The result, which launched in January, was Moxtra, a service for students and small businesses that combines collaboration capabilities with the ability to access data not only from cloud services such as DropBox, but also from the user’s desktop computer.

And now the company has made a big global push, releasing versions of the iOS app in 18 new languages, namely Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. This should help a lot more people join in the service’s collaboration aspect.

Moxtra has some pretty clever features on that front, starting with the range of things that can be rolled into these “binders” and the sources from which they can be derived: they could be photos from the tablet’s camera, or documents from the user’s remote desktop, or audio from a cloud storage account. In true Evernote style, web clippings can also be added. Updates from any member of the collaborating team will show up in a Facebook-like activity stream.

There’s also an ad-hoc meeting facility in there (again: WebEx guy) and the ability to share binders publicly or within a private group. However, the cleverest feature in my view is Moxtra Note, which lets you annotate files and binders with your voice (video is apparently also on the horizon, Iyar told me). You can then send out the annotated result to people who aren’t even themselves Moxtra users, who can then view it like a video clip.

With Evernote continually adding new features, and with rivals such as Wunderlist in hot pursuit, this personal information management space is getting quite frisky. Moxtra’s collaborative take gives it an interesting new avenue to go down.

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Here’s the thing about OpenStack — techies inside companies often want cloud computing capabilities and have the wherewithal to test them out but not the time or energy to knit together the disparate pieces that go into an OpenStack cloud. Mirantis says it can offer that OpenStack infrastructure — having already vetted the best, most stable OpenStack components and deliver them in a fixed time for a fixed amount, Renski told me.

Mirantis says it does the due diligence to keep up with which vendor has the most stable implementation of all the OpenStack subsystems and provides a blueprint based on those.

Moves like this show that OpenStack is gaining maturity. In the past, systems integrators  often acted as the arbiters to offer the best technologies for different use cases — Novell file-and-print servers, Microsoft desktop operating systems, Lotus collaboration software — and then tied them together into a coherent whole. The idea then as now is to prevent vendor lock-in, which remains a key concern in the cloud just as it was inside a company’s server room.

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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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Last week we called up Colin Miles, head of technical services at Virgin Media, and Keith Griffin, technical leader in engineering at Cisco to ask for the behind-the-scenes story of the pilot and what lessons it might hold for other companies or teams looking to roll out similar solutions. Not every switch over to new-fangled social or collaboration tools goes smoothly, but according to Miles Virgin’s pilot was relatively bump free.

The benefits

“We wanted the opportunity to really test how a full transformation of communication and collaboration could affect our organization,” Miles said of the pilot, “and the results have been absolutely fantastic.” How do they know things work so well? Participants in the pilot showed a six percent higher engagement-index in the firm’s annual engagement survey. The pilot also aimed to increase productivity and agility, while decreasing email overload a well as duplicated and inconsistent materials. Miles says Virgin Media has seen improvement in all these areas.

Particularly, the new tools have made life easier for teams whose work touches a variety of divisions within the organization. The company’s B2B provisioning group, for instance, has found that forming a Quad community (somewhat akin to a Facebook group) has eliminated organizational hassles. “This is a community that deals with a core, single business process, i.e. start something from a customer order through to customer delivery,” explains Miles. “However, it touches many divisions within that process, so trying to collaborate effectively can be hard work sometimes. By creating a community to share the information more effectively in one place – one version of the truth – that lends itself to breaking down those divisional silos.”

Griffin reports that social tools have had similar benefits within Cisco. “Back when we were starting with Quad we’d post something in created communities around topics like ‘the technology behind 2.0′ and we found that multiple people from other groups in other areas of Cisco were coming in joining that community rather than setting up their own,” explains Griffin. “That served two purposes. One, it became, as Colin said, a single source of truth for that topic, but secondly, it avoided duplication. We could see that teams were working on similar items and collaborating to get things done all at one place.”

The tips

These benefits aren’t instant, not are they automatic. Careful planning and consideration of how the tools are introduced is key, according to both Miles and Griffin.

