GigaOM » Collaboration

So why did Cisco buy Versly?

Om Malik — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:24:05 +0000

Cisco Systems announced Monday that it was buying a little-known collaboration software company, Versly, for an undisclosed amount. Versly makes it easy to collaborate inside the Microsoft Office products, though it’s not clear who its customers are. The way I see it, this is more of a talent and knowledge acquisition vs a product/market focused acquisition.

Now, like Cisco, we have long been believers that broadband-based collaboration is a transformational idea for companies and individuals. The San Jose, Calif.-based routing giant made collaboration a big area of focus when it bought WebEx and a slew of other companies. However, its collaboration plans have fallen short of its target.

Many of Cisco’s competitors — for instance, Google and Salesforce — are pretty far along in their efforts, and Cisco needs to catch up. It seems Cisco is looking to jump-start its efforts, and for that, it needs a team with deep understanding of collaboration and software-as-a-service business model.

I would rate this acquisition a “B+” for Cisco. Versly seems to be a good start, thanks to a pretty good group of executives who will soon be joining Cisco. That said, I do think Cisco needs more than just this team.

Versly is roughly two years old and has received funding from the likes of 500 Startups and Accel Partners along with a group of angels. It was originally called TaskDock. It had been building Atlasssian Confluence add-ons for a while before focusing on this new market.

Have you tried or used Versly? If yes, please share your thoughts with us.

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The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Tales from the trenches: Cisco

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:05:44 +0000

14 years ago when Chuck Robbins started at Cisco, “you had a desk and you put your name outside the desk.” Now after more than a decade, the workstyle at the company has changed nearly beyond recognition, becoming incredibly accommodating to remote teams. And Robbins has thrived in this innovate environment, rising to the position of senior VP and running the organization’s sales team for the Americas.

What lessons has Robbins learned from leading through this transition at company that was not only an early adopter of flexible working, but which also builds a number of remote work solutions? He shared his wisdom with WebWorkerDaily.

Talent

Do experienced managers of co-located teams just magically make a smooth transition to a virtual workstyle? Not according to Robbins, who is a big believer in training, and not just on the technical challenges of web work.

“The technology actually tends to be the easiest part of this whole thing,” he told us, adding that the success of web work is often inhibited by “cultural acceptance by the leadership team that this is how we operate and it’s OK. Some companies equate productivity with being in the office, so I think, first of all, we have to make sure that we provide our leadership with education on things around, how do you manage a remote workforce effectively? What are the things you need to do differently when you can’t walk down the hall and grab them? We give that kind of training.”

Tools

Robbins’s pro-training philosophy extends to tech tools as well. He explains that team members are also trained in how to make the best use the of video conferencing solutions Cisco offers, answering questions like, “What sort of things should you be thinking about when you’re presenting to a customer over video and you’re not in the room and everybody else is? Or if you’re in the room and somebody else is remote, how do you make sure you continue to engage them?”

Video may play a big role for Robbins’s team, but email doesn’t. “Email is becoming the least favorite mode of communication with our team,” he said. Instead of sending individual messages, Robbins’s employees have “a new platform that we actually designed called Quad. It’s named after the college campus quad where everybody gathers. Think of it as Facebook for enterprise. People can build communities around different topics and they have their profile and their status and then we have integrated instant messaging.”

“New technology that enables single number reach for our sales organization,” is the final piece of the puzzle for Robbins’s team. “No matter where you are somebody doesn’t have to keep up with what phone numbers to dial. They dial your office and it rings whatever device you need it to ring,” he said.

Tips

In addition to tech and training, Robbins relies on an outcome-based management style to keep his team running smoothly. To succeed as the manager of a virtual team, “you have move to outcome-based performance, and to the extent that you can, outcome based compensation,” he advises. “That cultural thinking that, if you’re at your desk from eight to five, than you’ve been productive is no longer valid, so you’ve got to figure out how you create outcomes and metrics where you can determine success.”

All of these pieces have come together to create a deep change in attitudes towards flexible working at Cisco, Robbins concludes. “When we first started working from home, for some reason we didn’t want people to know we were working from home. You didn’t want the dog to bark or the kids to come and say something. You were always trying to mute if the dog was coming around. Today, if you’re working from home and your kid walks in, you tell them to say hello to whoever you’re talking to on the other end because it’s such an accepted thing.”

