Enterprise Collaboration

Next Up, Social Media Law

Stephanie Jordan — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:23:54 +0000

More and more today, for the corporate user, social networking is giving way to social business, and along with it, experts predict, will be specific social media law and regulations.

A recent eWeek article, IBM Gets Down to Social Business, points to how “Social networking, and its social-business offspring, has become a fashionable field of study at universities. Student projects often focus on using social networks to solve everyday and business-related problems.” The story notes how students are using social-business projects for their master’s thesis.

As social networking becomes more tightly woven into business processes, it is no surprise that greater regulation is anticipated. Well known legal firm Morrison & Foerster (MoFo) recently launched a new blog called Socially Aware, “to help companies understand the legal implications of social media use – including privacy protection for workers’ Facebook musings, securities laws governing blog postings, or the confidentiality of instant messaging.”

This blog may sound familiar, as it is a companion to the firm’s Socially Aware newsletter. While it is still emerging, social media law is a high interest area for Fortune 500 companies. Morrison & Foerster’s Social Media Practice Group says it advises companies and financial institutions across industry sectors on social media law, regulation and policy affecting privacy, data security, intellectual property, employment, securities, advertising, defamation, online contracting, user-generated content and use of social media in the workplace.

According to the blog, there will be “an explosion of employment law disputes involving social media this year.” John Delaney, a founding editor of Socially Aware and co-chair of Morrison & Foerster’s Social Media Practice Group, believes everyone from Fortune 500 companies to mom-and-pop neighborhood stores are rushing to embrace social media, and says the medium is perhaps the greatest tool for reaching customers since the creation of the World Wide Web.

Delaney warns however, “Corporate users of social media need to be aware of emerging intellectual property, privacy, employment law and other legal risks associated with social networks. This is an area where implementing a few protective measures today will help a company avoid expensive legal headaches in the future.”

In 2012, companies that have been slow to adopt social media, MoFo expects, will begin to do so. Notes a blog entry, “We will see even the most conservative Fortune 500 companies adopting internal, company-wide social media platforms of the type offered by Jive, NewsGator and SocialText. In 2013 and beyond, we’ll be seeing a new generation of privacy, employment, defamation and other legal claims arising out of these enterprise social platforms.”

It won’t be just companies that will experience an increase in social media law activity. MoFo says that regardless of Facebook’s recent settlement with the FTC over its data collection practices, the firm anticipates still further privacy law headaches for social media companies. “Many social media providers, anxious to justify astronomical valuations, are undoubtedly feeling pressure to make more aggressive use of personal information collected from customers.” MoFo predicts we will witness much more in 2012, especially by European regulators.

Even though social media law is not “new” — just look at the blog’s interesting Key Moments in Social Media Law that begins with an entry for 1984 — it is clearly building in complexity, especially as it pertains to privacy and content ownership rights.

Some Thoughts on Lotusphere and the New Communications Paradigm

Michael Osterman — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:39:53 +0000

There is lots of talk about email going away: some are swearing completely off of email, others complain about how many messages they receive in their inbox, others use only email. Our own research shows that for many corporate workers, the importance of email continues to grow. Add to all of this the continuing discussions about migrating from GroupWise to “Outlook” (the subject of an upcoming blog post), how Notes/Domino is losing share to Exchange, etc.

However, does it really matter? The fundamental goal of email when it was invented decades ago was to enable people to communicate in a more efficient way. That goal has never changed, but the tools that are available to corporate decision makers to enable that efficiency have. For example, we now have social tools that can enable communication in a way that enables easier access to and analysis of employee and customer sentiment. We have collaboration tools that make it easier for groups to work on a document instead of sending a file to everyone via email. We have text messaging and instant messaging that enable bursty types of communication that are more efficient than email.

Spending time at Lotusphere last week reinforced my view that IBM, more than many other vendors, really understands the new paradigm. To them it’s not so much about Notes/Domino losing share to Exchange (which, on a worldwide basis, is questionable anyway given that there are more Domino servers under management than at any time in the company’s history) or cloud vs. on-premise or social media vs. email. Instead, it’s about how communications is evolving into a new platform that integrates social into the business fabric—integrating new paradigms with the old where it makes sense to do so. It’s about a shift in corporate culture that doesn’t focus on siloes of information, but instead uses a variety of communication modes in a way that makes the most sense. For example, email need not—and should not—succumb to social media, but instead evolve into a tool that enables integration of various communication types that makes sense given a particular organization’s culture, regulatory environment, today’s customer base, future customer base, the geographic distribution of its employees and other factors.

