An anonymous Research in Motion employee today published a letter to the company's senior management team begging them to change the companies direction by refocusing on end-user experience, among other things. The letter was published by The Boy Genius Report.
While it might be easy to dismiss it as the bitter rantings of a disgruntled employee, I think it's worth reading. Not just for yet another perspective on what RIM is doing wrong, but because it presents the exact series of organization problems that enterprise 2.0/social business tools are intended to solve.
Things have been quiet on the Zimbra front for some time now, so it's nice to hear a little news: VMware has released a Zimbra client for Android. But it describes the apps as a "fling."
Zimbra for Android is free, but there is no support and no guarantee that it will ever become part of an official product offering. In other words, it's nothing you want to seriously deploy, but if you're both a Zimbra user and an Android user you might want to check it out and give VMware your feedback.
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Disclosure: Qwest Business is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor
When I started professionally covering the enterprise 2.0/social business space just over a year ago it was all very exciting. I had personally witnessed how valuable a workplace microblog/activity stream could be, and I loved learning about all the different companies and the ideas floating around.
But it's easy to get bored. Despite all the talk about the consumerization of the enterprise, things still move slowly (heck, things don't really change that much day to day, week to week in the consumer space either). The same few problems seem to be discussed again and again: adoption, security, process, semantics etc. As Dennis Howlett recently wrote: "much of what we are hearing in the social space we've heard repeated for at least the last three years. In other words, precious little real progress."
So it's always nice to see some incremental progress, and this week brought at least two noteworthy product updates: one from Harmon.ie and one from tibbr. Each company was already doing something interesting, and each has taken its products to the next level.
In a forthcoming book from Wiley entitled iPad in the Enterprise, Nathan Clevenger cites several examples where the iPad has begun to transform the way that enterprise IT departments are operating. He does copious research and cites a series of intriguing examples where companies are tolerating, using, and even embracing iPads as part of their computing strategies. Here are a couple of excerpts from his research for the book.
Security vendor StillSecure has announced a new cloud security service for network penetration testing this week. This complements their existing panoply of cloud-based services including including firewall, IDS/IPS, VPN, e-mail security, multi-factor authentication, vulnerability scanning and log management.
Many of you are familiar with the packet capture tools Ethereal, Netscout's Snifffer or Wireshark. All of these are very useful for debugging network-related problems. The problem is that you have to run one of these tools on a computer with special drivers to enable the capture, and sharing the reports isn't always easy, especially on mobile devices. What if you could put the captures up in the cloud? Enter the idea behind CloudShark from QA Cafe.
Today, as expected Office 365 came out of beta. Office 365 is Microsoft's consolidated cloud-services system that combines hosted versions of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and Lync Server.
So how does it hold up to two older offers, Google Apps and Zoho?
Is there any truth to the belief that U.S. tech jobs are outsourced to India at least in part because Indian developers are better skilled than U.S. workers? According to GILD, a company that combines professional social networking with games that assess skills, there are some areas in which Indians beat their counterparts in the U.S, but there are others in which Americans excel. GILD examined the results of over 1 million assessments taken by over 500,000 developers with an average of 2-3 years of experience.
What is part Nimble.com, part Constant Contact, part Web site authoring tool, part SurveyMonkey, part wiki all rolled into one? The answer is a new service called GreenRope, available now.
This is a Swiss Army Knife of the Web. There are more tools here than you can possibly review in a short article, and the idea is to put in one place everything you need to get started online.