Forrester Research has just released two reports concerning 'web 2.0' in the enterprise. Forrester recently surveyed 119 CIOs on the topic and their answers illustrate what IT honchos want – and don't want – from social software technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging.
According to the report entitled CIOs Want Suites For Web 2.0, the enterprise Web 2.0 market "is beginning to consolidate". Apparently CIOs have a strong desire to purchase web 2.0 products "as a suite, as well as an equally strong desire to purchase these technologies from large, incumbent software vendors." 61% of respondents indicated that they would prefer both a suite solution and a large, incumbent vendor. According to the report, "integration issues, longevity concerns, and the occasional lack of polish" are counting against small vendors.
Source: Forrester
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
It's 2007 and no longer do startup employees, or even those of medium-size and large companies, need to be located in the same place. Instead, more and more companies are going virtual. The answer to long commutes, inner city traffic, tapping into creative minds in other geographies and combating global warming is: a 'work from home' policy.
But in order for working from home to be effective, certain things need to be in place. The most critical is technology - a set of tools, along with the infrastructure, that can replace the traditional office. Using these tools it is possible for team members to connect, communicate and execute as effectively as a traditional company. So in this post, we look at software that makes virtual companies possible.
Pick: Skype; cost: free. Alternatives: Gizmo, Jajah, Google Talk, more...
The first tool for a virtual company has to be one that
replaces face-to-face communication. This is not an easy task, but Skype gets close. This popular software bundles the
phone, traditional chat, conferencing and video conferenecing and works on Windows, Mac
and Linux. It is powerful to be able to chat and, when necessary, call a team mate. All
Skype PC-to-PC calls are free and there are options such as SkypeOut (calling normal
telephone numbers) and SkypeIn (gives you a phone number for anywhere in the world).
Written by Sramana Mitra
I have written several pieces recently about the Extended Enterprise trend, covering Segments such as Collaboration, CRM and PLM.
In the same vein, that I have proposed a framework for Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS), I would like to discuss in this piece, a framework for Enterprise 3.0.
Fot those working with web technologies, and focused on business applications, the trend to watch carefully is the Extended Enterprise one, which hasn’t quite become mainstream yet.
While this week's poll is
about Google's
Web Office bid, we mustn't forget that a few small Web Office vendors have been in
this space longer than Google and have built up a loyal and strong user base. One such
company is ThinkFree, which I've profiled before
on ZDNet. Today ThinkFree announced they'd reached 250,000 registered users. These users
are made up of small and medium business owners and their staffs, university professors,
teachers, entrepreneurs, parents, bloggers and students.
What's more, ThinkFree users come from more than 200 countries, including Mauritania, Anguilla, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. The greatest number of users come from five regions: the United States, South Korea, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Canada.
Here are some monthly statistics released by ThinkFree:
I'm participating in the Radar Relay, a group blogging effort being run by Under The Radar in preparation for the upcoming Office 2.0 event on March 23 in Silicon Valley (I will be a judge at the conference). So in this post I’ll be highlighting some of the office 2.0 news that came out this week.
The big news of course was Google releasing a Premier Edition of its Google Apps suite of office tools. The new-look suite includes the existing Google Apps tools - Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Start Page – plus Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a set of APIs and third party services, and a solid support and hosting package. We covered this on Read/WriteWeb, noting that it still falls short of a full office suite – missing is presentations, CRM, JotSpot(!) and other things. Also lacking is full integration and collaboration between the apps, a la Basecamp or Central Desktop. So Google Apps is a step forward, but by no means the final deal.
The big news tonight is that Google has released a premier edition of its Google Apps package (previously known as Google Apps For Your Domain). I've been following the Web Office trend for a long time and, like everyone, have been particularly obsessed with Google's gradual progression towards a Web Office suite. Tonight is another step towards fully challenging Microsoft Office, but there is still a ways to go. More on that in a minute, but first a quick overview of what's in Google Apps Premier.