Think something similar won’t be coming to your company anytime soon? Think again, insists Robbins. “Any companies that don’t think they’re going to have to buy in to this approach, I think they’re going to be in trouble. For the first time ever we have conversations with companies about how to build their remote worker infrastructure and their collaboration capability in a way that will enable them to recruit the next generation workforce, because they believe that will be a retention issue. It’s become a strategic recruiting tool for many companies.”

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be.

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3 reasons to create transcripts of your audio/video content

Terri Griffith — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:13:06 +0000

John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, has said (PDF) that “video is the next voice.” Unfortunately, just like other voice-focused communications, video content is hard to find, not accessible to all and hard to repackage. But transcription can add value to to both content providers and content users in at least three ways:

Increase the chances your content will be found. Full, or even partial, text is more searchable than tags and titles alone. “I’ve found that on several of our clients’ blogs, the transcript often outperforms its corresponding podcast,” says Janelle Kozyra, the Director of Editorial and Senior Managing Editor for Gregory FCA.
Make your content more accessible. People who can’t hear the video, or those who don’t want to search through it, will find transcripts useful. Ted Cocheu, the founder and CEO of Altus (an enterprise provider of video search and management tools) said recently, “New technology is enabling enterprises to easily combine PowerPoint presentations with audio/video into a dynamic format that is searchable down to the point of interest or keyword. . . . As a result, users can have instant access to the information they need.”
Make repurposing your content easier. Once you have a transcript, it’s a short step to a tweet, a blog post or a slide deck.

Creating these transcripts is becoming easier, and there are alternatives.

Professional transcriptionists. These professionals provide high quality and full control of the process. But this may be overkill for some audio and video.
Crowdsourcing. Ryan Lawler has covered the development of SpeakerText, a firm that supports the crowdsourcing of transcripts. The Kahn Academy crowdsources transcription and translation through Universal Subtitles.
Automatic captioning. YouTube uses Google’s voice-to-text technology to create autocaptions.

This is a call to both content creators and users to support transcription. Content creators: Please use a service that adds transcripts to your audio and video content. Users: Help where you can by contributing to the crowdsourcing efforts.

How have you benefited through audio or video transcription in your web work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Iwan Gabovitch

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Fuze Telepresence Connect hopes to solve interoperability woes

Simon Mackie — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 19:00:42 +0000

One of the major drawbacks with traditional room-based telepresence installations is that systems from different vendors are typically incompatible with each other, and also may not work with other video conferencing endpoints, such as desktop and mobile video conferencing tools. These walled gardens are a problem for a few reasons: They lock customers to a particular vendor; they reduce the possibility of business-to-business telepresence; and they limit telepresence usage only to those employees who can physically access a telepresence room, which isn’t great for remote workers.

Video conferencing and online meeting provider FuzeBox announced a new product Wednesday, Fuze Telepresence Connect, which hopes to overcome these interoperability problems by enabling its Fuze Meeting product to act as a gateway between Tandberg, Polycom and LifeSize telepresence systems. It can also extend telepresence across iPads, Android tablets, PCs and Macs, making it available to an entire workforce.

Telepresence Connect offers:

Scalable multiparty HD video conferencing. High resolution and high frame rate encode and decode at multiple frame rates and resolutions.
Standards-based encoding technology. H.264/AVC/SVC based.
Error resilience and localization. Maintains continuous high-quality video without broken pictures or other artifacts in environments with high packet loss, while individual client network errors do not affect other conference participants
Resolution and rate matching. Supports sending video to multiple endpoints with different bandwidths and resolution capabilities, without transcoding.
Dynamic rate control. Automatically and continuously senses the current network condition and adjusts bit rates accordingly
Firewall/NAT traversal. Embedded functionality that provides a safe and secure connection through any firewall with no feature loss and no additional equipment required.

I’ve seen a demo of Telepresence Connect in Fuze Meeting, and it was impressive, enabling connection to and switching between several telepresence rooms, as well as simultaneous desktop HD video conferencing with several participants. It also provides access to Fuze Meeting’s built-in collaboration tools, such as file viewing, annotation and screen sharing. The seamless connection to various telepresence rooms was particularly pleasing, as typically setting up a telepresence meeting session is not straightforward. I also liked the intuitive Fuze Meeting interface, which enables users to determine the layout of the conferencing screen, choosing which video feeds to highlight or bring to the front — something that’s not usually possible in MCU-based telepresence conferences.

