Polycom dubs the showcase software for its better collaboration RealPresence CloudAxis. The gist of it is that someone can now connect people who use Skype, with those on FaceTime or even Facebook all in a browser window. Once connected, those users can talk, provide a video and share screens, links and chat. As someone who works with people who are on at least four different services being able to see everyone online is awesome. Even better is the ability to connect with those people without undergoing the lengthy dialog that looks something like this:

Me: This is too much to type. Can we go voice?
Kevin: Sure
Me: Skype? hangout? phone?
Kevin: Facetime?
Me: Arghhh

Most of us have probably been there. But if I have the RealPresence CloudAxis software, after I ask for voice and Kevin says Sure, I can just shoot him a link and forgo some painful “What app should we use?” conversation. And while GigaOM almost never uses WebEx (or GoToMeeting) this service could work well for those type of scenarios since it allows for screen-sharing, all without downloading a client onto the call recipient’s desktop.

Just sign into your presence-aware related services to generate your contacts.

I can’t wait to try it. I spend a lot of time on informal and planned conference calls every day and the experience is one that drives me nuts. If I’m not trying to update Java or download a client to get some fancy collaboration suite to work, I’m negotiating with my colleagues about which server they want to use. And I don’t even want to say how much time a week I spend dialing into conference calls. Interoperability across presence, having built-in collaboration tools like chat and screen sharing and being able to launch the call from a link, all sound pretty sweet to me.

You can start a call with people from a variety of services.

The beta launches Monday, and Polycom plans to sell a corporate license for the technology as well as license it to service providers who can then offer it to consumers as part of a telecommunications package. And while I’m really excited about the product, I think the sales model is far too old-fashioned to work in today’s bring your own device and consumer-oriented world.

I asked if Polycom plans to release some type of limited app for home office workers or individuals to buy if their corporate office won’t shell out for it, mostly because I think this is software I’d love to use. The answer was vague. It won’t now, but maybe one day it would.

With this software Polycom is emphasizing how much it’s willing to change to keep current with a lot of VoIP and consumer technology that’s taking over the conferencing and collaboration space, but I think it needs to change its sales strategy as well. Because if this software does what Polycom says it does, I’d pay for it even if my company wants to stick with WebEx.

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Bessemer’s Byron Deeter and  John M. Jack, former CEO of Fortify Software, are joining the board of the company. ClearSlide had raised $11 million in Series A funding last September. With new money under its belt, the company wants to double its team of 110 people.

ClearSlide co-founder Al Lieb.

ClearSlide is one of the growing number of collaboration upstarts that are taking on Cisco-owned WebEx. The growing popularity of iPad inside corporations is opening up opportunities for founders to rethink WebEx and take a new approach to collaboration-oriented communications.

ClearSlide, with customers including CareerBuilder, Expedia, Gannett and The Weather Channel has developed technology that allows sales people to easily share documents via a single URL and use the same URL to  initiate phone or chat sessions. The company offers that technology as a web service akin to Salesforce.

Lieb who previously co-founded Evite in 1998, believes there is a real need for really easy to use tools for sales people who now use a mix of WebEx or GoToMeeting type web conferences, email and USB sticks to make their sales pitches. With ClearSlide, “you pop the link into an email, it opens immediately for the recipient– you don’t need Flash or any downloads — and it’ll work on your iPad and iPhone,” Lieb said.

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Created three years ago along with fellow Evite alum Al Lieb, ClearSlide aims to update sales for the wired present, rescuing reps from thumb drives, massive attachments and clunky web conferencing solutions, offering a simple, cloud-based solution for sales pros to share content either over email, during a live pitch or at an in-person presentation. Teams upload all their decks, videos and other content to ClearSlide (the product doesn’t include authoring), which generates a branded link that a prospect can click to view the material in a quick, clean environment, no downloading required. Reps can also lead prospects through the material, interacting with rich media such as calculators or live web pages within it and pulling up additional materials to answer prospects’ objections.

“When we looked at the market, all the investment in the space has been in CRM. There’s really nothing for sales to help them communicate with customers. We saw a big need there,” Lieb told GigaOM. His company’s approach to filling that gap appears to be working, with ClearSlide announcing a handful of new customers today, including CareerBuilder, Gannett., ShareThis and Wayfair, as well as revenue growth of 400 percent in the last year. Expedia, Yahoo, Amazon are already customers and ClearSlide received $11 million in series A funding led by Greylock Partners in September of last year.

