Collaboration News From Launch Pad
By Michael Sampson
Enterprise 2.0 2007, formerly known as the Collaborative Technologies Conference, was held during June in Boston, MA. The purpose of the conference and demo pavilion is to explore the integration of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise. The conference was staged over four days, and offered strategic and practical sessions, in-depth workshops, and real-life case studies. One of the new events on the main stage this year was Launch Pad 2007 where four companies announced either themselves or a new product. Each company had six minutes of presentation time, and then received real-time feedback, analysis and critique from two collaboration analysts focused on Enterprise 2.0. I was the Launch Pad moderator. The four companies were Clarizen, Collanos, KnowNow and LiquidTalk. A brief introduction of each follows.
Clarizen
Clarizen (www.clarizen.com) came out of stealth mode at Enterprise 2.0 with both a show floor booth and an appearance at Launch Pad. Clarizen offers a collaborative project management system, which is delivered as a hosted on-demand service. Businesses today need to organize project efforts across many global sites, and across many organizations within a supply chain, so effective ways of coordinating projects and tasks is critical. There is both an information sharing component to this—so that everyone can see what others are responsible for and working on—and a collaboration component— whereby the expertise of individuals can be tapped for specific problems, issues and opportunities.
Clarizen's offering enables the set up of projects and tasks. Because it is Web-based, it is available immediately to any authorized user across the globe. Individuals can see all of the tasks that have been assigned to them across one or many projects. Project and business managers can maintain effective oversight of what's going on, enabling decisions on raising or lowering resources on specific tasks and projects as required. Documents and discussions can be held within the context of a project and task, recording for posterity what worked and what did not. In order to simplify user adoption, Clarizen enables users to report on work completed via an email message. This is so users do not always have to log in to the Web interface. However, Clarizen is placing a lot of emphasis on developing an intuitive user interface to drive adoption and encourage active engagement by all project participants. To register for a beta account, go to Clarizen's Website.
Collanos
Peer-to-peer collaborative workspaces are not a new idea. Groove Networks championed the idea for the first part of this decade. Since its acquisition by Microsoft in April 2005, the Groove client has become enshrined as part of Microsoft Office. Like Groove, Collanos (www.collanos.com) also offers a peer-to-peer collaborative workspace product, but with two fundamental differences. One: A free price tag for the standard edition. Two: Cross-platform support. Groove is Windows-only; Collanos is Windows, Mac and Linux, which is a critical difference when aiming to simplify collaboration across organizational boundaries where the computing platform of use cannot be dictated. The Collanos workspace includes a list of members, folders for files and documents, threaded discussion capabilities, and a system for notification of changes and additions within the workspace.
Version 1.0 of the Collanos Workspace became available in June 2006. Announced at Launch Pad 2007, the newest addition is its "Voice Services" capability for the integration of voice calling and instant messaging within individual workspaces. This means that a workspace member can see the list of other members who are online and available, and then initiate a real-time communication session with them—by voice or instant message. Members no longer have to go somewhere else to engage in real-time conversations; Collanos Workspace integrates both asynchronous and synchronous communication in a single product.
KnowNow
Since the turn of the century, KnowNow (www.knownow.com) has offered a variety of tools and platforms to help link people with relevant information for their jobs. While RSS in the enterprise has been one of their focal points, KnowNow sees itself as more than an RSS company. In particular, the intelligent aggregation and dissemination of relevant knowledge from a multitude of corporate applications and repositories is a critical focus. KnowNow aggregation platform monitors many internal and external information sources— capturing changes, applying security policies, and advising people who need to know about certain events, revisions and updates. For example, KnowNow monitors ERP and CRM systems and sends alerts when orders are placed or updated, enabling individuals to stay on the pulse of business and make timely decisions.
As an existing company, KnowNow used its Launch Pad presentation to announce the private beta of a new product, KnowNow Live. As a browser-based offering KnowNow Live notifies end-users of changes and additions across corporate applications and external information sources that are relevant to their jobs. For example, users can choose to be notified when a new document is added into a SharePoint site of interest. Or users can request notification whenever a certain tag is used to describe a document or other digital artifact within any business system. KnowNow Live leverages the underlying power of KnowNow's enterprise servers.
LiquidTalk
To capture, disseminate and share organizational knowledge has traditionally been a text-heavy affair. Someone has to type the information and send via email, or publish to the Intranet. This is highly appropriate for some types of knowledge, and yet it misses the mark for others. LiquidTalk (www.liquidtalk.com) introduces a new way that seeks to return some of the nuance—the ability to record meetings, speeches, conference calls and presentations for wider publication and sharing within an organization. LiquidTalk supports both audio and video recordings. Text documents can be turned into audio podcasts for distribution. There is also a phone-in feature for easy recording of an item for distribution via LiquidTalk. Each organization gets its own secure, hosted Web application for managing their audio and video content. Individual users within the organization can log in and choose the material of interest to them, in addition to hearing or viewing what others have flagged for their attention. To support on-the-go learning and knowledge sharing, audio and video items can be synchronized to mobile devices, such as the iPhone, iPod and BlackBerry.
LiquidTalk addresses business needs while recognizing the timesqueeze many operate under. For example, a project team can record conference calls and make them automatically available for others to review. A CEO can record a presentation and broadcast it immediately to everyone in the organization. A star salesperson can record a sales call for neophyte salespeople to listen and learn from. People can subscribe to audio items that fit within a certain category of interest, and can themselves tag interesting audio items for their own future retrieval, as well as to help others find things of interest to them.
Launch Pad Vote
There is no shortage of new products and ideas for enhancing various types of collaboration between people. The four companies selected to participate in Launch Pad 2007 offer a range of complementary capabilities for this purpose. If you see possibilities within one or more of these products, I encourage you to find out more. During Launch Pad, live audience polling allowed attendees to vote via text message for the Biggest Game Changer presenting. KnowNow Live won the award. MS/TMP