FuzeBox’s new product is not the only cloud-based gateway that can connect telepresence systems. Vidtel, used by the MondoPad device I wrote about last week, also claims to offer “any-to-any” HD video conferencing, for example. However, Fuze Meeting with Telepresence Connect is the only product that works across H.323, SIP and H.264 and can also connect to tablet devices as well as PCs and Macs, and is also the only product to have built-in, easy-to-use conferencing and collaboration tools. Installation of Fuze Telepresence Connect starts at $18,000, with 20 percent annual maintenance fees. That may sound expensive, but it is pretty small compared to the investment required for a typical telepresence setup.

A potential issue for FuzeBox’s new product is the effort vendors are now making to improve interoperability themselves, with most new gear now adhering to either the TIP or H.323 standards, while Cisco, for example, announced an update to its TC and CTS software Tuesday that will be available later this year and extends interoperability with all standards-based endpoints. So has FuzeBox’s product come too late to market? I don’t think so; the telepresence vendors have been sluggish in their attempts to improve interoperability and there are plenty of existing, legacy telepresence installations out there that companies would like to squeeze more usage and life out of.

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Using Dedicated “Media Rooms” for Improved Collaboration

Amber Singleton Riviere — Thu, 19 May 2011 15:00:20 +0000

In recent months, I’ve increased my usage of video and multi-media presentations and conferencing, both for collaboration with external business contacts and for internal product development.

Not long after starting to use these technologies on a regular basis, I decided I needed a better and more-permanent setup in order to remain productive and comfortable, while also being able to shift quickly and seamlessly from one activity to another. Otherwise, I was constantly rearranging my work space to fit the task at hand and spending as much time setting up for a given activity as I was actually completing it.

The Case for a Dedicated Media Room

Many companies today with distributed workforces are making dedicated “media rooms” an important aspect of communication, one that allows workers separated geographically to engage in dynamic conversations, as if they were in the same room and without having to spend time setting up equipment.

Lew Epstein is a general manager at Steelcase, one company providing such working environments. Steelcase’s “media:scape rooms” are dedicated meeting areas that use furniture and technology to create collaborative work spaces for distributed teams. Epstein says that “teams need to share complex ideas [and] solutions that enable them to connect quickly and globally. They want to share content on their laptop or get up and write or draw on a whiteboard, and they need all the subtleties of face-to-face communication, too. For true collaboration, groups need spaces that nurture the process of collaboration. Work is not defined by what you do at a desk, and organizations are no longer confined within office towers. Teams need comfortable, versatile collaborative spaces to work in.”

Tandberg, now part of Cisco, is another company that provides such solutions for face-to-face communication or, as the company refers to them, “telepresence environments.” While these spaces require considerable investment, they can provide companies with cost savings and create greener organizations by cutting travel.

Creating a Media Room

The options for setting up a media space are as varied as the companies that use them. Overall, you’ll want to make sure your solution provides a seamless way to share information, audio, and video so that your team can easily connect and engage with one another remotely, but here are a few other considerations to make when planning your media room or space:

Think about how your team currently collaborates and how you might improve remote meetings and presentations.
Decide if you need a dedicated room is required, or if whether you can integrate your media space within your current office or meeting area.
Decide if you’ll be conducting calls with multiple parties at either end or with just one person.
Think about whether your solution needs to be portable or if it will be set up as a permanent point within your office (some HD telepresence units are now reasonably portable).
Consider the types of content you will share within your presentations and meetings.

In the end, a dedicated media space allows a distributed workforce to collaborate and share information from anywhere in the world quickly and easily, saving time and money, while increasing the effectiveness of global communication.

Image courtesy Steelcase

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Social Tools: Helping People Share What They Know

Murali Sitaram — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:00:12 +0000

Ever since Andrew McAfee coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” in 2006, organizations have been investigating ways that enterprise social software (ESS) can address gaps in how employees work together. But we’ve also come to realize that there is a greater context behind industry interest in ESS. Over the next 20 years, nearly 80 million people will retire; that’s nearly 10,000 baby boomers a day. This trend will likely lead to significant generational shifts in the workforce, and the potential for a tremendous loss in intellectual capital as senior staff depart. The trend will also challenge organizations to more rapidly on-board new hires. ESS, alongside an effective change management program, can help an organization address these knowledge transfer needs.