Of course, ClearSlide isn’t the only company helping folks share presentations. WebEx, GoToMeeting and SlideRocket offer some of the same capabilities, but ClearSlide is more specifically focused on sales, combining tools for email and in-person presenting, as well as the virtual pitch. “Most of the solutions in the space are designed around web conferencing, WebEx for example,” explains Lieb. “One of the things we think is unique about ClearSlide is we have a broad horizontal package that ties it all together. It’s really email we’re competing with.” Plus, ClearSlide offers analytics.

Send a link to prospects and ClearSlide will tell you not only when they open it but how long they spend on each slide, as well as aggregating data on a specific deck to show managers what’s getting looked at and what’s being ignored. “We’re giving sales reps back-end data that’s really actionable, so we’re helping them better service their prospects by understanding how they have engaged with the content. Sales guys are able to follow up smarter,” says Benton.

It’s a big reason online home goods retailer Wayfair chose ClearSlide, according to Andrew Garcia, local media manager for the company. He runs a small team within Wayfair that sells media to brick and mortar stores that has been using ClearSlide for a couple of years, and he says the ability to know exactly what his prospects are spending time on has been valuable. “We think where ClearSlide wins for us is really as a sales intelligence tool,” he says. “We end up selling smarter. For my sales guys, it’s important to them to know the right time to follow up with their prospects. In the case of ClearSlide, we actually know when prospects have been looking at our email decks. In the old world, you’d have someone maybe badgering you day after day– ‘Did you look at my deck?’ – but now we just know, which is great.”

“And we’re selling more efficiently because we just know what topics to address,” he adds. “We see the prospect looking at a particular slide and say, OK, the prospect is interested in a particular testimonial so we have to be sure to bring that up when we talk to them.” A review of the last six months of sales revealed at least half involved ClearSlide at some time during the process, he notes.

The analytics may win over the cool heads of sales managers, but the product wins the hearts of sales pros in the trenches and their distant prospects with its elegant content sharing, according to Benton. “There’s a little bit more of a warmth to this because you don’t have a lot of technology in the way. It’s just the visuals and the conversation,” he says. The result? No matter the distance, “you feel like you’re just sitting next to somebody.”

ClearSlide users out there, what’s been your personal experience with the platform – have you found any drawbacks?

Image courtesy of ClearSlide.

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The new feature is built into the latest version of the GoToMeeting software, and doesn’t require any fancy equipment — any webcam and microphone will do, although headsets will most likely be needed to keep room noise down, or users can choose to dial into an audio bridge. Each stream can be displayed at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, for a total maximum resolution of 1920 x 960 pixels.

I attended a demo with four attendees, and found it to be easy to use, and the quality to be very good. If you’ve used GoToMeeting before, you know that the software (available for Windows or Mac) is  quick to download, and doesn’t generally require any fiddling with settings. Audio was perfect, and video quality was quite acceptable for standard “talking head” meetings. The folks at GoToMeeting told me that they decided to limit the service to six simultaneous users in order to maintain video quality — plus, with more users, the video thumbnails for each person would be pretty hard to see.

The program automatically displays a split screen divided into the appropriate number of boxes need to show each participant, and a screen sharing space when desired. GoToMeeting has added some useful touches, like a subtle white outline that shows who’s talking at any given moment, and the ability to resize the viewable area to maximize the shared desktop if desired.

The new service occupies a niche between Skype and some of the higher-end video conferencing options that require sophisticated hardware. For organizations and individuals that won’t use the service often enough to justify GoToMeeting’s cost, similar technology will be available later in the year through Skype, since Citrix will be powering Skype’s upcoming web conferencing service.

HDFaces is available to existing GoToMeeting customers and trial users at no additional cost over the service’s standard pricing, which begins at $49/month or $468/year. A 30-day free online trial is available at the service’s website.

Do you use GoToMeeting? Will the addition of video capabilities make the service more attractive?

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WebWorkerDaily spoke to Chan to find out what’s worked for him and what hasn’t, so other companies can crib from his answers and avoid the school of hard knocks.

Talent

Chan’s first move into web work was to hire a virtual assistant, Marina. She is from the Philippines and eventually came to work directly for ADP, becoming a baseline for the company in the country and helping them hire more people. Having such a linchpin is key, according to Chan.

