And it follows that the programs employees prefer incorporate the social and collaborative aspects that define the apps they use in their personal lives, according to an on-stage conversation between Flextronics CIO David Smoley and Workday Co-CEO Aneel Bhusri at the GigaOM Net:Work Conference held in San Francisco Thursday.

For business leaders, this new environment requires a willingness to improvise and being very open to change. “You have to be willing to continuously grab things if they’re interesting, try them, and throw them out if they don’t work,” Smoley said. “In a way, you have to be a ‘yes’ guy, you can’t tell people no.”

This flexible attitude is needed to get the most out of today’s workforce, which is comprised of people who are used to having control over the technology they use. “We’re much more intently aware at the highest level that every employee is first a consumer,” Bhusri said. “There’s this massive revolution happening in consumer Internet, social media, that is training people to use systems in a certain way. So when they get to work they also expect their systems to work in a certain way.”

The à la carte nature of collaborative software is not all rosy, though. There are often generational gaps that come to play, as well as integration pains. “Tools are very individually specific and team specific. One customer may want to use Cisco WebEx, while the next customer may say they want to use Skype. Often even within companies you’re constantly pinging between different tools,” Smoley said. “The hope for a guy like me is that all this will actually converge, and that unified communications will be unified some day.”

But the panel’s moderator Stowe Boyd, who monitors these trends as an independent analyst and as an analyst for GigaOM Pro, did not think that day would come any time soon. “I think continued chaos is more likely.” At least we will all continue to live in interesting times, both at home and at work.

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
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Levie took aim at Microsoft early in his presentation, introducing Box.net as being “like Sharepoint, if Sharepoint actually worked,” and then showing a photo of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with a pirate-style eyepatch. The Box founder talked about how many companies are frustrated because more than $250 billion is spent on enterprise software annually, but the industry still suffers from bloated software that is expensive, slow to innovate and takes too long to deploy. And despite the size of the enterprise industry, no one really talks about how to make it better because everyone is too busy “talking about check-ins and virtual cows.”

Enterprises are going to create more than 1.8 trillion gigabytes of data this year alone, Levie said, but too much corporate software makes it hard to find that information, makes it hard to see who is using it and where, and makes it difficult or even impossible to share it outside the organization. The enterprise software industry is devoted to creating a complicated stack of programs and services that can be controlled by the company, he said, and IT departments spend all their time managing this infrastructure in the hope that it will create this “magical rainbow of enterprise value,” but the rainbow never appears.

Companies like Microsoft don’t want to dismantle this industry because they have so much invested in it, said Levie, but startups can re-imagine what the industry might look like if someone could rebuild it from the ground up — and the Box.net founder said it would look a lot more like the consumer software business, where satisfying users is the most important thing. “We need simple software, solutions that humans would choose to use even if they didn’t have to, and open systems where software works together instead of just locking customers into one solution,” he said.

With freemium and open-source and software-as-a-service models, companies can not only innovate and adapt rapidly, but users only pay if they like the product and find that it works for them, instead of buying a huge, complicated solution and then getting stuck with it — which Levie called the “Zappos model instead of the Oracle model.” And because they are more open, companies can choose several different pieces of software that work together, instead of going with a single-vendor solution.

The enterprise software industry may not see a lot of evangelists who wear orange sneakers and drop quotes from rappers like Notorious B.I.G. into their presentations, but Box.net’s CEO is clearly out to change that — and pretty much everything else the enterprise business seems to take for granted.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

Enterprises spend $270 billion on software every year, yet some can’t even calculate the number of employees in their organizations. Shocking? Well, such was the problem for Chiquita before they moved to Workday.  But rudimentary challenges like this plague every enterprise in the world, and every individual within those enterprises. When we need to derive anything beyond the basics from our enterprise software, most corporations are out of luck.

This problem is only getting worse. With 1.8 trillion gigabytes of information projected to be generated and stored this year alone, our enterprise technology is on a collision course to become utterly useless if something doesn’t fundamentally change.  The data being created is obnoxiously large, with IDC citing that “by 2020, IT departments worldwide will need to administer 10 times the number of servers–both virtual and physical–50 times the amount of data, and 75 times more files.”  Our software, infrastructure, and organizations are ill-prepared to manage this scale of data creation, let alone generate anything meaningful or useful with this amount of content being created and shared.