We need to get this right as an industry. There is an enormous amount of “know how” and business insight within the heads of our senior workers. At the same time, those entering the workforce will be expected to become proficient quickly. We need to create opportunities for people to connect, share, learn and collaborate as a natural way of working rather than repeating the “knowledge capture” mistakes of the past. That’s where ESS offers tremendous potential. By making work more observable and participation more visible, “knowledge transfer” becomes something that occurs as people interact and build relationships. Let’s look at two examples:

On-Boarding New Employees

In the “good old days”, organizations would hire employees and bring them into the office for training. During orientation, employees would forge bonds with co-workers that might last throughout their professional career. This process helped new recruits sense that they were part of a community. We don’t always do that today; we might never actually meet the people we work with every day. Virtual teams are the way work gets done in global organizations.

With ESS, we can’t recreate those exact physical experiences, but we can come close, and in some ways, provide more flexibility. With ESS, we can create a community and social networking site where employees can connect with each other in ways similar to consumer sites. However, within the enterprise, this interaction is more aligned with employee needs and interests. An enterprise collaboration platform should make it easier to: find subject matter experts (social profiles), add them to your network (social graph), follow their work (activity streams), and converse with them (microblogging). Senior staff does not have to think of this as “training” new hires. By making their actions more transparent (what communities they join, what videos they viewed, what content they bookmark), junior staff can “watch” how they conduct their work in a non-intrusive manner. Over time, this becomes a means of informal learning and new type of virtual apprenticeship for new hires. When senior staff does want to share information with new employees, ESS offers a frictionless way to share links to relevant knowledge sources, or share insightful commentary on a current task.

The participatory nature of ESS also enables new hires to create their own professional networks with senior colleagues or join established communities where senior staff share experiences and refine work practices. And as ESS becomes more integrated with unified communications and video, those interactions can become more real-time and visual, getting us closer to that orientation experience we had long ago.

Preserving a Personal Legacy

ESS capabilities can also help organizations address knowledge transfer concerns arising from likely retirement waves. As mentioned in the on-boarding scenario, use of ESS can make “work” more observable and self-documenting as employees blog, update wikis, “tweet”, and have their actions published into an activity stream. This type of natural osmosis enables the organization to focus less on the type of forced capture of “tacit knowledge” prevalent during knowledge management projects in the nineties. The benefits of observable work, however, need to be felt by employees. If senior workers do not see personal value from contributing in that manner, they might return to prior information hoarding practices. Effective leadership and change management practices are necessary to address cultural dynamics and help with community-building efforts. When culture and community come together, senior staff should view participation via ESS as the “norm” for the way employees connect, share, learn and collaborate.

Offering retirees a way to stay connected after retirement should be considered as another means for organizations to harness retiree’s business insight. There was a time when retirement meant that the employee disappeared from the workplace. Nowadays, that’s often not the case. Consumer sites like Facebook make it easy for retirees to keep in touch with former co-workers. Organizations are now exploring how ESS capabilities can be used in a more purposeful way to provide retirees with options to continue work in a limited capacity. It is not unheard of to have former workers return to the workplace as a consultant, subject matter expert, or even as a mentor. An enterprise collaboration platform with the right security integration can support these former employees as they participate selectively in various roles.

Gaining Adoption

Changing existing employee work patterns and behaviors is perhaps the greatest challenge for making ESS initiatives a success. Governance, change management and constant communication are essential elements of any transformation program. However there are some techniques strategists can employ to influence actual technology usage.

Make it personally valuable: Enabling employees to post, tag, bookmark and share information enables them to create their own personal learning environment and build relationships with peers based on similar interests. Adoption will not be driven directly by what processes they are involved in, or any other formal activity that directs their role. Instead, their use of ESS is influenced by their own goals – which might tie to career development, recognition of their expertise, or professional networking.
Make it a community effort: People often enjoy helping others and collectively co-creating something of value. Adoption can be facilitated by posing challenges for employees to overcome. For instance, inviting employees to participate in solving some of the more pressing issues facing the company (products, markets) or their department (customer service, data quality) can tap into the goodwill of employees to contribute.
Make it the new way of working: Over the years, companies have changed the means of production by deploying office productivity tools, or automating work activities by deploying various business applications such as CRM. Employees had to change the way they worked as the work itself changed in terms of its tooling. In some cases, we can change the work itself such that people blog instead of creating documents, or share information via wikis rather than email. As people become comfortable using tools for their daily routine, they can become more comfortable using the same tools to voluntarily participate in communities and professional networks.