One size doesn’t fit all. “We have a very wide spectrum of employee in terms of age range and technical capability, so they’re naturally those that are very technically adept and will leap at the opportunity to try a new tool, and there are others that are slightly more hesitant around how they work towards it,” says Miles. One type of training wasn’t enough to get everyone up to speed and willing to make changes, especially when it came to a social tool like Quad that fundamentally alters how information gets shared. Miles explains what did work:

We couldn’t just deliver a simple technical training course and people would naturally adopt the technology all at the same rate. We had to create a unique and individual set of adoption processes that included everything from one-to-one training to self-help with videos through how-to communities. One of the big successes during the pilot, which I was hoping for but surprised me nonetheless, was the amount of people who started to self-help and help others. Naturally like every organization, we have a structured help desk department where people phone for technical queries, but what we wanted to introduce was trained people helping each other out on how to make a process more efficient or how to do something. And due to the community nature of Quad we started to see that really hit home.

Persuasion beats pummeling. “Our view of social software is it’s something you don’t want to force people to use. It’s something that they have to see a huge benefit in using themselves and want to use,” says Griffin. This is a view Virgin Media took to heart, so while they ensured executive level buy-in in the person of the company’s chief people officer Elisa Nardi, they also relied on persuasion rather than mandates to drive adoption.

“A lot of our success was involved in the preparations to start with. We completed lots of analysis around who our key collaborators were. We started to look at email stats on who sends lots of emails. We looked externally at who has a lot of followers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, so we could start to see who our collaboration experts are, our super connectors,” says Miles. “We then engaged those first and started to bring them on to the pilot to become evangelists that would shout from the rooftops on how it’s going to change the world, which was really positive. It was a groundswell from bottom up.”

Measure success. “Make sure you have some clear and understood metrics that you can measure from start through the pilot and to the end as well, including surveys, etc.,” Miles stresses. It’s a point Griffin is keen on as well. He recommends, “having a set of goals and measuring how you get towards them. I know it’s a very obvious statement but if you have that, you’re going to be able to measure your success or otherwise and if it’s otherwise, readjust and figure out what needs to change.”

Are there any other keys to a successful roll out of social enterprise tools?

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At oDesk, our in-house full-time employees work from home at least one day a week, and we’re regularly collaborating with a team of about 250 remote contractors who act as a crucial extension of our internal team. This has forced us to study how to make meetings work for all involved.

We’ve found there are three steps to a successful online meeting:

• Be sure you need a meeting to accomplish the desired result
• Establish topics and their time allocation, roles and processes (planning objectives, information sharing, problem solving, decision making, relationship building)
• Assess your meeting afterwards (results met, process adhered to, relationships strengthened)

We started by defining the roles involved in making a remote meeting work: the organizer, coordinator, presenter(s) and attendees. Each role has its responsibilities to the team, and by defining those roles, we’re able to ensure accountability for each meeting’s success and seek out ways to continually improve the remote meeting experience. Adopting these roles has allowed us to make sure members of a distributed team are as active, included, and productive during a meeting as those who are on-site.

Organizer: Setting the stage

Someone needs to make sure the meeting will accommodate all participants. The format of the meeting will largely depend on the needs of the group and the goals of the meeting. The meeting organizer works with the presenter to ensure that the right format is chosen and prepared ahead of time.

• Where will we hold the on-site meeting? Generally, this will be a conference room or office large enough to hold all the on-site attendees, with the technology necessary to accommodate remote attendees.
• What kind of access do remote attendees need? Is audio sufficient, or do they need video of the room? Do they need to be able to see slides or other materials?
• How will remote attendees “dial in”? This means choosing the platform of the meeting, which can include a bridge line, Skype, or a desktop sharing/presenting platform such as GoToMeeting.
• How will we communicate when and how to attend? Invitees need to know when, where and how to attend the meeting. If remote attendees need to have a login to register or to download and install a plugin, the organizer makes sure they are aware of this potential roadblock and are prepared in advance.
• Is everyone clear on the roles and their responsibilities? Make sure all attendees are aware of the presenters and meeting coordinator, and share the agenda and best practices with them.

Presenters: Adapting to the environment

Presenters must remember to take into account the remote participants. When you’re explaining concepts or an initiative to a distributed team, will there be visual aids? Do you intend to show something on a computer screen? Does it need to be seen live, as you manipulate it, or can you send a copy of the material, such as a PowerPoint presentation, to remote participants so they can follow along? Prior to the meeting, the presenter should work with the meeting organizer to make sure they—and the facility—are prepared technically to present via local projection and remote platforms.