The bottom line is that email—and every other mode of electronic communication—is about how to let employees and customers communicate, collaborate, learn, change and act in a way that meets their needs and those of their employer. Those who get caught up in the email vs. social media vs. Web 2.0 vs. cloud vs. on-premise vs. whatever else discussion are often missing the bigger picture: this is much more about business and getting things done efficiently, and not so much about technology.

Making the Case for “Social” Media

Michael Osterman — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 02:14:54 +0000

To some decision makers, “social” media has the somewhat dubious connotation of people telling the world what they had for breakfast or spending a couple of hours each day keeping up with family and friends when they should be working. To others, it carries with it the connotation of excessive corporate risk because employees will use Twitter or Facebook to say something in violation of corporate policy. As an example of just how scared some corporate decision makers can be of social media is the NFL policy that forbids players to tweet 90 minutes before a game commences and through final postgame media obligations. Chad Ochocinco, for example, was fined $25,000 for two tweets and possession of an electronic device during the 2010 pre-season when he played for the Bengals.

My recommendation to those who are fearful of or resistant to the benefits of social media is to spend a day or two at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. I was there on Tuesday and—while I am already sold on the many benefits of social media—came away with a renewed appreciation of how important this technology will be in improving business processes, reducing costs, speeding decision making and improving overall corporate performance. More on what was most impressive in another post.

However, for social media to work there are three important questions that decision makers in any organization need to consider:

First, do you have a corporate culture that will enable social media to add value? A culture that rewards information-hoarding or that encourages employees to build their own little fiefdoms within your corporate walls will simply waste money deploying even the most promising social technologies. Because social media is about, well, being social, organizations in which employees trade information only to get brownie points or to establish their own reputation will simply be wasting their time and money.
Second, will the social media technology that you deploy simply be another thing for employees to do, or will it integrate with existing business processes so that social media becomes a natural extension of these processes? If the former, fuhgeddaboudit—it will simply be a waste of your IT department’s and employees’ time.
Third, do you have a plan for social media? If not, don’t bother—as one keynote speaker put it, “Social without a goal is a whole lot of noise.”

In short, make sure that your corporate culture, integration plan and goals for social media are set before you deploy the technology. If you don’t, you’re probably better off not deploying social media in the first place.

What Is the Real Value of Social Media?

Michael Osterman — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:22:30 +0000

This post is aimed at people who don’t think that social media offers much real business value and that it’s more time-waster than productivity tool. One of my favorite quotes from Jimmy Fallon:

“Did you guys notice this? Twitter was down for two hours on Saturday. It was horrible. I was forced to call random people out of the phonebook and just tell them what I had for lunch.”

And that pretty much sums up how many people view social media—as an avenue for possibly meaningful content, but primarily as a means of sharing information that doesn’t have much business value. However, while social media actually does provide substantial business value, I believe two of its more important benefits in a business context will be (a.) its ability to allow people to communicate useful information in a way that would simply seem silly when delivered in another format, and (b.) to delve into a knowledge base of information that today is more or less kept hidden in people’s brains. Here’s what I mean:

Imagine that you wanted to tell people you were at a particular Starbucks, enroute to another city, attending a conference next week, etc.—information that might be relevant to maybe three people at any given time (who might be at that conference or a block away) in your circle of friends, associates or acquaintances. Now, imagine sending an email with that information to a few thousand people three or four times a day. Worse, how about sending them a fax? It simply wouldn’t happen, and you wouldn’t be able to obtain the benefits of sharing this useful information.

Of course, this is an obvious example of how social media is used today, but it underscores the point that social media represents a new medium, not a replacement for email and other, more traditional forms of communication. Our own research shows that the a much larger proportion of people view email as more important compared to a year ago than view it as less important, indicating that social media really is a supplement to traditional communications, not its substitute.

More important, social media—particularly purpose-built, corporate social media—represents something of a knowledge directory that is generally not available via other systems. While the idea is not new (Linkadoo and others were focused on this years ago), social media enables the sharing of information in ways that are simply impractical via other methods. Let’s say you want to find someone with knowledge of Hadoop-based software who also had worked in healthcare earlier in their career. Or someone who was familiar with the particular marketing manager with whom you’re on the phone right now. Or you need to find just the right restaurant for a customer event in a city with which you’re unfamiliar. The right social media capability can act as that repository and distribution mechanism for the tidbits of knowledge that are perhaps too obscure to put into a database or to codify on a resumé or that would never be assembled across the diverse array of contacts you might have on Twitter or Facebook. In short, social media represents a tool for bringing that kind of information together and to provide real business value as a result.