But this is about to change. It has to. The cloud, social capabilities, and a web of integrated applications are on the verge of creating a far more personalized technology experience for tomorrow’s workers, and a world where an increase in data generates an increase in value and knowledge for organizations.

The client-server paradigm and a reverse network effect

The emergence of the personal computer may have transformed the way we work, but the software revolution that followed was anything but personalized. And amazingly, very little has changed for today’s average knowledge worker over the past two decades. The legacy software within today’s enterprises is stale, static and non-contextual. Applications don’t adapt to our behavior, or tell us anything new about our content and projects that we didn’t explicitly tell them. And they certainly have no understanding of our relationships with co-workers, partners, or customers.

It’s not just end users who are suffering. Technology still rooted in the client-server paradigm invariably prevents organizations from deriving real value from their systems.  Generally, any influx of employees or the addition of a geographically disparate team requires new instances of applications and infrastructure. An organization might have SharePoint running in many different data centers throughout the world, making it nearly impossible to efficiently upgrade applications, deploy new servers and perform maintenance at scale. And with application sprawl comes data sprawl, creating a veritable digital landfill of unconsolidated, silo-ed information.  In looking at the fragmentation of SharePoint in large organizations, a leading enterprise content management analyst, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, discovered that “…enterprises can in fact reach a point of negative returns where an inability to manage proliferating SharePoint silos becomes a hidden but serious enterprise management risk.”

Enterprises everywhere are experiencing the opposite of a standard network effect with their information and people. In these sprawled and firewalled environments, an increase in users and data make it more difficult to locate content, make decisions, and gain insights from past actions.  This means more information is creating more complexity – far from the ideal outcome if organizations are about to generate orders of magnitude more information.

The cloud and centralization

Of course, decentralization and fragmentation of data and applications isn’t a new problem by any means. Early last decade, Oracle decided that application and data sprawl were hindering customers’ agility, decision making and cost savings.  Larry Ellison said of the client/server era, “Your information was chopped into tiny pieces, stored in lots of tiny databases, running on lots of tiny PC server computers.  This data fragmentation was accompanied by distributed complexity.”

Not surprisingly, Oracle’s solution to this problem was to have all core applications run on a single Oracle database instance with consistency across its apps. This would have worked marvelously if the world wanted to adopt only Oracle’s software — but that comes at the cost of tying your entire fate to a single vendor’s vision, roadmap and services.  With the emergence and maturity of cloud platforms, there’s now another way.

On-premise applications are inherently limited in that they rarely leverage data beyond what’s immediately available on a local machine, server or narrow data store. The opposite is true with most cloud products that take a centralized approach to storage and computing, and we’re only now starting to tap into their potential.

At Box, our model is store once, extend everywhere — and “everywhere” spans desktops, smartphones, tablets and even other apps. With the cloud, users can get to content and tools from any device, and IT departments are no longer burdened with maintaining and upgrading cumbersome hardware and software. This is making today’s employees more mobile, nimble and productive, and it’s enabling organizations to focus on competitive differentiators rather than systems management and maintenance.

But centralization is only phase one. If the first wave of the cloud is about realizing the efficiencies of moving software to the web, then the second wave is about making this software — and in turn, our organizations — much smarter. Software has tremendous potential to look at lots of pieces of information and make decisions to produce optimal outcomes. Then learn from these results, iterate, and do it again. We’re seeing this at work in the consumer world: think about how Facebook exposes the people we’re likely to know or updates we’re likely to engage with, or how Netflix makes personal recommendations to its users, aggregating and learning from the ratings across millions of users. As described by Mike Olson, the CEO of Cloudera, the power all this data is about being able to answer qualitative questions like, ”What do you like? Who do you know?” and no longer about simply solving basic equations.

Applied in the enterprise, our software, backed by large amounts of information to cull through, can tell us far more about our businesses than we could ever know ourselves.