“If you have one really solid person who you trust in country, whether you know them personally or they come through a reference, that can make or break your whole virtual team,” he says. “I think it’s really been because of Marina that we’ve been able to succeed in working in the Philippines. The same is true now in India. We have one lead person and it’s because of our relationship with him that we can manage the India team without us falling apart.”

An adequate hiring process is also essential. “We hire based on the resume, the portfolio they show us online, and an interview process where my lead person in the Philippines interviews them first and my partner and I do subsequent interviews. Finally we give them a test at the end of the whole process to make sure they can do what they say they can do.” But it wasn’t always that way. Previously, the company simply hired off a resume and a single interview, “but then we found these people were not performing, leaving, slacking off, so that’s when we put in the other procedures.” Problem solved.

Tools

At first, “it was hard for us to figure out how to manage virtual workers properly,” Chan confesses, “but now we’ve put a number of tools in place so we can monitor their hours and then match the hours with the productivity.”

To do so the company uses a range of off-the-shelf, paid-for cloud services. Chan explains: “Basecamp manages all our projects. We use Yammer, a corporate Twitter-like product. As soon as a team member finishes a particular task in Basecamp they have to ‘Yammer’ it. Then we use Skype for one-on-one discussions. We use GoToMeeting for training purposes. We also use SlimTimer to track how much time is actually spent on a particular task. One last tool people might consider using is called RingCentral. Here in the U.S. I have an 800 number for our company and I can parcel out extensions to anyone I want, including people in the Philippines and soon in India.”

Tips

Leave little up to interpretation is Chan’s first tip. He suggests having “a very discreet process for  the tasks you want workers to complete. You can’t be ‘loosey goosey’ on your requirements – it doesn’t work. If it’s left up to interpretation, most of the time it will fail.”

Close collaboration is also important. Chan and his partner meet the entire team virtually every day at one o’clock. “The team we have in the Philippines works California time. That’s a requirement, which is the graveyard shift for them. So we meet every day come rain or come shine and we go through all our projects and everyone gives updates.” This is part of a concerted effort to keep the team cohesive, which also involves giving the team leader in the Philippines resources for team-building meals and drinks on a regular basis. And Chan has also invested in a few face-to-face meetings: “we have visited the Philippines once to get the team all together and we recently flew to Singapore and flew one of the team members there to meet us.”

Finally, Chan advises close attention to avoiding cultural miscues, at least at first. “When I started working with these teams, I was very cautious about what I said, how I said it, being polite. I’m less worried about what I say now because we have built a relationship up. But I think it’s very important that you understand the cultures that you’re dealing with and cultivate that. Then over time you can loosen up,” he says.

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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Here is a list of five basic categories of tools all remote workers should have at the ready, and a variety of options to consider for each category.

Document Collaboration and Workspaces

There is a bit of a blur between virtual workspace and project management tools. These tools emphasize collaboration:

1. ideapi. Recently reviewed by Simon, this is a simple online tool for creating documents and collaborating on discrete sections of the documents.

2. Glasscubes. I’ve been using virtual workspace Glasscubes for a while now. Here’s my latest post taking a fresh look at the app.

3. Binfire. A free solution that lets you “manage projects by adding members, creating tasks and milestones, and assigning responsibility.” Here’s what else Amber has to say about Binfire.

4. Hyperoffice. A collaborative suite bundling email and communication, project management, database management and group meetings. Reviewed here by Amber.

Project/Task/People Management

Some of these tools also offer collaboration features, but they are more focused on managing tasks and people and getting things done efficiently.

5. Huddle. Many moons ago, we reviewed Huddle, and the team collaboration space is still going strong.

6. Cohuman. Delegate, assign and prioritize tasks with others for free. It even integrates into Google Apps. Simon published a screencast about this app.

7. Teamly. A collaboration tool with an emphasis on priorities, as Thursday explained in her initial review.

8. ProjectTurf. A collaboration app for running a project including briefs and time cards. Thursday reviewed it here.

9. Zcope. Simon felt this combined project management and collaboration tool had a lot of potential. It has slightly more advanced project management features than many of its competitors.

10. Mavenlink. This SaaS app neatly integrates project management, collaboration and invoicing. I reviewed it recently.

11. Microproject. Simple,  online project management for the smaller team. Here’s our review.

12. Wrike. We’ve covered Wrike several times, including most recently when the company added mobile apps to its project management and collaboration solution.

