ReadWriteWeb

To everyone wishing they could use their Microsoft Office Access database to build a Web app, your savior has arrived. Zoho has introduced a plugin to migrate Access databases on to their platform. Once migrated, they can be used to build database applications through the Zoho Creator interface.

The new plugin is just one part of a larger strategy by Zoho to integrate with Microsoft, in the hopes that they can encourage converts to their SaaS products. The boon for those who use Access databases is that they can now easily translate their data tables into applications, which can be served through Zoho at little or no cost.

On top of the 3.0 release of their time management software, Slife Labs now integrates with the financial services of FreshBooks.

Alone, Slife was a fantastic tool for personal and enterprise productivity. By integrating smoothly with a Web-based application for invoicing, its value proposition is increased tenfold.

Today's 1.3 release of IBM's free Lotus Symphony productivity suite may not be the most innovative of improvements, but it's a product that addresses core needs of the enterprise as it exists today.

The flagship addition is full support for importing Microsoft Office 2007 documents. Other new features include the ability to drag-and-drop plug-ins, and the export of the files you've imported to either PDF or ODF.

Can you believe that using social networking sites at work can increase your workplace productivity? A new study just published by Australian scientists found that taking time to visit websites of personal interest, including news sites and YouTube, provided workers a mental break that ultimately increased their ability to concentrate and was correlated with a 9% increase in total productivity.

Reporters are shocked by the findings. We're in shock that this is where the state of academic study is concerning social technology use vs. workplace filtering technology when it comes to productivity. A 9% increase in productivity? Try using these social technologies for on topic work and you'll see productivity increases that make 9% look like nothing.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we see hundreds of new apps, scripts, plug-ins and doo-das every week. We review some portion of those. Many we get excited about. But few stand the test of time for even 30 days. Here are 23 apps we're still using a month or more after discovering them.

We wrote a similar post last November ("30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using 1 Month After Finding Them") and can happily report that we're still loving almost all the services we wrote about then. If a service can make it past the 30-day mark, it has a good chance of sticking around for a while. 22 or 23 in a month is a pretty impressive number really, so go web innovators go!

It's all about the web apps these days, right? Everything important's in the clouds? Not so fast! Spend some time separated from your physical computer and you'll likely be reminded just how much time and care you've put into setting it up like you want it. Even in this era of web app hype, we still love a good piece of desktop software, don't we?

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we'll be honest with you - we love our computers. Not just the web. In that spirit we thought we'd offer readers some short video tours of the apps we use every day. You may discover some things you want to try out for yourself.

ReadWriteWeb is a partner with Defrag, a conference about web innovation. Defrag's Eric Norlin has lately been blogging about enterprises and organizations starting to move beyond mere 'cost containment' (although that's still a big driver) and into using web technologies to boost productivity. Eric points out that "taming the data" is one of the challenges of this shift, because there is so much information online which workers need to process. And it's not just taming the data, but gleaning 'intelligence' from it. He mentions a number of buzzwords: enterprise 2.0, semantic web, business intelligence. Eric's main point is that this space is wide open for innovation - going beyond Webex, social networks and so on.

Part of the problem in the enterprise/business market is the predominance of big, bulky software from large IT vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Oracle. Although most of those companies are slowly evolving into offering web-based software (Cisco owns Webex for example), it tends to be slow progress from all the bigcos except for Google. But nowadays we're seeing startups making a significant impact in the enterprise. There are two main ways this is happening...

This will be post #1 of 2 posts on today's information overload problem and how we can cope. Part 2 is here.

Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.

In the early days of the web, going online was heralded as a great way to connect with other people who have had experiences similar to your own. The web was a place to get answers, advice and community no longer limited by the geographic location of the individuals you connected with.

While all of that remains true today, the ubiquity of the internet, the ease of publishing and the rise of online advertising has lead to the emergence of new kinds of websites: productivity, how-to and advice/Q&A sites that broadcast, scale and monetize that kind of information.