From the social enterprise to the smarter enterprise

Given our trajectory, all enterprises will soon be filled with dozens or hundreds of light and heavy-weight applications that are function, company and industry specific. Salesforce.com has an app marketplace of thousands of add-ons, Jive and Yammer have their own respective ecosystems. With apps that can talk to each other, we’re seeing the emergence of a much more integrated enterprise technology stack – starkly contrasting the vertically integrated solutions from a single provider, apps are pulling from different data sources to create powerful mashups and overlays. Roambi, for instance, makes it easy for you view your CRM data from your iPad. Marketo lets you create extensive marketing automation customizations tying together email marketing, Google AdWords, and Salesforce.

But rather than the proliferation of apps creating more fragmentation, they’ll actually increase personalization and relevance of information. Driving this will be the social utilities that wrap around our enterprise applications of the future. Every action we take in our personal lives can be manifested as a social event, whether it’s checking into a restaurant, accepting a party invitation, or updating a status — our whereabouts, thoughts and actions help us engage with others both actively and passively. The same is becoming true in the enterprise, and it will create the first real ROI we’ll see from social activity in the enterprise. Yammer, Jive, Box, and Chatter securely broadcast the work we’re doing to our coworkers, and we’re about to see yet is what happens when these streams become more connected to all the other applications we’re using.

But it’s not just about creating a more social workforce with frequent status updates, file “likes” and ad-hoc conversations. In the enterprise, social is only useful if it makes us smarter. Think about it. You update a project status and all the relevant participants are passively notified of the change or delay.  Or a member of the sales team uploads content for a proposal, and someone from another department or team comments on its relevance to their own work.

As our social stream algorithms improve, user behavior will drive for better ranking of the information you and others should be looking at.  And with federation and syndication of this data and events, our applications will all work smarter together.  An HR update in Workday will prompt a response from someone on Chatter.  Customer support requests on Zendesk are analyzed by an executive in GoodData.  Software will be able to quickly connect the dots across people and data, building a combined view of the most important information. Most importantly, this can all be done passively, with little to no involvement from the user.

Rather than an increase in information and engagement yielding diminishing returns, our systems will get smarter with every interaction. We’ll be served content that has been filtered by our colleagues, and outputs that are corroborated by multiple platforms. As individuals and organizations, we’ll move faster and make better decisions based on better data. This is what we’re starting to hear from customers when they deploy cloud solutions like Box and others. This is the future.

Aaron Levie is CEO and founder of Box.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Susan NYC.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
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One of the most common definitions of crowdsourcing is “an open call to an undefined group of people.” This definition would seem to exclude a call for input to a more defined and limited group: your employees. Crowdsourcing techniques, however, leverage online technologies to “harness” the input of many and to apply that input toward getting results of some kind, so why can’t they also be applied to the people within an organization instead of without?

Some popular uses of crowdsourcing include:

• Crowd wisdom where many can contribute possible answers to questions.
• Crowd innovation where many can participate in problem-solving.
• Crowd creation where many can be part of producing something and often each participant takes a smaller piece of the whole based on their skills and abilities.
• Crowd voting where the best ideas “bubble” to the top by community review and voting.

Why not take these models and apply them to problem-solving, creative brainstorming, and creation tasks within your organization? You can even use readily available crowdsourcing technology and platforms to facilitate those processes.

Where can you go for crowdsourcing technology? Companies like Chaordix and Spigit specialize in “innovation management,” and they’ve built online tools to manage input from groups and allow for voting and other features to facilitate “crowd” participation. Even a DIY crowdsourcing system such as the one offered by Crowdtap could prove an interesting tool when the “crowd” you use for input and feedback isn’t a large random pool of unknown people but actually the folks working within your own organization.

