Collaboration: October 2011 Archives

IBM unveiled new software for managing and analyzing big data to the workplace. The new offerings span a wide variety of big data and business analytics technologies across multiple platforms from mobile devices to the data center to IBM's SmartCloud. Now employees from any department inside an organization can explore unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, log files, genomic data and video, and make sense of it as part of their everyday work experience. IBM is also placing the power of mobile analytics into the hands of iPad users with a free download in Apple's iTunes Store. The new software is designed to help employees in industries such as financial services, healthcare, government, communications, retail, and travel and transportation use and benefit from business analytics on the go. IBM is delivering new analytics and information management offerings: New Hadoop-based analytics software on the cloud, which helps employees tap into massive amounts of unstructured data from a variety of sources including social networks, mobile devices and sensors; New mobile analytics software for iPad users; and new predictive analytics software with a mapping feature that can be used across industries for marketing campaigns, retail store allocation, crime prevention, and academic assessment. http://www.ibm.com/

OpenText announced a new release of OpenText Social Communities (version 8.1), designed to help companies promote and drive the shift to a social business model. It combines a comprehensive social framework with a set of applications for building and engaging communities. This new release builds on the security and governance of the OpenText ECM Suite to apply appropriate controls to social objects. This is designed to create a safe environment of dialogue to foster informal collaboration and networking to help improve internal collaboration. Social Communities now integrates with OpenText Wave, OpenText's Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP), which allows organizations to create, develop, and deliver mobile applications for employees, partners, and customers. Integration with OpenText Web and Social Analytics offers the ability to monitor and measure social activity. To help promote and manage sharing between public social networking sites into a community site, Social Communities now gives users the ability to post content from a community site to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ and other social networks. Social Communities 8.1 provides a set of social applications for social intranet, social marketing and social workplace workloads. These are complemented by reusable and adaptable site templates with the flexibility to combine features as needed to meet specific goals, such as launching a brand, product or campaign. http://www.opentext.com

Box.net announced it closed $81 million in funding from a mix of investors including NEA, Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures and existing investors. As revealed on their company blog, Box has aspirations to compete with Microsoft's Sharepoint. Box is currently available on most mobile platforms, while SharePoint is currently tied to Windows Phones. Yet Box also lacks the full array of content management features that an enterprise user may currently need/use from Sharepoint. http://box.net/