During the meeting, presenters should:

• Log onto their presentation platform five minutes early to address any technical difficulties.
• Welcome everyone and ask remote attendees whether they can hear and see appropriately
• Make sure to verbalize throughout the meeting what attendees should be seeing (slide number, visual cues, etc.) to help flag sharing problems quickly.
• Ask whether the remote team has any questions. It can be hard for remote participants to interject or notify organizers of their desire to speak. Give them equal opportunity to contribute by offering them the floor at meeting/slide transitions.
• If a contributor is not near a microphone or speakerphone, repeat the statement or question yourself to ensure remote attendees can hear all conversations (since you’ll probably be best situated for microphone pickup).

Coordinators: Keeping everything on track

Identify a coordinator before the meeting. This person makes sure that the technical side runs smoothly and is prepared to respond to challenges as they arise. The meeting coordinator can also be the organizer, but should not be a presenter. If presentations are being made from more than one location, there should ideally be a coordinator in each place. Also, the coordinators should be members of the department presenting the meeting, to ensure that they’ll understand the material being presented, even if they’re distracted by the on-the-fly back-end management.

During the meeting, the coordinator:

• Facilitates an instant messaging group chat with remote team members, including updating the conversation regularly as problems are recognized and addressed. This IM session allows remote members to communicate technical difficulties or other distractions that need to be addressed without interrupting the meeting flow.
• Handles all troubleshooting requiring local action, such as adjusting microphones, encouraging speakers to talk louder, refreshing slide screens, etc.

Attendees: Ready to go

Attendees have a role to play in keeping the meeting running smoothly, as well. They’re responsible for:

• Logging onto the platform five minutes early to address any technical issues prior to the meeting.
• Communicating difficulties during the meeting to the coordinator via the chosen instant messaging channel.

A note on having a solid platform

Often a simple phone call and speakerphone is sufficient, but make sure any printed material, such as an agenda, is also shared with remote participants before the meeting. Depending on your presentation needs, more involved platform options include:

• Dial-in conference bridges or direct-dial phone calls
• Skype (video and voice chat)
• Shared documents (Google Docs)
• GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar
• WebEx

Whatever platform you choose, adapt your presentation to the platform’s strengths (don’t try to present a PowerPoint over a direct-dial phone call), and make sure that everyone is prepared. Check in with remote attendees afterward to make sure they had a positive experience, and work on ironing out wrinkles as they’re identified.

At oDesk, we’ve been refining our techniques for years, and we’re progressing toward meetings that are every bit as easy as having everyone under the same roof — sometimes even easier. More importantly, we’ve made sure that our remote workers are able to fully contribute to our success at least as well as if they were in our office. Which is the whole point of what we do, after all.

Gary Swart is CEO of oDesk. He has more than 17 years’ experience leading remote and local teams as an executive at Intellibank, IBM and Pure Software. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik

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The first crop of gadgets includes tools for web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue reporting and monitoring, and note-taking, such as:

• An Evernote gadget that automatically displays notes containing the name or email address of a particular contact, and allows adding and editing.
• A Dropbox tool for finding files and sharing them by creating links that are entered into email messages. Drag-and-drop file sending is planned for the future.
• A JIRA bug tracker tool that allows programmers to update project status inline.
• A Google Translate tool that automatically translates entire conversations, both incoming and outgoing. Xobni says that the translations are good enough to be helpful for use in customer support.
• A WebEx tool to schedule meetings, and start them on the fly.

Other gadgets available today include:

• Productivity: GoldMail
• Collaboration: Huddle and Microsoft SharePoint
• Content: Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp
• CRM: Salesforce CRM

Xobni was one of the first companies to bring “social CRM” services to the inbox, but has more recently seen significant competition from the likes of Rapportive, Gist and Liaise. By hooking into third-party services, the gadgets can offer offer additional capabilities not offered by Xobni’s competitors.

When I spoke with Xobni representatives recently, they said that the rationale for developing this platform was simple: research shows that in the enterprise, people spend 38 percent of their screen time in Outlook, so it makes sense to make Outlook as capable as possible.