In organizations, there is a tendency for each team member to operate strictly within their department or division. In virtual teams, these divisions may be less obvious, but the silos still exist, and may even be worsened due to the lack of proximity. By using crowdsourcing tools and applying more democratic methods of soliciting crowd input, allowing for group voting of ideas, and reaching across departments for participation, you may be able to:

• Innovate more quickly because you are tapping into your team in different ways
• Identify issues and reach solutions more effectively by utilizing your team more widely
• Gain insights into your team’s talents and abilities by providing more open opportunities for participation

In some situations, crowdsourcing can take on a competitive edge in the form of a contest or competition where participants are rewarded in some way for the “best” solution — and the best solution is often not something determined by a top-down approach, but rather by the votes of the crowdsourcing community as a whole. We’ve previously written about the gamification of work; in some circumstances, applying a competitive layer to participation in problem-solving or innovation initiatives can increase motivation and stimulate better responses.

Using your team for crowdosurcing can not only help to “get things done,” it can potentially produce fresh, interesting and beneficial results.

Editor’s note: Aliza’s new book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Crowdsourcing, has just been published by Alpha.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng user lusi 

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• Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises
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Alfresco Team is an open-source, professional tool for content collaboration that enters the sharing and collaboration market with enterprise-oriented social and security features not found in some Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products.

Getting more social with collaboration

Alfresco Team’s “dashboard portal” revolves around content and the development, sharing, collaboration and tracking of large amounts of content and managing workflow. Content can include business documents from  Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint; image files from Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop; and even audio and video. The portal can be used by such groups as advertising teams working on ad copy and graphics, or creative teams managing video production, from script to storyboard to final edit.

Alfresco Team includes social features to increase interactions between team members, such as: the ability to “Like” and comment on content, a threaded discussion board and an activity stream to track what has been done to a file by each team member that has access. Alfresco Team also captures the dialogue around file collaboration that can often be missed.

Alfresco Team offers real-time collaboration around content using a smooth integration with Google Docs. Files can be “checked out” to Google Docs, and team members can be given access for real-time content collaboration. When the document is checked back in to Alfresco Team, the file’s version number is updated.

Secure mobile access for iOS

As more companies are considering providing their teams with tablet computers, but are concerned about security issues, Alfresco Team has addressed this issue by releasing a native iOS app. On the iPhone, the app can take photos or make audio or video recordings and securely add them directly into the Alfresco Team system. The iPad version provides fast, secure access to documents and files on the server; iPad 2 users can also capture images, audio and video.

Alfresco Team is available for $199 per user per year, or 10 users for $1,990 per year. Teams from 10 to 200 team members get a reduced rate of $79 per year per user. Teams of five or fewer users can deploy the software for free either on their own server, on an Amazon EC2 account, or even on a computer desktop.

How are you managing the sharing, collaboration and tracking of large amounts of content amongst your team?

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Whereas most current corporate social networking tools, such as Yammer and Socialtext, are based around people, skills and interests, Necto starts with business data and makes connections based on who knows about, or is interested in, that data. Using the standard social networking model of being able to “follow” someone, anyone within a company can follow other users to see what they are doing in terms of publishing, accessing and commenting on company information.

Like any integrated internal business intelligence system, Necto gives users a view of what is going on within their company, what they should be concerned about, and helps them hone in on the areas in their business where action is required, speeding up response time to help companies become more efficient. The system also has smart features that can suggest new items of internal company data that may be of interest, based on who a user is following.

Necto also uses the information it tracks about the information individual users are accessing and commenting on to suggest other users who are looking for similar data insights.With the social features integration, everyone has the opportunity to share relevant information more easily and with more up-to-date and relevant information at one’s fingertips, productivity improves.

Taking the approach of starting with the data and then providing context and connecting the right people adds a social layer to business intelligence. Necto’s “One Click Insights” helps to pinpoint issues such as dips in product sales. The system also has time-saving “Cause and Effect” features to help identify the causes of these issues based on the underlying data.

Necto offers self-serve data mining and report generation, allowing individuals to generate their own custom views of the data without having to wait on someone else to run a report for them. It also lets users create collaborative “workboards” and visual presentations to provide better context as they put together ad-hoc business teams to address internal issues. The system is scalable, and customers currently using Panorama’s NovaView product can easily migrate to Necto.