And, in case you’re wondering, I had an enchilada and an apple for lunch today.

IDC Offers Insights into SMBs, Unified Communication and Collaboration

Stephanie Jordan — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 02:16:33 +0000

Just because a business is small to medium-sized does not mean that the importance of messaging tools is lost to them. According to recent research released last week from International Data Corporation (IDC), forward-looking SMBs are selectively using a range of tools including voice-over-IP (VoIP) and unified messaging. Few, however, says IDC have implemented a comprehensive, end-to-end unified communications (UC) system that can deliver connectivity and collaboration capabilities beyond the sum of its separate parts.

“Many SMB’s business and IT priorities relate to communication and collaboration,” says Justin Jaffe, research manager for Small/Medium-Sized Business and Remote Worker/Home Business research at IDC. “SMBs are interested in both underlying capabilities and specific UC technologies.”

The report authors note that due to the economic downturn underscoring the need for expense management and restrictions on business travel, especially for SMBs, there has been an increase in the popularity of virtual alternatives to in-person meetings. Approximately 45% of medium-sized businesses currently use some type of conferencing technology.

Additionally, the paper states that while SMB ownership of mobile resources—from smartphones to notebooks to media tablets—continues to increase along with interest in supporting remote workers, adoption of unified messaging remains modest. The study found, however, that the percentage of firms citing plans to add it in the next 12 months has increased since the previous IDC survey, indicating a keen interest with more than 30% of small firms and 55% of midsize firms acknowledging plans to add at least one UC component in the next 12 months.

“The real challenge for vendors is to effectively connect the benefits of unified communications to improved business performance,” believes Jaffe. “Show how UC can make a real difference in productivity and efficiency and SMBs will flock to it.”

More information and results can be found in the IDC whitepaper: Unified Communications in U.S. Small and Medium-Sized Business, 2011: Growing Demand for Communication, Collaboration, and Connectivity—But Integration Remains Elusive (IDC #230314).

Should You Have Email-free Days?

Michael Osterman — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:10:44 +0000

Essential has posted an interesting blog entry about Rhondda Cynon Taff (RCT) Homes, the largest landlord in Wales, with regard to their decision to have an email-free day once per week. The goal of this initiative is to help RCT employees understand that email is not always the best way to communicate with others, and that other forms of communications—such as face-to-face meetings or telephone calls—might be more appropriate than relying solely on email. RCT has gone so far as to implement technology that will enable management to determine if their program is effective by monitoring email traffic before and after its email-free days, as well as compliance with the rule on those days. You can read more about the initiative here.

Should there be email free days? While the decision is certainly laudable because it represents management’s desire to improve the sense of community and the quality of communications and interaction within RCT, I believe it’s the wrong approach for two reasons:

Email is simply a tool for communications, content transfer and recordkeeping—and a very useful one at that. While it’s true that some may become too reliant on email and neglect their obligations to interact with other employees, customers and others on a more personal basis, that’s not a good reason to ban email one day per week. Let’s say you were a general contractor and you found that your carpenters were not only nailing the frame of the house together as they should, but were also nailing the hinges to the doors and door jambs instead of screwing them in. Your response could be a hammer-free day once per week to drive home the point that hammers and nails are being used excessively, or you could provide training on a better way to install doors—and electric screwdrivers.
While useful, email should not be the only tool that people use. However, instead of banning email for certain periods, I believe it’s critical for management to undertake a program to implement additional tools to improve communication and collaboration. This might include encouraging more personal interaction, but it should also include deploying social media, collaboration, real time messaging, document management, videoconferencing, Web conferencing and other technologies that will enable employees to have the right tools available to do their work. For example, a social media tool might be the best way to notify employees about a just-published article that is relevant to the corporate policy. A document management tool with good version control capabilities might be the best tool for groups of users to create and modify a document. An instant messaging tool might be the best way to find a subject-matter expert for a time-sensitive customer inquiry. Web conferencing could be the right tool for quick brush-ups when training seasoned employees.

