Collaboration: October 2009 Archives

MetaCommunications has announced the November 2, 2009 launch and availability of Spark!, a browser-based tool designed to facilitate collaboration between content creators and their clients. Spark! will help enable creative concept review workspaces where document content, including PDFs and graphic files, can be collaboratively discussed, revised, and routed for final approvals. Spark! is specifically designed for advertising, marketing, creative design, packaging, prepress, and web design. Spark! addresses issues surrounding collaboration between content creators who need to iteratively work through a design and then route that design through final approvals. The new Spark! requires no installation, special knowledge, or training to use. Spark! renders PDF and many image-based file formats on the fly. Whether it's a Balsamiq mockup, a magazine spread, logo designs, or packaging ideas, Spark! aims to circulate and discuss creative and concept files. By using commenting and annotation tools, all users reviewing a Spark! document should be able to annotate and discuss with each other in real-time, entirely within their web browsers. The Spark! Workflow Spark! plugs in to Approval Manager workflows to provide creative teams with feedback on concept and creative files. Reviewers responsible for giving feedback work from notifications delivered to their email inboxes or from review dashboards in their web browsers. Whether following links from email or using the dashboards, all reviewers open the same document in Spark! and share each other's comments, annotations, and approval statuses. http://www.meta-comm.com/

Jive announced the general availability of Jive Social Business Software (SBS) 4.0. With SBS 4.0, Jive extends SBS further out into the marketplace, deep into the enterprise, wide across the firewall, and out on the road. The Jive Microsoft Office Connector enables Jive SBS 4.0 users to work on any Microsoft Office document, spreadsheet or presentation in Jive or on their desktop. When users create and save Office content on their desktop it is automatically published to Jive where the content is rendered for viewing and commenting directly from the browser. Additionally, users can view and reply to comments made in the browser directly from the plug-in in Microsoft Office. The Jive Microsoft Office Connector enables document co-authoring, allowing multiple contributors to make comments and changes to an Office file simultaneously with automatic synchronization of each other's changes. The Jive Mobile for the iPhone and Blackberry module allows users to create content and participate in active discussions from the iPhone and/or Blackberry, or any mobile or desktop device with access to email. Jive has added enhancements to its Bridging module to let employees capture relevant conversations taking place in their public communities, share them internally, collect and consolidate responses, and go back out across the firewall to post a response. Moving beyond the monitoring or collaboration status quo, Jive Bridging in Jive SBS 4.0 lets users sustain a continuous, bidirectional dialogue with the people around whom their business is centered. The Jive Analytics Module provides tools for community managers to quantify and characterize the growth and success of their communities. A comprehensive set of key community activity reports is presented via the analytics console, including reports on adoption, participation, and top content, spaces, groups and users. Jive SBS 4.0 is available immediately. http://www.jivesoftware.com

Jive announced Jive Mobile, a new module for Jive Social Business Software (SBS) that enables mobile workers to connect with people and resources while they are out of the office. Jive Mobile provides a native application for Apple's iPhone and an enhanced experience for the BlackBerry and any other email enabled mobile devices. The Jive Mobile iPhone App provides Apple iPhone or Apple iPod Touch users full access to Jive SBS for online networking and collaboration. Jive Mobile also lets users leverage the unique properties of the iPhone, including integration with mobile contacts, geolocation updates, and the built-in camera. Jive Mobile extends the basic core email functionality of Jive SBS - reply via mail to discussion threads - to allow users of any mobile device with e-mail access to create and post Jive community content via email. Jive Mobile is available as an add-on module to Jive SBS 4.0. iPhone or iPod Touch users can download Jive SBS Mobile directly from the iTunes App Store to connect with their enterprise's license of Jive Mobile. http://www.jivesoftware.com/

The annual analyst keynote panel at the sixth annual Gilbane Boston Conference, produced by The Gilbane Group and Lighthouse Seminars, to take place December 1- 3, 2009, in Boston, MA, hosts leading industry analysts who will debate What’s Real, What’s Hype, and What’s Coming in content management and collaboration. Industry analysts from different firms speak at all Gilbane events to make sure conference attendees hear differing opinions from a wide variety of expert sources. A second, third, fourth or fifth opinion will ensure IT and business managers don't make ill-informed decisions about critical content and information technologies or strategies. Some of the topics to be debated are: How the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010 with affect the web and enterprise content management, search, and collaboration markets; What organizations are finding when they deploy enterprise social software; What companies should be doing about managing user-generated content; Whether it is time to seriously invest in mobile content applications, and; How companies are engaging customers with multi-lingual web sites. "Industry Analyst Debate: What's Real, What's Hype, and What's Coming" will be a lively, interactive debate guaranteed to be both informative and fun. Participants include moderator, Frank Gilbane, CEO Gilbane Group, and panelists: Melissa Webster, Vice President, Content & Digital Media Technologies, IDC; Stephen Powers, Senior Analyst, Forrester; Dale Waldt, Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group; Kathleen Reidy, Senior Analyst, 451 Group; and Guy Creese, VP & Research Director, Collaboration and Content Strategies, Burton Group. Conference attendees are encouraged to come with questions, and can also suggest questions in advance via our social media channels or email. See http://gilbaneboston.com/conference_program.html#K2, http://twitter.com/gilbaneboston