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• Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Distributed teams are prime test candidates for P2P enterprise initiatives, because using a P2P model for workflow control and task assignment stands the best chance of succeeding among employees who already enjoy a high degree of autonomy. P2P workflow could eliminate middle management control mechanisms that do little beyond assigning tasks, and instead leave priority management and task claiming to team members themselves is a great way to get things done more efficiently and effectively. It could be achieved by coming up with a proprietary internal tool that allows management to post “job” advertisements, each defining a specific task, or breaking down a larger project into component parks. Team members could then assess, evaluate and take on tasks according to their strengths. Peers could recommend jobs for one another, also, which should help make sure that all assignments are covered. Once someone takes a job, they could also opt to sub-contract or connect with other peers if they find the task isn’t quite what they expected, or if they think someone else in the pool has better insight.

P2P could significantly alter the enterprise in other ways, too. Small, nimble companies can use P2P to cut employee travel expenses, for example. Businesses could set up programs by which they share or pay each other for things like the use of office space, the use of company cars and even the use of accommodations for traveling employees. Payment could be  non-monetary compensation: information sharing, trading of services, or repayment in kind, for example.

Many of the services that offer P2P models for services like car sharing and equipment rental that are currently consumer-focused can also be leveraged by forward-thinking companies to outfit employees, especially those with large remote workforces where inflexible, centralized models don’t make sense. Use of these services may be spearheaded from the ground up, like the bring-your-own-device and bring-your-own-app movements have been, but I also think smart enterprises will embrace and encourage P2P solutions where they make sense, because when it comes to managing remote resources, trusting them to arrive at smarter solutions with less guidance is the way to go.

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• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Report: Delivering Content in the Cloud

1. Lack of a social culture. Mandating the use of social media tools such as social network-style collaboration and sharing applications like SocialText or Twitter-style messaging such as Yammer won’t create social interaction. Your company needs to start with a fundamentally communicative culture, one where open sharing and collaborating is encouraged. Just plugging in a new collaborations or communications tool won’t change the culture of your company. If people are hesitant — or even afraid — to draw attention to themselves within your company, they won’t welcome tools that force them into being more visible. While social tools can help expand and reinforce an open and collaborative environment, without mass adoption, they could potentially create deeper and darker silos within an organization. Examine your corporate culture first and create a more receptive environment for internal social tools.
2. Lack of public participation If your team members aren’t already comfortable with using social media tools in their non-work life, chances are they won’t gravitate eagerly to the new social tools you’ve set up for inter-company inter-relating. The flip side of this is that you may see more immediate adoption from team members who are already social media enthusiasts. Identify team members who use s social tools to communicate outside of work and enlist them to help kickstart the use of the new tools. They will often be more comfortable with adopting such tools, and can help champion them to their colleagues.
3. Lack of training. You may have some early adopters to champion your new internal company social media tools, but what about the rest of your team? Without proper training, those who aren’t as familiar with social networking and tweeting may feel left out or even overwhelmed. Even those who take to these tools like the proverbial fish to water will need some guidance as to how, when and why to use the tools in ways that fit into your company’s work processes. Before you install the software, re-examine how your team works, how they communicate and how to appropriately use the new social tools to enhance work and communications, not distract or hinder it. Provide written guidelines and training across the board, regardless of social media skills, to ensure everyone knows what is expected of them, in addition to how to use the tools properly.
4. Lack of access. Has your firewall blocked team access to public social networks? You’re sending mixed messages if you are asking everyone to be more social, to share, to collaborate, to communicate more frequently internally and yet shut off access to public social tools. Before you open the floodgates, however, develop your internal “rules of the road” for interacting in public social media spaces.
5. Lack of willingness. Not everyone will understand the benefit of using social tools internally, particularly for the workers who prefer to remain low-profile, nose-to-the-grindstone, and are content not being noticed. Using team-based social tools within a company can be taxing and can push some people beyond their comfort levels. Make sure the parameters you set up for internal use of social media tools are based on encouraging professional exchanges, expanding internal knowledge bases, increasing collaboration, and helping to improve communications. Be respectful of individuals who may not want to be so personal in a professional setting. Don’t force team members to share their personal interests, for example — make those features optional. While there is something to be said about knowing a little more about someone’s hobbies or interests to engender more human connections within an organization, it may be extremely off-putting to some.