The new 'suite' includes the existing Google Apps tools - Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Start Page. New to the package is Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a significant edition considering that word processing and spreadsheets are mainstays of Microsoft Office. A comparison between the free edition and premier is here. Also new of note is APIs "to integrate with your existing infrastructure" and ability to integrate with 3rd party applications and services. 'Best of breed' web apps is another theme we obsess over here at Read/WriteWeb - so APIs and 3rd party features will go a long way towards making Google Office an attraction for external developers and startups. Google wants to be the center of the Web Office ecosystem, a very wise strategy.
Disclosure: Central Desktop is a current sponsor.
Today Web Office company Central Desktop announced a new online
spreadsheets feature, via a collaboration with HongKong-based company Team and Concepts
(TnC) Ltd and its EditGrid product. You may remember we profiled
EditGrid last week and touted it as 'better than Google Spreadsheets'. We said in
that post that EditGrid is a feature-packed app that is best in class, but that it
required partnerships with other vendors to be truly successful. Already it's integrated
into start pages
Netvibes,
Pageflakes and
Google Personalized Homepage, plus Salesforce
AppExchange and several SaaS products and platforms. Now Central Desktop has
integrated EditGrid too.
I spoke with Central Desktop CEO Isaac Garcia to find out more about the partnership. Central Desktop is a collaboration platform, similar to 37Signal's Basecamp. It's focus is on small-to-medium businesses, as an alternative to complex, traditional groupware products such as Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Notes. Central Desktop has what Isaac referred to as a "team level focus" and its features include collaborative document editing, Web and audio conferencing, discussion threads and versioned file tracking. The addition of EditGrid means that users can also now collaborate on spreadsheets, in real-time within the Central Desktop environment.
Written by Gang Lu and Richard MacManus
EditGrid, the main product of HongKong-based company
Team and Concepts (TnC) Ltd., is a leading Web 2.0 online spreadsheet service that
focuses on online collaboration and interoperability. Having had 1 year of development
and 9 months of public beta with 18 beta releases, yesterday EditGrid officially
announced its subscription service and removed the beta tag from its site. We spoke with
TnC's founder and Chairman, David Lee, a brilliant young man who was recently nominated
by BusinessWeek as one of Asia's
Best Entrepreneurs under 25. Also in this post we outline EditGrid's main features
and discuss why it's better than Google Spreadsheets.
The online spreadsheet market is crowded and the big players include Google Spreadsheets (as part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets), Zoho Sheet (as part of the Zoho Office Suite -- disclosure, Zoho is a R/WW sponsor), WikiCalc (a part of SocialText), ThinkFree Calc (as part of Thinkfree Office). But EditGrid is the only standalone online spreadsheet offering.
EditGrid boasts real-time-update (RTU), allowing users to see changes immediately when someone is editing the same spreadsheet, and extensive collaboration features. It has a feature called Remote data, which fetches data from the web (e.g. stock information and foreign exchange data) and puts it into a spreadsheet. Also EditGrid has many more functions available than Google Spreadsheet - EditGrid has over 500 functions (like SUM () etc), whereas Google Spreadsheet has 230+; at least according to this EditGrid comparison of EditGrid to Goog Spreadsheets and MS Excel 2003.
The big news today is that
IBM has released an enterprise social networking suite, called Lotus Connections. The
NY Times explains:
"Lotus Connections has five components — activities, communities, dogear (a bookmarking system), profiles and blogs — aimed at helping experts within a company connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs."
The NY Times article notes that IBM has long been interested in social networking, for example it has "several projects under way within Second Life".
Marc Canter thinks IBM's entrance into social networking software validates his own product, PeopleAggregator. IBM's corporate competitor, Microsoft, is a bit more defensive. The Redmond company has issued a press release, with the title 'Microsoft Makes It Easier for Organizations to Transition to Its Unified Communications and Collaboration Platform'. The press release goes on to helpfully (and wordily) suggest how existing IBM customers might migrate over to Microsoft:
The NY Times has an interesting article about how many office workers forward work email into their web email accounts (Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, etc). Employers are worried about the security implications, as well as legal issues. It's a classic case of web 2.0 consumer apps infiltrating the enterprise (the consumerization of the enterprise, as it was labeled last year). NYTimes writes:
