GigaOM » Collaboration

Moxie Software’s Spaces Gets New Mobile, Video and Search Features

Charles Hamilton — Mon, 23 May 2011 11:00:38 +0000

Moxie Software’s Employee Spaces provides social and collaboration tools for larger organizations. It was developed in cooperation with design consultancy IDEO and can add a “social layer” to legacy enterprise systems, such as ERP, CRM and HR tools. The company has announced several major enhancements to the product, including:

A new browser-based version of Spaces that’s optimized for mobile and tablet use, allowing mobile users to share and collaborate anywhere. Mobile users can post status updates, follow an activity stream, upload images, find and connect with colleagues via phone, email and Skype, interact with groups and projects, and perform searches. A native iPhone application is to be released in June, with BlackBerry and other apps to follow.
The addition of rich video and media sharing capabilities, including the ability for users to upload videos in more than 100 video formats, which are then converted into MP4 for embedding into various areas of an organization’s Spaces site.
Improvements to the search and recommendation functions of the platform. Users can search for information across all types of content, regardless of whether the information is within Employee Spaces itself or within an external application such as SharePoint. Users may also add other data sources in which to search.
Employees can now display their online presence in real-time through integration with Skype. Skype’s voice, chat and video capabilities may also be used to enhance collaboration directly within Employee Spaces. Other third-party communication apps can also be integrated.

Moxie will be hoping that these new features can help to maintain its share in an increasingly crowded “social business” market, especially with competition such as TIBCO’s tibbr also now able to integrate with legacy enterprise systems.

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Moxie Software’s Spaces Can Fix Problems in Real Time

Thursday Bram — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 20:00:23 +0000

Moxie Software‘s Spaces platform provides businesses with “online engagement spaces” for both employees and for customers. One such business is Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, which uses Moxie’s products to better manage collaboration. The company has built a community of employees, as well as vendors and other trusted partners, that can solve supply chain disruptions in more than forty factories in real time.

The tools that many organizations use differentiate between employees, customers and partner organizations, making it difficult to work with members of each group within the same set of tools. An integrated solution, like Moxie’s, makes sense: your team needs to only learn to use one software package, and there’s less chance of miscommunication because something didn’t get transferred properly between tools. Bridging the distance between internal and external communities can streamline the processes necessary to actually get your work done.

New Spaces: The Winter 2010 Release

Spaces was designed in collaboration with IDEO, a design firm specializing in innovative solutions. The software is designed to reflect the way employees typically work as closely as possible, making it easier to add Spaces to existing workflows, and was developed with the goal of bridging the gap between social CRM and Enterprise 2.0. It should make information easy to share, even inside large organizations with many stakeholders who may not actually be employees of the company. Last month, Moxie Software released an updated version of Spaces, integrating Moxie’s Knowledgebase tools with the employee engagement space offered in Spaces. The Winter 2010 release improves integration, making it easier for an organization’s members to collaborate together, as well as work with customers to solve problems.

The updates in the Winter 2010 release include:

Integration with SharePoint: Access SharePoint’s document repository, workflow and approval capabilities from within the tool.
Integration with MS Exchange: Calendar synchronization and ability to email content into discussion groups.
Enhanced micro-blogging with real-time notifications
Enhanced projects, which allows employees to collaborate around projects
Virtual Private Cloud for companies that require a segmented/private location for their data

See Tom Kelly, President and CEO of Moxie Software, and Doug Solomon, CTO of IDEO, speak about “Key Design Principles for Maximizing the Value of Collaborative Technology” at our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9.

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Using Spaces to Manage Information Overload

Charles Hamilton — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:00:22 +0000

Everyone has their favorite tricks to keep focused while working at the computer. Mine can be summarized as “out of sight, out of mind…but easily accessible.”

The Spaces function is one of the nicer features that I discovered in OS X when I started using a Mac as my main machine a couple of years ago. Spaces allows me to open programs in multiple virtual desktops, then move between them using mouse movements or hotkeys.

Space 1 (the default workspace) is where I do most of my work. My browsers (Firefox and Safari) live here, along with Dreamweaver, Photoshop, iCal, Address Book, and Mail (which I still use, despite my earlier comments, as it’s the best way to manage multiple email accounts and move messages between them). Adium lives here, too, taking up a few pixels of space on the left of my wide-screen monitor, as my colleagues and I use instant messaging to communicate frequently between our home offices.

Space 2 is dedicated to a Remote Desktop Connection to my Windows XP computer. There is still some software that’s Windows-only, so I keep an old XP machine around. If preferred, you can set up a virtual Windows machine in this space through Parallels or other virtual-machine software.

Space 3 is where I put the communications that I look at when I have some extra time: RSS news feeds, Twitter and Facebook. For RSS feeds, I use Prism, which turns Google Reader into its own desktop application. For Twitter, I’m currently using Nambu, but am testing a bunch of other software, as Twitter apps seem to be progressing very rapidly. I’m not sure why RSS feeds aren’t more widely used. Dawn has written several great posts on how they can help improve efficiency. Updates from Facebook and LinkedIn can be collected via RSS. Even Twitter updates can be turned into RSS feeds with Gtweet.

Space 4 is used for fun stuff, notably Songbird, so that I can control what I’m listening to while working.

You can control the layout, mouse shortcuts and hotkeys for Spaces from “System Preferences > Expose and Spaces”. You can also make certain programs always start in a particular space. Finally, you can move between these spaces using Control+(arrow keys), a combination that I actually had to look up as I was writing this, as my fingers have it so memorized!

By keeping different kinds of programs in different Spaces, I can focus my time more effectively, but easily switch to other tasks on the fly.

There are similar programs for other systems. Windows and Linux users, which do you prefer? How do you organize your desktop(s)?

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