What challenges do you foresee or are you working to overcome as you implement social media tools into your internal company processes?

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The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Manymoon said it will operate as a separate unit and will continue to offer its free and premium products to clients. It also plans on developing new features. Manymoon said Salesforce will help it grow by assisting with scalability, security, performance and support. In addition to the Google Apps platform, Manymoon is available through LinkedIn and the Chrome Web App Store. Manymoon said it has 50,000 businesses using its software with 1,000 signing up each week.

The Manymoon pick-up underscores Salesforce’s emphasis on social collaboration. The company on Monday launched Chatter.com, its Facebook-like enterprise social platform. It also invested $4 million today in Seesmic, which develops applications that monitor social networks across mobile devices.

Marc Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce, recently spoke at the GigaOM Net:Work conference talking about the power of social tools in enterprise, which he said have the ability to flatten hierarchies and democratize companies. The move to social is part of a larger push toward Benioff’s vision of Cloud 2, which he said encompasses cloud computing, social networking and mobile. With all the talk around social, Benioff is showing this week that he’s putting his money where his mouth is.

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Right Person, Wrong Internet Connection

Situations do come up when the person you want or need to work with just doesn’t have the Internet connectivity to support the tools you use or to easily download the files they need. There are different options available, the simplest of which can be adding a stipend to pay for an improved Internet connection of some sort.

There are, however, some places where a great Internet connection just isn’t available. For the right person, it’s worth choosing tools that don’t require high-speed Internet access. This kind of situation can be less than ideal, especially if you need to keep files synchronized, making it necessary to weigh the difficulties against the value of working with a particular individual.

Preparing for Emergencies

At any given time, you can read about floods, fires and a wide variety of other natural disasters in the news headlines. With team members spread throughout the world, there’s a greater chance that services such as Internet access will be disrupted by such events.

It’s good to have an emergency plan in place for these situations so you aren’t left scrambling if a team member’s Internet connection goes out. That can include making sure that you’ve got alternate lines of communication set up — you may be surprised by how many teams communicate purely online, not even making a note of members’ cell phones in case of an emergency. It can also be worthwhile to look into setting up alternate methods of internet access ahead of time, like a wireless modem.

Hiring With Internet Access in Mind

It’s interesting to watch the job ads listing positions for telecommuting. It’s become fairly common for such jobs to require having a high-speed Internet connection as part of the job. Virtual assistants based in places like the Philippines or India will often make a point of noting the speed of their Internet connection. It’s become a valuable asset in such careers not only because it makes a person more productive but because many employers now expect an Internet connection beyond dial-up.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Jonas Boni

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Tracking and Record Keeping

TimeDoctor focuses on tracking how employees spend their time. The software also includes monitoring and record keeping features. You can see at a glance what your team is working on, and can receive reports on what your team has accomplished in specific time periods. The program effectively acts as a task management tool, as well as tracking software.

The monitoring tools incorporated into TimeDoctor are not entirely automatic. While the software can automatically monitor the use of certain websites, the developers are still working on adding application tracking. Employees will also need to report the specific projects that they’re working on. TimeDoctor randomly takes screen captures to ensure that team members’ reports match reality.

The developers of TimeDoctor also provide time-management tips to help employees make better use of their time during working hours.

You can access a free beta version of TimeDoctor through its website. Once it exits beta, the developers plan to charge 20 cents per work hour logged. The program is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

The Question of Motivation

I do have a concern about the problems that using a tool like TimeDoctor may create. Team members could easily see such tools as an invasion of privacy. It’s common for employees to feel that it’s okay to take short breaks from their work — in a way, Facebook breaks have become the new smoke breaks.

Managers need to bring in a tool like TimeDoctor with some sensitivity to this issue. Otherwise, it could lead to poor morale, team members attempting to circumvent the system, or less efficiency, because employees feel like they must be always on task. Since TimeDoctor requires interaction by the employee (turning on the software, entering project information, and so on), simply requiring employees to start using such a tool would be problematic at best.

