools or features into their workflow. By taking cues from the social features found in apps like Facebook, developers can encourage users to embrace new applications.

Those are the points I make in my GigaOM Pro article, but I’m curious to hear what you think: What could the developers of traditional “enterprise” software learn from the apps in the consumer/SMB space?

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For its part, Dell is now selling its Virtual Integrated System architecture. Anchored by Dell’s Advanced Infrastructure Management software (a product of its recent Scalent acquisition), the product lets users provision servers, networking and storage from a single interface. In true Dell fashion, where those resources come from doesn’t really matter — the VIS architecture supports heterogeneous gear and hypervisor environments.

Then there is Egenera, which has been selling its PAN Manager converged infrastructure software since 2001. What makes Egenera open is its broad choice of blade hardware and virtualization platforms. Customers can choose Dell hardware (via the Dell PAN Manager or Dell Datacenter-in-a-Box solutions), Fujitsu PRIMERGY blades or Egenera’s own BladeFrame architecture (with more platform support on the way), and can keep their existing Ethernet technologies.

Whether Dell and Egenera can prevail against the one-stop-shop approaches of their much-larger competitors remains to be seen. Companies like Cisco, HP and Oracle have mountains of marketing muscle and sales teams, as well as great technology. The problem, of course, is software and hardware components designed to work optimally, sometimes exclusively, with one another. Dell and Egenera certainly appear to have the upper hand if it cost is a factor: Forrester comparisons show Dell VIS and Egenera PAN Datacenter-in-a-Box coming in at approximately 75 percent the cost of comparable VMware/Cisco/EMC Vblock, HP BladeMatrix and IBM CloudBurst implementations (roughly $150,000 compared with roughly $200,000).

Despite past concerns, I’m willing to acknowledge that IT departments will indeed buy into the converged infrastructure vision. But I’m not yet ready to concede that complete vertical integration will win the day. As long as there are independent server, networking and virtualization vendors, there will be buyers for whom best-of-breed is the only way to go.

Read the full post here.

Image courtesy of Cisco Systems.

Basically Oracle thinks enterprises want a ready-made meal and customers don’t care what’s inside as long as it tastes good. In many respects, this makes sense, but it also counters a tide of “rack ‘em and stack ‘em,” where companies and service providers secure inexpensive servers and connect them together with Gigabit Ethernet. If you buy into the Oracle Exalogic vision, you’ll be using a server interconnect called InfiniBand which boasts honking speeds, but in no way has the broad adoption and reach of networking technologies like IP and Ethernet.

But boy is that InfiniBand stuff fast. Oracle is pulling out the stops with dual 40-Gigabit connections for each server within Exalogic, and claims a 2.8-to-3x improvement over 10-Gigabit Ethernet. In fact, 10-Gigabit Ethernet is only prevalent in switches nowadays, and not widely deployed within the end points of the system, or more specifically, in the servers themselves. InfiniBand originally took hold as a high-speed interconnect for compute clusters, and made lots of headway in the high performance computing markets. But it has never seen broad enterprise adoption or even recognition, until now.

The benefit of using InfiniBand is the ability to avoid extra networking layers like TCP/IP which, while incredibly helpful for Internet connections, can sometimes get in the way of high-speed data center connectivity. The downside is that InfiniBand is not Ethernet. Though there’s overlap between the cabling, transceivers, and silicon behind InfiniBand and Ethernet, they are different approaches. This means a different set of networking switches, a different set of expertise, and no way to easily share network infrastructure between the InfiniBand gear and the rest of the enterprise network. Yes, there are technologies to package InfiniBand within Ethernet, but who wants to do networking acrobatics?

Cisco for example, has taken a pure play Ethernet approach and chosen not to go the InfiniBand path with its Unified Computing Solution. The company has also worked hard on Data Center Ethernet, an initiative to bring a lossless Ethernet fabric to the enterprise.

As a self-proclaimed IP, Ethernet, motherhood and apple pie fan, I have a hard time swallowing the InfiniBand approach. But Oracle, unlike many of its data center competitors, is a software company purely trying to find the fastest platform to tout its chest-pumping benchmarks for Java applications. If it finds InfiniBand, or any other technology, will get it closer, perhaps that is the only thing that counts.

Gary Orenstein is host of The Cloud Computing Show

The report is damning: Only 65 percent of organizations carry out employee satisfaction surveys, and of them, roughly half bother to measure employee satisfaction with their technology devices, despite their importance for workplace productivity.

Dissatisfaction with corporate-issued devices and software has led to employees are bringing their own tools into the workplace. This can cause problems for corporate IT departments; it’s something I wrote about in a recent post for GigaOM Pro, “How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace” (sub. req.). However, it’s also worth noting that the difference between what we consider “consumer” and “enterprise” tools is shrinking rapidly: Gartner’s Nick Jones says he expects that there will essentially be no difference between the two within five years.