Murali Sitaram is the Vice President and General Manager for Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform Group. He is responsible for driving the development of Cisco Quad, an enterprise social software platform that helps organizations deliver a social, mobile and virtual workspace to its employees.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Ed Yourdon

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Cisco Launches Its Jabber, Mother of All Messaging Apps

Simon Mackie — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:09:10 +0000

Cisco is continuing with its push into the collaboration space, with the announcement of Cisco Jabber. A product that’s a result of Cisco’s 2008 acquisition of Jabber, it’s 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 (including Android, iPhone and Nokia).

The app enables users to seamlessly escalate from an IM chat to a voice, video or desktop sharing interaction on the fly, and because the app will be available with a near-identical identical feature set on nearly any platform you can think of, these features will be available wherever the user happens to be, using their device of choice.

As you’d expect, the app is based upon the XMPP messaging protocol, which means that it’s compatible with many other XMPP-compatible IM services, including GTalk, AIM and Sametime

Of course, with Skype and many other IM vendors in the market, Cisco Jabber not the only multi-platform messaging app available, but Cisco Jabber seems to be very enterprise-friendly, and also offers out-of-the-box integration with video endpoints like IP phones, WebEx and telepresence systems.

Cisco Jabber can be deployed across on-premise and cloud-based options. It’s being rolled out across the various platforms over the coming year, starting with a client for the Mac that’s available now (note that integrated video is not due to be added to the service until the second half of the year, however).

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Cisco’s Making It Easier to Share Telepresence Sessions

Simon Mackie — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:01:42 +0000

Cisco is a company that’s long been pushing video for the enterprise, and today announced a range of new initiatives aimed at boosting production and consumption of video. Most interesting of the announcements is the new integration of its TelePresence Content Server 5.0 unit with the company’s Show and Share service and updates to the MXE 3500 transcoding unit, which should make it easier for users to record telepresence sessions and then make them available for sharing, streamlining workflow and opening up a range of possibilities for knowledge capture and video production, such as the creation of training materials.

TelePrecence Content Server (TCS) is a rackmount appliance that can capture HD video from teleprecense sessions (1080p at 30 fps and 720p 60 fps, with support for five concurrent calls, and video conference bandwidth up to 2 Mbps). It’s able to record and stream video and H.239 dual-stream presentations from any H.323 or Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) video conferencing unit. Show and Share is an enterprise webcasting and video sharing solution; users can record, edit, post and comment on video. By integrating the two, the content generated during telepresence meetings can be seamlessly captured and then shared within an organization, to enable re-use of training sessions or to enable a meeting to be shred company-wide, regardless of attendee availability.

These kind of capture and sharing features aren’t only found in Cisco’s offerings, of course; web conferencing software such as Adobe Connect 8 can also also capture video sessions for later playback, and will do so at a much lower cost. The difference is that the quality of video captured by the TCS unit will be much higher, and is also able to take advantage of the multi-camera setups available in typical room-based telepresence installations, which should allow businesses to leverage their existing telepresence investment to easily produce high quality training materials that can be then be distributed within a company, for example.

Also announced today, the MXE 3500 transcoding appliance (a device that can automatically convert both recorded and live video from one format to another) is getting updated with a browser-based interface and Pulse Analytics, a technology that automates the time-consuming process of having to watch hours of video just to find the right content. With Pulse Analytics, the Cisco MXE 3500 now automatically tags words and speakers in videos so users can easily the find speaker and content segments they need, which should greatly streamline the process of editing the videos captured by the TCS unit for distribution on Show and Share.

TelePresence Content Server 5.0 will be available in March, while the Pulse Analytics upgrade to MXE3500 will be released Q2 2011.

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Social Media Melding: Marketing and Customer Service Collaborate

Aliza Sherman — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 18:00:35 +0000

Are you thinking about where social media monitoring and management fits into your business? The inclination in most organizations is to put it into marketing or public relations. But is that the right move?

I recently spoke with Ross Daniels, Director of Marketing for Cisco, about the challenges of deploying social media monitoring and management tools inside a larger enterprise. I’d spoken with Daniels about Cisco’s SocialMiner, a product that companies can use to capture, analyze, prioritize and take action on consumer posts in social media channels. The application is not aimed at the marketing function but instead focuses on customer service, customer support and sales in the social media ecosystem.

One of the first things companies should do before deploying any software solution to help harness social media activities and actions, says Daniels, is to make sure social media is positioned — or repositioned — as residing between marketing and customer service. If customer service and marketing aren’t talking to each other, there is a high likelihood that social media marketing efforts will fail. Customer service is built for listening and for scaling and can be an integral “pillar” alongside marketing to manage social media.