It is absolutely necessary to present software like TimeDoctor as something that will be helpful to employees.  Such tools shouldn’t be used to punish underperforming employees, but should be ways to help employees identify their own work habits and make them more productive.

How do you track your time, and your team’s time?

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Keeping Your Project in One Place

Whenever project communications happen outside of the tool you use for project management, there’s a risk that decisions and changes won’t get recorded and the team won’t act on them. It’s a danger of in-person meetings, as well. You may say that you’ll remember to update your project management tool with the information contained in the email, but eliminating potential problems seems like a better choice than trying to keep up with them.

There’s a temptation to justify moving from the project management tools you rely on to email with the idea that there are some decisions that the entire organization shouldn’t be party to. There is some truth to that, but most project management tools have a direct messaging capability built-in.

Email’s Value

There are reasons, though, why many companies rely so heavily on email. If you need information quickly, your team may be more likely to check their email rather than your project management tool. And if you’re working with people outside of your organization, there’s a certain level of hassle associated with getting them set up on your project management tool; it may not be worth the effort, while you can generally expect a contact to have an email account.

Integrating Email and PM Tools

At the end of the day, it seems preferable to have all communication related to a given project in one place. It’s important to realize that email isn’t going away any time soon, though — especially for project management,. That makes it necessary to make sure that, however you handle your projects, there’s a plan in place for making sure that email can be integrated into your system. Although it’s not ideal, even copying and pasting emails into your PM system may help.

How does your team handle project communications?

Image courtesy Flickr user Bruno Girin

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Sharing Information

Saba Live is built on content, not unlike consumer social networking tools. Team members can quickly and easily put information together into a page, share ideas and vote for them and even put together micro-posts similar to tweets.

Furthermore, Saba Live does not operate in a vacuum. Rather, it is just one of Saba’s products. Other tools include Saba Workforce Planning, Saba Goals and Objectives and a variety of other tools for businesses. Saba Live is designed to work with the Saba Collaboration Suite, making it easy to focus on the tools your organization truly needs. Saba focuses on creating the tools large organizations need and is continually rolling out new products (such as Saba Live), making it a reliable provider for an enterprise that needs to keep up with technology.

Managing a Large Network

One issue that some larger organizations run into is that there is a limit on the number of people an individual can connect with on more than a superficial level. This limit is referred to as Dunbar’s number; most people can build relationships with somewhere around 150 people. When you consider that your team members probably have lives outside the organization, the number of people they can connect with at work drops significantly. This is a problem for larger organizations. Saba Live’s approach does significantly help with the issue, however: features like profiles help your team members understand who else is in the organization, while the tools it offers to build and explore institutional knowledge are useful for keeping everyone on the same page, even if you’ve got a lot of people to manage. You may not be able to introduce every individual in your organization to each other, but these tools can work around that concern so that team members find who they need to talk to.

Let us know what you think of Saba Live below.

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A Flexible Solution

By building on top of the MangoTalk tool set, the company has been able to develop a full social collaboration suite. The MangoApps suite includes the tools necessary to manage projects, share documents and plan events, and manage communications. While each of the tools in the MangoApps suite is available as a standalone product, the true benefit of the platform is in its integrated abilities. For instance, you can launch a group chat or a conference call from within any of the MangoApps tools. If you decide to start with just one of MangoSpring’s tools, you can add on others from the suite as you purchase them.

MangoSpring has taken its flexibility beyond offering organizations only the tools they need, however. Your organization can deploy MangoApps in a variety of ways, letting you make use of existing IT infrastructure or avoid adding new, as needed. You can fully outsource your installation of MangoApps, have it running on a server or even locally host it behind a firewall.

The Future of Enterprise Collaboration

Increasingly, enterprise-level collaboration tools are incorporating social media features. MangoSpring was out in front of that trend and the new additions to its MangoApps platform continue to build on that lead.