Desktop Sharing/Presentation/Web Meeting Tools

GoToMeeting is one of the leaders in the desktop sharing/web meeting space  (did you see the announcement of its Skype integration?), but there is an array of other useful remote presentation tools out there:

13. iMeet. Elegantly combines video and audio calls with document sharing. I reviewed it in March.

14. join.me. A  no-registration, free screen sharing app that fills a gap now that DimDim is now defunct. We’ve praised it here on WWD before, including announcing its iPhone app.

15. yaM. An app to streamline the process of holding meetings including planning, scheduling and note taking. See our review.

16. Zipcast. Slideshare’s quick presentation tool adding video and chat to your slideshows for public (free) or private (fee) presentations. Mathew reviewed it here.

17. CrunchConnect. Charles recently reviewed this web conferencing solution with an emphasis on sales.

18. FuzeMeeting. A fee-based video conferencing solution with collaboration features.

19. Yugma. Free and fee-based Web video conferencing with desktop sharing.

20. Zoho Meeting. Free for one-to-one video call meetings, or starting at $12/month for up to five participants.

File Storage/Sharing/Syncing

Giving the entire virtual team access to files – especially big ones – without having to email them back and forth is critical for remote work processes.

21. Dropbox. Store and share files in the cloud securely, and get access to them from your mobile device. Ryan covered the latest version of Dropbox late last year.

22. Box.net. An enterprise-friendly file sharing and collaboration, reviewed most recently by us here.

23. SugarSync.We’ve written about this file sharing and backup solution before including most recently about new features for its iOS app.

Miscellaneous Useful Cloud-Based Tools

A couple of online tools that help you do things that previously required pricey desktop software.

24. Diagram.ly. Simon recently reviewed this easy-to-use site for creating flow charts and other diagrams.

25. Tom’s Planner. A Gantt chart-based planning tool, with easy drag-and-drop functionality; it’s now iPhone and iPad compatible.

What are some of your must-have tools for remote work?

Image courtesy stock.xchng user spekulator

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1. Square pegs in round holes. Let’s face it: Not everyone is cut out to be a virtual worker. Not everyone has the personality to work completely alone, apart from the team, nor has the ability to be focused and motivated to do work without the looming presence of a manager over one’s shoulder. Beyond personality types, not everyone has the ability to set up an environment away from the office that is conducive to work. It takes a special type of person and set of skills to navigate sketchy work environments (from distracting households to noisy coffee shops) and still be a consistent contributor to a virtual team.

What to do? Look for self-starters and team members who either have had virtual work experience and done well in that format or are flexible, focused and organized.

2. Lack of a clear process. A successful virtual team relies on a defined vision for desired outcomes and a careful breakdown of how it can accomplish those goals. In some ways, virtual work processes may need to be more rigid than those for co-located teams, with specific systems in place to cover time tracking, milestones, check-ins and knowledge sharing. But at the same time, the process must be flexible enough to accommodate the varied work styles of virtual workers. Ask yourself: Is it more important that work be done on a very specific schedule at a certain time of day or just that it is done on time? Because virtual teams can be dispersed across time zones, there can be distinct advantages to making use  of the asynchronous workflow rather than forcing someone overseas to be up in the wee hours of the morning just to be “at work” at the same time as the rest of the team.

What to do? Map out your workflow and communications processes and be specific about what is set in stone versus what is flexible. Make sure you have the systems in place to capture important data and that let you track workflow, deadlines and output.

3. Weak training techniques. If you’re running a team, you know the importance of “on-boarding” new team members. If you’re embarking on a virtual work process, getting everyone on the same page about how you want the team to work together and how to use the systems you’ve deployed is key. Without a clear explanation and properly conducted training, team output is guaranteed to be inconsistent at best. Because virtual team members don’t have the kind of contact one gets  in an office environment, making sure they have access to effective training materials and have the opportunity to ask questions as needed is important to the success of the team. One weak link can spoil the whole bunch.

What to do? After carefully thinking through your process, develop strong training materials and utilize one of the many tools that work well for knowledge sharing amongst virtual teams such as Mindflash, Knoodle and GoToMeeting. Make these materials available even after the training for reference. Keep lines of communication open for subsequent queries.

4. Failure to capture knowledge. In an office space, you can more readily ferret out the data you need, but in a virtual team environment, the bread crumb trail to data may be more convoluted or harder to track. And even in an office space, knowledge can be dispersed and kept in silos. Multiply that potential ten-fold in a virtual work space. The tools you use to capture information from the team can be helpful, but knowledge sharing starts with having the right attitude.