In short, corporate IT and business management needs to implement tools that will enable employees to complete their work in the most efficient way possible while striking the right balance between efficiency, community and camaraderie. Simply banning email one day per week, in my opinion, is the wrong approach because it does not require management to be sufficiently proactive about solving the problems that it perceives email has caused.

What the Stock Market and GroupWise Have in Common

Michael Osterman — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:24:43 +0000

After the collapse of worldwide stock markets like we have seen in late July and early August, people are quick to remind us of the emotional and irrational nature of investing, investors and the market in general. I disagree, believing instead that investors (at least more seasoned ones) are largely unemotional and, for the most part, quite rational.

For example, Sally is an investor and reads the news about the European debt crisis, the US federal deficit, high unemployment numbers, slowing GDP, etc. She know that none of those things will have a short-term negative impact on her investments in Proctor & Gamble, Google, Merck or her stock-oriented mutual funds. However, she believes that Bob and a few million other investors are quite emotional about these developments and will, in knee-jerk fashion, sell a big chunk of their investments and put the money into bonds or gold or simply sit on the sidelines waiting for things to calm down. So, unemotional and rational Sally makes the decision to dump her stocks based on her fear about Bob. Meanwhile, unemotional and rational Bob fears Sally, and so dumps his investments. You end up with a situation in which just about everyone is levelheaded, but their fear makes them all act in a frantic way. The bottom line is that markets go down in a big way as they have recently because investors lack confidence in the future.

In a way, that’s part of the problem that GroupWise is having right now. To be sure, there are competitive incentives, the allure of Microsoft’s roadmap and other reasons that decision makers are considering other platforms and are moving away from GroupWise. But the big problem for Novell before and Attachmate now is that many GroupWise customers hear about their fellow customers leaving the platform in droves (whether it’s real or not) and so decide they need to do the same. In short, many decision makers simply lack confidence in the long-term future of the GroupWise platform and Attachmate’s commitment to it.

Should decision makers in organizations that run GroupWise have a lack of confidence in the platform? Aside from the conventional wisdom (which, in any realm, is heavy on the former and light on the latter) that everyone is leaving GroupWise for greener pastures, there are good reasons for staying with GroupWise:

In a good interview between Gert ter Burg and Novell’s President and General Manager Bob Flynn, Flynn reiterated Attachmate’s long-term commitment to the GroupWise platform.
GroupWise is now available as a hosted service through HostedEM.
GroupWise has a strong partner community offering everything from basic email security through compliance-based archiving.
GroupWise deployments worldwide continue to send email reliably, they run with minimal IT staff requirements, and they cost less to maintain than Exchange.
Plus, migrating to any email platform can be an expensive and disruptive proposition.

The same argument for staying with GroupWise can be used for lots of other email platforms out there from companies like IBM, Alt-N, Ipswitch, Gordano and many, many others.

Am I saying you should never migrate to another email platform? Certainly not. But what I am saying, Bob and Sally, is that if your decision is based more on emotion than on solid business benefits, it might be useful to re-evaluate the whys of that decision before committing to an expensive and time-consuming migration.

MSExchange.org Readers’ Choice Award Goes to Messageware OWA Suite 2010

Stephanie Jordan — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 22:39:55 +0000

Microsoft Exchange resource site, MSExchange.org, announced recently that Messageware OWA Suite 2010 was selected the winner in the OWA (Outlook Web Access) Addon category of the MSExchange.org Readers’ Choice Awards.

“Our Reader’s Choice Awards give visitors to our site the opportunity to vote for the products they view as the very best in their respective category,” explains Sean Buttigieg, MSExchange.org manager. “MSExchange.org users are specialists in their field who encounter various solutions for Exchange Server at the workplace. Their vote serves as a solid peer-to-peer recommendation of the winning product.”

The application allows OWA to function in a similar manner as Microsoft Outlook, giving workers familiar user interface and tools. Messageware OWA Suite adds Outlook-like features not available in native OWA such as Outlook-like addressing, access to personal contact lists, and roaming personal dictionaries. OWA users can also see and print their daily, weekly and monthly calendars and schedules, as well as delegates’ schedules, in multiple layouts.

The product also addresses certain security gaps that can occur when email is accessed from a public kiosk or multi-user PC giving additional Exchange security. Messageware’s Suite lets users view and work with files without leaving confidential information on an unsecured computer. For instance, NavGuard, an application for the Microsoft Exchange OWA server, requires a user to logoff OWA before moving on to another Web site. TimeGuard, another tool, applies timeout protection in a user-friendly way and also enforces a maximum session time, ensuring access is not granted if an employee leaves an email session active. Another app, AttachView, converts attachments to secure HTML pages for over 400 files types.