Here are some suggestions for managers to consider to pave the way for more effective social media management that came out of my conversation with Daniels.

Connect customer service with marketing. Start making introductions between departments to establish a more collaborative relationship if it doesn’t already exist. The heads of both your marketing and customer service departments should meet regularly. Marketing plans should be shared with — and can even be enhanced by — customer service. Each side should know how to use social media to not only fulfill their own goals but to help one another to get closer to reaching overall company goals.
Assign dedicated staff to social channels. Pick or train people who can develop an expertise in social media engagement and response in social channels. Consider representatives from both marketing and customer service or a shared liaison. Cross pollinate social media activities so no single department — or person — holds the responsibilities.
Measure results together. As expectations are high for tangible returns on social media marketing investments, bring customer service in to help measure, analyze and tell the story of how social media is effective for the company. The measurements and analysis customer service already does will bring value to the analysis of social media. Both departments can contribute to generating reports and presenting findings.
Mine social media for more than sentiment. Instead of just looking for the positive, negative and neutral of what customers are saying about a company’s product or service, look for clues to how the public perceives the company as a whole. Social media can be used to identify places within an organization where there are silos hindering cross-departmental communications and other operational issues. Use the findings in social media channels to make functional improvements in how the company works, not just what they offer.

As you manage, monitor and respond to social media activity around your company and brand, make sure to spread the awareness and responsibilities across multiple departments. When it comes to social media, operating in silos can be the kiss of death. Social media can also help identify and break down silos, but these changes must be articulated as a core shift in both internal and external communications and interactions. Present social media not as yet another burden for someone to add to their already overloaded work day but as an inherent change in the way the company communicates with the public and within its own walls.

Where do social media responsibilities reside within your organization, and how is that working?

stock xchng image from user svilen001

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At Cisco, Employees Drive Adoption of Collaboration Technology

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:45:20 +0000

Three years ago Rebecca Jacoby, an SVP and CIO at Cisco attended a meeting of her peers at large companies and discovered that very few were using instant messaging pervasively in their organizations. Fast forward to today when few people would imagine life without IM, either in the workplace or the home. Such rapid adoption of collaboration technology represents an opportunity that Jacoby called, “[T]he biggest transformation since e-commerce in the mid ’90s, related to how a set of technologies can change the way you work and change your business model.”

At the GigaOM Net:Work event today, Jacoby said Cisco’s adoption has come from employees and also from the top-down. She says many of the technologies they have adopted came about as folks who were using it in smaller groups sought to scale it out. At that point, her organization became involved, trying to think strategically about how they could deploy the various collaboration systems without causing compliance or security problems. And deploying such products correctly has led to big advantages in terms of cost savings and improved productivity.

Jacoby pointed to a virtual sales meeting Cisco holds, that enabled about 10 times as many people to participate for a third of the cost. She also pulled out Cisco’s favorite example of collaboration savings — Telepresence. The company’s high-end videoconferencing hardware and software has saved the company more than a billion dollars in the last few years with about 75 percent of that savings coming from a reduction in travel costs and a quarter coming from a boost in productivity. No wonder Cisco thinks collaboration is going to be a $34 billion business.

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Breakin’ the Law: Corporate IT Policies and the Mobile Workforce

Simon Mackie — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 22:00:07 +0000

Thanks to broadband and mobile technology, the tools and the very nature of work are changing, but are corporate IT policies keeping up? According to some data released today by Cisco from its Connected World report, the answer is no; workers feel stifled by corporate “acceptable use” IT policies, and are prepared to break them in order to get their jobs done. Only 34 percent of the 1,303 end users surveyed who had an acceptable use policy in place felt that they adhered to it all of the time. The primary reason for not adhering to policy (as reported by 41 percent of those who didn’t stick to their company’s policies) was that they needed access to unsanctioned programs or devices in order to do their job. Overall, a whopping 64 percent of the workers surveyed felt that their IT policies could use some improvement.

As I outlined in a recent post of GigaOM Pro (sub. req.), workers are breaking their firms’ IT policies because they are frustrated with the limited choice of tools available in the workplace. Smartphones, tablet computers, collaboration software and video conferencing apps are just some of the sophisticated tools available to consumers outside the workplace; it’s understandable to want to use them at work, too. While mobile technology and broadband mean that workers can be more productive, this “consumerization” of the workplace is a potential problem for corporate IT departments, because it can introduce security risks and also add to a firm’s IT support costs.