I’d like to get the opinions of the corporate web workers in the WWD readership about the tools that you use. How do you find the equipment and software (including web apps) that are issued to you by your employer? If they’re not up to scratch and are hindering your productivity, do you go ahead and use your own gear?

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Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace

While the Skype service grew out of a consumer VoIP offering, the company believes there is significant scope for growth in targeting the business market; in a survey of 40,000 Skype customers earlier this year, approximately 37 percent of the respondents reported that they used Skype’s products for business-related purposes at least some of the time. Skype currently offers two products for business: Skype Connect, which enables businesses to use Skype with their PBX systems, and Skype Manager, which provides a way to centrally manage a company’s Skype usage.

So what might these new business products be? I have a couple of suggestions. Firstly, as Skype has expanded the collaborative capabilities of its product of late — adding features such as file transfers, multi-person video calls and screensharing — a more full-featured, robust web conferencing offering could be on the cards. As Ryan pointed out, Skype needs to find a way to monetize the video calls made through its service, and getting companies to pay for additional features may just be a way to do that. However, it’s a pretty crowded market, with some well-established players like WebEx and GoToMeeting.

Secondly, Skype could also look to expand the Skype Connect service, providing the ability to connect employees’ mobile phones to a company’s PBX though Skype. Employees could then effectively have their office phones in their pockets when they’re on the road, providing similar functionality to the Alcatel Lucent Multimodal Communication Companion that I wrote about recently.

Those are my suggestions, but what business products do you think Skype should develop?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Consumer Video Chat Market, 2010-2015

From my own perspective, I know that for certain tasks I am more productive working from home, as I find it easier to concentrate without the distractions present in an office: People interrupting you, office chit-chat, pointless meetings. Added to that is the fact that I don’t have to contend with a long, tiring commute. However, whenever I work from a coworking center — an office-like environment where I am frequently distracted by social interaction — I seem to be able to get through just as much work as I do from home. And for certain tasks (brainstorming, for example) I am much less productive working remotely. The claims of an up to 40 percent rise in productivity don’t really ring true from my experience. And for organizations that have seen such drastic increases in productivity, perhaps the figure indicates that there was something very wrong with the office environment or the management of those places.

I’m wondering if my experience is typical, and as many WWD readers work from home at least some of the time I was wondering what you thought: Have you seen drastic increases in productivity since you started working from home?

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Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?

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As WebWorkerDaily readers tend to be on the cutting edge when it comes to collaboration tools and technologies, I’m curious to know what software you’re using today. So, please share your favorite apps in the comments, and explain why it is that you’ve chosen them.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req’d.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Photo by stock.xchng user star-one.

Having worked in both dysfunctional “in-person” teams and distributed teams that were highly effective, I’d say that Suster’s opinion is probably not always true, though it is hard to argue with his point that building a startup is easier if everyone works from one location, particularly because it is so difficult to establish a company culture within a distributed team. I also agree with Suster that it’s more important for certain team members to be present and available in the office — such as the CEO and CTO — than others.

However, thanks to the Internet, working in a distributed team is easier now than it ever was before. Technologies such as video conferencing, IRC and IM, and collaboration software, like Yammer and Socialtext, are helping to bring distributed teams closer together. And not only are the tools that that we use getting better by the day, but our knowledge of how best to use them to work effectively is improving, too.

So, given that many of our readers have personal experience of working in distributed teams I thought I would post an open thread asking for your opinion: Do you agree with Mark Suster’s view that “in-person” teams are more effective than distributed teams? If so, can technology (such as collaboration apps, VoIP and video chat) ever bridge that gap for distributed teams?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

So, if you were lucky enough to get your hands one one today after waiting in line (or smart enough to pre-order your new phone), what do you think of it so far?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?

The slow rollout might be a little frustrating, but as Microsoft’s Phil Smoot explains, Hotmail’s servers are grouped into clusters, and the new software is being released to a cluster at a time in order to minimize potential problems and downtime. There are more than 100 clusters serving the 360 million or so people who visit Hotmail every month. It may be a while before everyone sees the new version, so I thought that I would ask those lucky WWD readers whose accounts have already been updated: What do you think of the new Hotmail? I’m particularly keen to hear how you think it compares to Gmail.

Google very occasionally incorporates Labs features into Gmail (the Forgotten Attachment Detector, for example) but many of them seem destined to remain stuck as Labs features forever, and so probably won’t be seen by most Gmail users. With that in mind, which Gmail Labs features you think should “graduate” and become part of Gmail itself?

Here are the Labs features that I’d nonimate:

• Google Docs previews in mail
• Move Icon Column
• Send & Archive (this is such a small change, but it’s a huge time saver)
• Title Tweaks

Leave your picks in the comments.