Zoho has announced that Zoho Projects, the company’s online project management and team collaboration application is now integrated with Google Apps. The move brings Zoho Projects to Google Apps users, complete with unified login and embeddable gadget options. Zoho Projects for Google Apps will soon be available in the Google Solutions Marketplace. A highlight of the Google Apps and Zoho Projects integration is the unified login system. Once logged into Zoho Projects, users should be able to upload their files from Google Apps and attach them to their projects. From Zoho Projects, users can then open, view and edit those files in the corresponding Zoho applications, e.g., Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, etc. Additional highlights include: Calendar integration - Meetings, Tasks, and Project milestones from the Zoho Projects calendar can be added automatically to a Google calendar; Zoho Projects will be available as a Zoho Gadget that can be embedded in iGoogle, Gmail, Google Sites and other online applications that support OpenSocial; Zoho Projects is free for one project, so Google Apps users can try out the software. For additional projects, prices start at $12 per month. http://projects.zoho.com/google-apps

Microsoft and Quark are working on a new solution for publishers that combines editorial collaboration and dynamic publishing to streamline editorial workflows and enable single-source multi-channel publishing. Built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, the Microsoft Unified Communications platform, Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution (Quark DPS) and Quark XML Author, the solution consolidates communication processes, facilitates collaboration, and streamlines workflows to improve the efficiency of the creative and editorial process to help publishers be first out with stories either in print or digitally. With the new integrated solution, Microsoft and Quark combine XML authoring, professional design, and dynamic publishing from Quark with the collaboration and unified communications platform of the Microsoft Office System. Journalists, editors, resource managers, graphic designers, and layout designers will be able to: - View incoming RSS feeds - Share story ideas - Track events and plan coverage - Request, find, and allocate suitable resources - Search related content and subject matter experts - Author content in XML that is suitable for multi-channel publishing - Track review and approval workflows - Communicate using presence status indication, instant messaging, voice of IP, e-mail, audio and video conferencing - and, Incorporate professionally designed output for a variety of channels http://www.quark.com/, http://www.microsoft.com/

Tomoye announced a new community and social networking platform for Microsoft SharePoint. The platform combines capabilities to fuel communities and social networking combined with an open source approach intended to deliver customers and partners with flexibility and extendibility. The product is available for both Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) enabling organizations to leverage their SharePoint infrastructure and data. This platform is installed as a SharePoint _layout application, deployed via SharePoint central administration, and utilizes SharePoint search and authentication provider. This means no additional costs to organizations as is deployed on existing SharePoint servers. Integrated search and authentication gives unprecedented access to security trimmed SharePoint data. As users explore and mark-up content, the software tracks implicit behaviour and aggregates explicit user actions to present data to community members by what their peers are using and liking. Delivering a dynamic roster of expertise in the organization's communities and across the enterprise, Tomoye tracks and reveals experts by their online activities and by the votes of others. Changing on a daily basis, expertise rosters becomes real-time. Tomoye aggregates content across communities and SharePoint data so users can now identify the best information assets from across the enterprise, in a single place. This is done by tracking user behaviour and explicit user endorsements. Along with open source licensing, Tomoye is offering partners a series of incentives including free deployments of 50 seats or less. Tomoye Community Software v 3.0 is available immediately through the company and its partners. Pricing starts at $35 per seat, with discounts for volume and externally facing deployments. http://www.tomoye.com

Jive Software announced a new strategy to extend a social layer across an organization's content silos. As part of the strategy, Jive will deliver Jive Connects, a series of modules that will enable organizations to surface content and activities from almost any content management system (CMS) inside Jive Social Business Software (SBS). The first module under the new strategy is the Jive SharePoint Connector, a deep integration between Jive SBS and Microsoft SharePoint. The SharePoint Connector enables users of either solution to unite content and activities originating inside either Jive or SharePoint into a single stream via unified access, unified search results, unified activity streams, and unified document storage. Jive customers can do the bulk of their work in the Jive environment while maintaining easy access to SharePoint's content repositories and workflow. With the SharePoint Connector, Jive customers can search, browse, and link to SharePoint repositories and content from wherever they happen to be working in Jive, including groups, discussion threads, documents, and blogs. The SharePoint Connector enables Jive customers to: give authorized users transparent, click-through access to both applications while exposing Jive SBS social features in the heart of SharePoint; keep track of modifications to SharePoint content and activities as well as SharePoint content that has been socialized in Jive; conduct unified searches that reflect both application environments, and link to and embed content in both directions; publish content from SharePoint to Jive SBS allowing for content to be reviewed, edited and processed prior to sharing with the entire community; publish content from Jive SBS to SharePoint to leverage SharePoint's storage and content capabilities to comply with company data and security policies; and manage corporate governance policies through a granular, semantically rich business rule language to help IT and SharePoint administrators strictly define what, how, and when content gets socialized out of SharePoint hierarchies. Jive Connects SharePoint Module will be available later this quarter. http://www.jivesoftware.com/