Xobni says that its system relies on open APIs, and it is based on OpenSocial. Developers can create their own gadgets; they can be created with straightforward web development tools. The infrastructure can even be hosted on intranets to take advantage of corporate LDAP servers. Gadgets are not yet part of Xobni for Gmail beta, but they are on the way.

The new Xobni gadgets are available from the company’s website. Most of the Xobni Gadgets are free, but the JIRA and Saleforce gadgets are priced at $9.99 per user per year. Xobni handles billing and payment for developers.

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Tungle.me users can now automatically embed WebEx information into meeting invitations when organizing a conference call. The location field in the email confirmation and calendar event will both have a direct link to the WebEx meeting. That should mean that participants won’t have to hunt down a dial-in number hidden in away in an email somewhere, and they’ll also have direct access to any required meeting or presentation documents.

Setting up your Tungle.me account to work with WebEx is straightforward:

1. Sign into Tungle.me
2. Click “Partner Add-Ons” in the left sidebar
3. Enter your WebEx credentials

As WebEx is the only item under the “Partner Add-Ons” menu currently, I’d hope that would mean that Tungle is also looking at integrating other apps with its service. Tungle.me already plays nicely with a large variety of calendaring apps, but being able to integrate it with a wide variety of web conferencing and online presentation providers would be very useful.

What meeting scheduling tools do you use?

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In order to showcase their apps and services, many of these web conferencing companies offer free or affordable webinars on a variety of business topics to lure in new customers. Additionally, some companies hold free webinars to showcase their expertise. Either way, there are more and more free webinars offered every day. You can use them to gain knowledge from credible consultants, authors and other experts.

A caveat: When companies have something to sell, their webinars may tend to be skewed toward their products. Go for the webinars that include diverse topics and especially those where the experts are not from within the host company.

Here are some webinars on topics that can help you with your work.

1. Webinars on WebEx — free sessions hosted by experts using WebEx software. Upcoming webinars include a WebEx Q&A where you can ask a WebEx expert about holding large virtual events on December 8, 2009 and on December 15, “Reward & Recognition on a Limited Budget” led by Senior Consulting Partner Mark Paskowitz of The Ken Blanchard Companies.
2. New Marketing Labs — Coming up December 3 is “Measuring Success in Social Media” from the team at this reputable social media consulting firm led by Chris Brogan.
3. Radian6′s Twebinars — Sample topics include case studies of “engaged brands” like communications company Mullen and beverage company Molson Coors.
4. Sustainable Industries — This magazine holds free webinars about the issues of sustainability for anybody wanting to reduce their carbon footprint both (in both their personal and professional lives) as well as to learn about the latest trends in sustainability.
5. The IRS — Yes, even the IRS has gotten on the webinar bandwagon! Topics include tips on e-filing, tax updates (often based on specific states), and IRS Disaster Assistance.
6. Hubspot — While I do not endorse the Hubspot product, it does offer useful archived webinars like “5 Tips for Advanced B2B Business Blogging” and “How to Use Social Media to Manage Your Company Brand Online” There are also live webinars.
7. Awareness Networks — Watch archived videos of webinars with such industry leaders as Paul Gillin and Brian Solis.
8. Marketing Profs — For an annual membership fee, you can access archived webinars on topics ranging from “Monetizing the Long Tail of Search: Rethink Your Keyword Strategy” and “Love or Marketing? How Word-of-Mouth Will Save Your Brand.” Marketing Profs also holds live webinars including webinars on how to succeed with webinars.
9. Constant Contact — This email marketing company offers live webinars on email marketing, event marketing and online surveys. (Disclosure: I am a paying customer of Constant Contact).
10. Small Business Administration — The SBA has a series of small business training webinars covering finance and accounting, business planning and business startup, among other topics. You can also find webinars offered for free by local SBAs by state.

Virtual events company On24 takes webinars a huge leap further by sponsoring — and providing the platform for — virtual summits such as last month’s Social CRM Virtual Summit, essentially an all-day series of webinars and webcasting.

Webinars are a convenient way to learn best practices, hear case studies and hear from some of the world’s top experts in their field, all from the comfort of your office, your home or anywhere.

What webinars have you attended that you recommend?

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