If you’ve been following the evolution of the enterprise collaboration space over the last 12 — 18 months, you may have noticed two attitudes toward the ROI of collaboration technologies. The first views collaboration tools as an expense that needs to be justified in order for organizations to decide whether to adopt them or not. The second views collaboration tools as an expense that needs no justification, akin to email or shared drives — the question for organizations is not whether, but what, when and how.

The way I see it, however, the proper approach to the ROI of collaboration technologies depends on at least three factors: industry, organizational footprint, and organizational culture.

Source: www.cmswire.com Posted by bee 637 days, 16 hours, 6 minutes ago

The economic slump has put a severe strain on the relationship between companies and their employees. Staff are enduring pay freezes and job cuts, while in many cases bonuses still roll in at the top, fuelling resentment.

Yet against this background, large companies claim that they are doing more than ever before to listen to their staff and improve relationships. "Employee engagement" – the jargon for firms' efforts to communicate and build good relations with their workforces – is a hot topic in management circles. Since 2006, companies have had a legal duty to "have regard to the interests of employees" and to report on their interactions with staff each year in their accounts.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk Posted by admin 638 days, 15 hours, 58 minutes ago

The flexibility of a software in supporting virtual environment clearly corresponds with its readiness to work in corporate frameworks. Very much like supporting various operating systems in the past, the more platforms you cover, the wider market coverage you have. Failing to cope with this challenge may result in losing the market just as in the example above. In fact, the term ‘cross-platform’ has apparently transformed into ‘cross-cloud’, illustrating a product’s operability in different virtualization environments and therefore its ability to cover new markets. At the same time with many virtualization platforms around it is quite difficult to develop dedicated versions for each. There is too much hassle in converting the distributions, testing the compatibility and properly configuring the settings. How to find an elegant solution to find the balance between compatibility and productivity?

Source: www.bitrixsoft.com Posted by bitrix 644 days, 12 minutes ago

Of late I’ve been reading quite a few posts on how we might depict the social intranet. Two in particular I am going to focus on here and they are from Jane McDonnel and from Deb Lavoy. Let’s start with Jane’s post “To technology strategists: how to blend enterprise + business + people?”. Here Jane argues that the workplace has 3 perspectives and to each she ascribes 3 collaborative tools by asking the salient question.....

Source: theparallaxview.com Posted by bee 644 days, 22 hours, 35 minutes ago

Intranet collaboration is tightly associated with the knowledge base. Data in a centralized repository brings little benefits in the absence of proper collaboration tools which act as a superstructure, enabling employees to effectively work with this data. In fact the connection between data and collaboration tools can be made with third-party applications. However, is there any sense in extra software investments when modern intranets are full of such tools? The only reason to work with third-party collaboration tools is legacy software. But in this case, the organization will inevitably meet with integration difficulties.

Source: www.bitrixsoft.com Posted by bitrix 648 days, 5 hours, 40 minutes ago

Socially-enabled intranets bring organizations a plethora of advantages for unleashing the power of creative communities, capitalizing on the social dimension of employees and as a result improve their market position, offering products which better reflect market demand.

There will always be the difficulty of finding a balance between business opportunities and the accompanying threats that arise with each step in making the enterprise more social. Intranet security issues are normally solved in the process of software implementation. The case with external social media tools is much different.

Source: www.bitrixsoft.com Posted by bitrix 648 days, 23 hours, 16 minutes ago

Barb Mosher from CMSwire announced the results of their latest poll regarding the usage of collaboration tools in intranets.

...

Anyway, this quick poll got my attention for a different reason. When summarizing the poll results, Barb questioned the readership: Do you hear the term intranet used when looking at social software solutions? It made me think of a common perception leading to a misunderstanding of the meaning and distinguishing of the terms intranet, Enterprise 2.0 and social media.

Source: www.customerthink.com Posted by support 649 days, 23 hours, 56 minutes ago

When Enterprise 2.0 first hit the radar, many of us were excited by the new social collaboration tools and their power to usher in new collaborative behaviors.

Some of this promise has indeed been realized. The market for Enterprise 2.0 software is strong and growing, with social computing functionality such as profiles, wikis, blogs, microblogs, tagging, and presence now widely available, both in specialized Enterprise 2.0 products and embedded into office productivity and unified communications suites.

Source: www.bworldonline.com Posted by bee 650 days, 17 hours, 25 minutes ago

Many organizations are planning or are already in the middle of deploying collaboration technology to their global organization. Before you go much further, ask yourself if you've identified these three elements of your collaboration strategy.

1. Define the Business Context

2. Identify the Degree of Openness

3. Establish Goals and Objectives

Source: www.cmswire.com Posted by admin 653 days, 15 hours, 58 minutes ago

It’s only natural that everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing. Building an effective enterprise social technology strategy means looking into what other companies have deployed and whether or not they have seen positive results from their efforts.

However, I've come to the realization that it is actually somewhat difficult to find a really good collection of case studies for enterprise 2.0 or information on what other companies have done to integrate social technologies within internal communications.

With that in mind, I decided to put together some of the case studies and research I have found in my own search

Source: socialmediatoday.com Posted by bee 655 days, 22 hours, 41 minutes ago