“Business collaboration has reached an inflection point in which businesses of all sizes are recognizing that their teams need to better collaborate for them to compete most effectively,” said Anup Kejriwal, the CEO of MangoSpring, in a press release. “Watching companies like Yammer & Salesforce move into our space is an incredible validation of the vision that we’ve had in place for several years now. Most important of all, we have listened closely to our customers to deliver the industry’s most advanced set of collaboration features, which are packaged in a highly intuitive user interface that requires zero training and is a great deal more economical than competing solutions.”

Considered as a whole, MangoApps is a full suite of collaboration tools that offer the flexibility a large organization needs. Where some tools are single-purpose or force an organization to work within their constraints, MangoSpring has crafted a platform that will work with the needs of your team or company.

Let us know what you think of MangoApps in the comments.

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There are plenty of chat tools out there, but using one that is purely meant for internal business communication has its benefits — at the very least, your team won’t be distracted by friends and family on one of the broader networks. HipChat is a group chat tool built specifically with companies and project-oriented teams in mind.

More Than IM

If HipChat were just a simple instant messaging client, it might not be that useful, but it also includes video and voice chat. Robert Dippell, who uses HipChat at Praetorian Group, says, “We have used generic chat services in the past that really only allowed us to send messages back and fourth to supplement longer emails or a phone call. HipChat doesn’t supplement those mediums, it streamlines our communication and in many cases even replaces the desire to send a long email chain or hold a conference call when the same goal can be accomplished and archived using the service.”

HipChat integrates a variety of other features beyond voice and video chat: records of past chats, file transfers and even an API to allow automatic notifications of what your team is doing. Dippell notes, “We use the service often to not only share but archive different files such as images, PDFs, word files, spreadsheets and miscellaneous links. By posting any of that content within a personal chat or room the content is stored there to refer back to down the road. It’s easy to see the progression of a project when you look through the archive and can open past files to review progress…We’ve encouraged our different departments to open and participate in rooms specific to their duties. For example, our production team gets a lot of questions from account managers and sales about inventory availability and scheduling. Rather than send an email to multiple people they can simply pop into the Production room and ask their question directly to the team members available to help them.”

Getting the Most Out of HipChat

Dru Nelson uses HipChat in his work at Brightroll. The engineering team there relies on the IM tool to keep everyone in sync. Nelson is careful to point out that the usefulness of a chat tool and HipChat in particular depends on an organization’s workflow and whether you some time is invested into using it effectively: “We tried introducing it to other groups, but it didn’t make sense for their workflow. One easy thing for companies to learn now is how to properly use online chat rooms within teams. There are many articles online talking about the benefits. Regardless of your organization size, the sooner you learn how to use these tools, the better.”

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The Importance of Keeping Things Simple

Keeping your team using just one or two channels of communication makes collaborating significantly easier. A single tool may not be an option — different tools work particularly well for real-time communication, while others are better if you just need to shoot a reference message over — but having your team focus on a limited set of communication tools can reduce the chances of miscommunication. By knowing where they need to check for updates rather than having to search through a dozen different inboxes, your team will get information faster and can act upon it quicker.

The difficulty lies be in choosing which tools to use. After all, there are pros and cons to any communication medium you may consider. And in larger organizations, just trying out a bunch of different tools and seeing what sticks simply isn’t an option.

Looking at Integrated Tools

If you need project management tools for your team, a logical option is to focus on those tools that have integrated communications tools, such as a chat or messaging feature. At the very least, you won’t have to go searching for a secondary tool. There are other benefits, though: When your employees are only checking one tool regularly, they can become more efficient. Skipping around from one application to another means lost minutes, fumbling with passwords, transferring information between tools and other opportunities to lose productivity. Of course, there are ways to minimize such issues if you find a communication tool that is truly ideal for your team that’s not integrated with the rest of your collaboration tools, but, when in doubt, integration offers an easy solution.

It may be worth adding an internal policy about which communication tools to rely on: if your team uses an integrated tool, it may be necessary to ask them to use that tool for all team communications, no matter what they rely on to communicate externally. Such a policy can help ensure that all communications are recorded and easy to reference in the future.

Photo by Flickr user Jeff Keyzer, licensed under CC 2.0