What to do? Emphasize the importance of knowledge sharing to team members and make sure you provide specific tools and steps to properly capture information from individuals. Everyone on your team must understand the critical nature of documenting and archiving in a shared space, and some helpful virtual work spaces include Glasscubes or Basecamp.

5. No glue to keep it all together. A good virtual team starts with a good leader. Whomever is managing the team needs to have a good grip on the dynamics of virtual work. Whether creating or communicating the vision, the team leader must be able to do so effectively, using tools such as Cohuman and Mavenlink to further a more cohesive team and work process. The team leader must be vigilant, organized and nimble, ready to address issues and fill in gaps to ensure consistent output with an emphasis on documentation and shared knowledge. Without a good leader acting as the glue to holding disparate parts together, communications meltdowns will be the norm, not the exception.

What to do? Find — or be — a smart virtual leader. Know when to be firm and when to be flexible, and be comfortable with being flexible. Keep both the big picture and the detail in mind and use the best technology and tools at your disposal to enhance your ability to do both.

Overall, a successful virtual team includes well-equipped, prepared team members who possess the right personalities and skill sets to understand the process, are on-boarded thoughtfully, and have tools to track work and share knowledge. And someone at the helm who can properly engineer and oil the machine.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user clix

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Sure, there are web conferencing services, such as GoToMeeting, where you can share your desktop, present audio over phone or VoIP, and even push out polls, but what if you want to produce a more media-rich presentation that you can share with your virtual team for training purposes? And archive it? And repurpose it?

Knoodle offers a training solution that provides a presentation with a split screen; you can have text or PowerPoint slides on one side of the screen and video on the other, then sync the video and audio with the slides so they automatically advance at the right time. The Knoodle presentations are more engaging than screencasts or audio slideshows.

You can combine multiple assets — PowerPoint slideshows, video, images and text — and also add also add test quizzes or surveys into your presentations to allow viewers to become active participants in the information exchange. You can capture video as you produce your presentation with your web cam, or opt not to use the video component and just sync up audio.

Once your rich-media presentation is complete, you can share a link to it, export it as an MP4 file and email it, or embed it on your site, your blog, or within your intranet. You can also reuse and repurpose assets you’ve uploaded to create new presentations quickly and easily. As an admin, you can create and manage groups, invite group members,and manage and track who has viewed the presentation you’ve created. You can share the presentations internally (for training your team, for example) or externally (for providing publicly accessible training, demos and educational tools).

Knoodle offers a 30-day free trial. Pricing ranges from $14.99/month to $149.99/month, based on usage and the number of people watching the presentations. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time.

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Voice and video chat provider Skype is hoping that by making hosting of meetings and web conferences a seamless experience, its product will become more appealing for  business users. Presumably, users will be able to pay for GoToMeeting access with their Skype credit and sign into GoToMeeting using their Skype credentials, or perhaps it will be added to a premium business subscription plan (GoToMeeting currently costs $49 per month). But don’t get too excited about this integration just yet; it’s not expected to actually become available until the fourth quarter of this year.

This may not be the first partnership like this that Skype announces in the coming months. While its userbase is still growing, Skype is coming under increasing competitive pressure from the likes of Google and Apple; gaining a larger foothold in a relatively untapped business market while its competitors continue go after the consumer market may be a smart move.

Photo courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives

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HDFaces will support:

• A video conferencing viewer that’s integrated into the content screen so attendees can collaborate on shared content and see each other at the same time.
• One-click web, audio and video conferencing.
• Video optimization that automatically adjusts to suit the hardware and network each participant is using when video, audio or screen sharing are in use.
• A resizable viewer and layouts, which can be adapted to numerous monitor and projection configurations.
• No specific or proprietary hardware configuration: Any HD-capable video conferencing viewer will be able to support HDFaces.

HDFaces is based on technology originally developed by VidSoft GmbH, a Dresden, Germany-based video conferencing provider, which was recently acquired by Citrix Systems.

A beta version of the product is being previewed today, with commercial availability expected in the first quarter of 2011. The technology will be available at no extra cost to users of GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar and GoToTraining.

Immersive, high quality HD video conferencing has been available for some time for some time via expensive corporate telepresence systems, like those from Cisco. The fact that it’s starting to become more widely available in cheaper teleconferencing tools like GoToMeeting and Skype is great news for those of us who work remotely.

Photo by Flickr user jenny8lee, licensed under CC 2.0.

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