Given that it’s very difficult to stop consumerization of workplace tools (simply blocking their use just leads to added worker frustration), corporate IT departments need to redraft existing guidelines to make sure they aren’t draconian and allow workers more autonomy in their choice of tools, while they also need to educate the end users on the security risks. Worryingly, 37 percent of the IT decision makers in the survey had the opinion that end users did not feel that breaking IT policies presented enough of a security risk to be concerned. There needs to be better communication and understanding between IT departments and end users: staff need to understand that unsanctioned tools can present a security risk, while IT departments need to understand why staff want to use those tools in the first place.

If you’re interested in learning more about how businesses can adapt to a new era of working and how to manage the equipment and software that the modern worker needs, you should come to our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco on Dec. 9, where we’ll be discussing these topics in-depth.

Does your employer have an “acceptable use” IT policy in place? If so, how could it be improved?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Carl Lovén

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Jawbone Icon for Cisco Wants to Be the Center of Your Unified Communications

Simon Mackie — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 19:00:50 +0000

San Francisco-based start-up Aliph recently went into partnership with Cisco to release a new version of its Jawbone Bluetooth headset, the Jawbone Icon for Cisco. You’ll probably be familiar with the design, as it looks very similar to other Jawbone products. This one’s a little different from standard headsets, though, because it adds in upgradable firmware and the ability to seamlessly switch between mobile phones, Cisco IP desk phones, the soon-to-be-released Cius tablet and softphones, all through the headset. It’s basically a wearable computing device.

Here’s a quick unboxing video showing the headset and its packaging:

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I’ve been using it for a few days now, and it works pretty well. It’s nicely designed, very lightweight and the range of fit options provided mean that it’s comfortable to wear. Sound quality is great for both making and receiving calls, even when outside or in a noisy environment.

The main point of this headset is that it wants to be the central part of a unified communications (UC) setup, providing seamless switching between your desk phone, mobile phone and other communications devices, like the Cius tablet, so as you move around you can take and make calls without ever having to reach for a phone; it can pair with up to eight devices.

It’s quite a neat idea, but personally, I just don’t make or receive enough calls to constantly have a headset on. Perhaps I needed a bit more time to get used to it, but I found that when I wasn’t using the Jawbone I would remove it and then forget to take it with me, which kind of renders the whole thing a bit pointless. Still, it’s a nice headset, and if your office is equipped with compatible Cisco IP phones it may be worth checking out.

Jawbone Icon for Cisco is available now. Street price should be around $140, although Cisco customers will likely get it included as part of a package.

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Cisco Umi: An HD Telepresence System for SMBs?

Simon Mackie — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:00:14 +0000

Yesterday, Cisco launched its consumer telepresence offering, Umi, which can be connected to an existing HDTV to provide high-definition video calling, with up to 1080p resolution, in the home. As Ryan pointed out over on NewTeeVee, at $599 for the hardware, plus an additional $24.95 per month for unlimited calls, it seems a little pricey for its target consumer market, especially given that there are much cheaper web conferencing products from the likes of Skype and Citrix (CTXS) that can also provide HD video chat.

It should be noted that Umi is a fairly capable offering, though. It includes the kind of high-end features that have previously only been found in expensive enterprise systems (like those from Tandberg and Polycom, for example): full HD video, a video camera with motorized aiming controls and optical zoom, and a dedicated service to handle the calls, which should mean guaranteed call quality. It will be able to provide the kind of immersive “feel like you’re in the same room” high quality call experience that you just can’t get with cheaper web conferencing products.

While it remains to be seen whether there will be many consumers who are ready to shell out for a super-high-quality telepresence system like Umi in their homes, it wouldn’t surprise me to find Umi actually winding up in the hands of SMBs (and perhaps even some freelance web workers) who’ve always entertained the thought of having a telepresence system but haven’t been able to justify the tens of thousands of dollars they generally cost; in comparison with enterprise systems, Umi sounds cheap. It seems strange that Cisco hasn’t pitched this product at the SMB market, but perhaps the company didn’t want to undercut its existing (and lucrative) enterprise offerings.

Umi is available for pre-order now from umi.cisco.com, and beginning Oct. 18 from bestbuy.com. It will become generally available on Nov. 14 from the Cisco Umi and Best Buy websites, and Best Buy and Magnolia Home Theater stores.

What do you think? Would a high def telepresence system like Umi help you as a web worker? Do you think it will end up in the SMB market, rather than home?

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Moving to Mac: Use Thunderbird to Switch from Outlook to Mail

Simon Mackie — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:00:23 +0000

If you read Scott’s recent Moving to Mac series of posts, you’ll know that transitioning to Mac from Windows is not as tricky as some might fear. However, there is one area that can cause a lot of pain, and that’s moving email between Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail, as there’s no way to directly import Outlook mailboxes into Mail. The How-to Geek has written a useful guide on making the transition using a Mozilla Thunderbird mailbox as an intermediate step. The process is straightforward, and the guide includes plenty of screenshots illustrating each step of the way.

Of course, before deciding to plump for Mail as your email program of choice on your shiny new Mac just because it came with the OS, you might like to give Mozilla’s client a whirl for a little while first. Thunderbird is actually a very good client.

Share your moving to Mac tips below.

(Via Lifehacker)

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

CintaNotes: A Fast, Free Windows Note-taking App

Simon Mackie — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:00:56 +0000

Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of the note-taking combo of Notational Velocity on my Mac and Simplenote on my iPhone, because they’re exceedingly quick to use and they let me access my notes from anywhere. But if you’re a Windows user, you should check out CintaNotes, as it provides a similarly fast, lightweight, access-anywhere note-taking experience for the PC.

CintaNotes is unobtrusive and doesn’t interrupt your workflow — you can leave it minimized in the system tray when you’re not actively using it. It lets you clip snippets of text (quotes, blog posts, article excerpts, etc.) quickly from whatever application you’re using: Just highlight the text, then hit the CintaNotes hotkey (Ctrl+F12 by default, although you can change it if you prefer) and the text will be stored as a note.

Your notes are listed in the app in chronological order, and you can organize notes using tags. Like Notational Velocity, CintaNotes has find-as-you-type searching to help retrieve notes, with advanced search options (searching by title, or the URL the note is from) also available.

CintaNotes is available as a portable app, so you can carry it with you on a USB Flash drive. And because it plays nicely with services like Dropbox — you just have to store your CintaNotes database in a folder on your file sync service — you can easily keep your notes synchronized across all of your PCs and access them from anywhere.

If you’re looking for a simple, lightweight, easy-to-use and, above all, fast Windows note-taking app that won’t interrupt your workflow, CintaNotes is recommended. CintaNotes is free to download and works on Windows 2000 and later.

What note-taking app do you use?

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

(Via Lifehacker)

TrashMe Makes Uninstalling Apps From Your Mac a Snap

Simon Mackie — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:00:05 +0000

Unlike Scott, who’s in the process of transitioning to a Mac from Windows, I made that move quite a while ago, but I still struggle with some aspects of the OS occasionally. One thing that irks me is that there’s no uninstall tool. And since most applications also hide files (preferences, temporary files, etc.) on your system, cleanly uninstalling an app is not as simple as just dragging it to the trash. Unlike Windows, which has a fairly robust (though not perfect) built-in uninstaller in the Add/Remove Programs utility, Macs come with no such tool.

Such an absence was just a minor annoyance for me until recently, when I upgraded to Snow Leopard and it broke one of the apps I’d installed so that every time I booted up my computer I’d be issued with a bunch of warnings about it. Totally removing the offending app was proving tricky, so I looked to see if there was a program available to help — and discovered TrashMe.

It’s very much like what I’d expect OS X’s own uninstall utility to be like, if it had one. Open up TrashMe and you’re presented with a Finder-like window with a large trashcan in the center.

To uninstall an app, drag its icon to TrashMe’s trashcan. TrashMe then presents you with a list of all of the files associated with that application, enabling you to trash them all in one go (by default, TrashMe sends them to the trash, but you can elect to delete them instead).

That’s pretty much all there is to it. If you’ve got into the bad habit of simply dragging applications into the trash, then you might like to enable TrashMe’s “Smart Mode” (disabled by default), which can detect when you do it and automatically suggest related files to delete. There’s also a feature that enables you to detect orphans (files which were used by previously removed applications), although you need to be careful using this feature as you could potentially delete useful files.

I highly recommend TrashMe as it makes cleanly removing applications and all their associated cruft easy. TrashMe is freeware and can be downloaded from the JibApps website.

What do you think of TrashMe? Let us know in the comments!

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