MSExchange.org conducts regular polls to discover which product is preferred by Exchange administrators in a particular category of third party solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server. The awards draw a huge response per category and are based entirely on the visitors’ votes.

New Version of Alternative to Exchange Available for SMBs: Kerio Connect Has Native Support for Outlook 2011 for Mac Users

Stephanie Jordan — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 09:05:46 +0000

The messaging and collaboration platform that provides email, contacts and calendar management through desktop email clients, Web browsers and smartphones offered by Kerio Technologies, Inc. has been upgraded. The latest release, Kerio Connect 7.2, is intended for SMB organizations with anywhere from 5-500 employees and is an alternative to Microsoft Exchange that supports a number of OS platforms including desktop clients and mobile email options, like iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry.

“Kerio Connect serves small and medium organizations such as local governments, schools, manufacturing companies, and law offices – and they all have diverse needs,” says Dusan Vitek, vice president, worldwide marketing, Kerio Technologies. “We’ve worked very hard to make Connect 7.2 fit for those who value flexibility when choosing a smartphone, desktop email client or operating system that works best for them.”

A key feature in the new release is that Microsoft Outlook 2011 for Mac now works natively with Kerio Connect 7.2, providing email, calendar, contact, and task synchronization with the server. Mac users also have a choice of Microsoft Entourage 2004 and 2008 or Apple Mail and iCal as clients that will work fully with Kerio Connect.

Another feature being introduced is a new version of the CalDAV protocol, which allows for better synchronization between various CalDAV clients such as iCal on the Mac and Calendar on the iPhone.

“Kerio continues to push open standards and promotes interoperability of calendaring systems through CalDAV to break the stranglehold of old school vendors and allow all users to use any calendar application and device they want,” continues Vitek.

According to the company, within the calendar scheduling functionality, Kerio Connect 7.2 users can use advanced features such as creating exceptions (change time and attachments, add attendees, etc.) to recurring events, even between users that have different calendaring applications. In addition, a new auto-accept feature tentatively schedules meeting requests in calendars even when the user is offline. Others can see free and potentially busy timeslots without waiting for the user to accept or decline meetings and adjust accordingly.

Kerio Connect 7.2 is a low cost solution that runs on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and is available as a virtual appliance on the VMware and Parallels platforms. The solution comes with integrated anti-spam, anti-virus, automated backup, and archiving.

Ingres-Talend Partnership to Benefit Data Management Professionals

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 06:26:46 +0000

Redwood City-based Ingres Corporation, provider of open source enterprise-grade database management and inventors of VectoWise, entered into a strategic relationship with Talend, a well-known open source data management company. Talend has certified the connectivity of its open source data management solutions to VectorWise, offering data management professionals out-of-the-box data integration and data quality for business intelligence reporting and analytics.

“Companies of all sizes continue to experience the challenges of getting meaningful information into the hands of their business users for right time decision making. The partnership between Talend and Ingres and the native support for VectorWise will enable IT and data management professionals to seamlessly integrate data from all their enterprise systems and provide their business users with access to this information faster and easier than ever before,” said Fabrice Bonan, COO and co-founder of Talend.

“Talend is solving some of today’s most pressing data management challenges with its open source, enterprise-grade data integration, data quality and master data management solutions and superior customer support. When you combine the benefits of Talend with those that VectorWise offers - including minimal hardware requirements, reduced IT maintenance and up to 70x the performance gains over other relational databases for reporting and analytics, you’ve got a compelling joint solution that significantly reduces data management costs and complexity,” said Fred Gallagher, General Manager of the VectorWise business unit.

The relationship and its support for VectorWise was forged in the hopes of giving IT and data management professionals the ability to integrate data from their disparate enterprise systems. The companies say that the relationship will also enable customers to provide their users with easy access to real-time information much faster.

Talend notes that their data management solutions cover all aspects of the data life cycle through data integration, data quality and master data management. Their products were built around a unified data management platform, with a shared repository, a common development and deployment environment, and a single user experience. The company’s application integration solutions also allow organizations to integrate and expand their systems and applications through the use of service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles.

VectorWise is a record-breaking database that unlocks the power of modern commodity CPUs with a revolutionary database engine that leverages vector-based processing and on-chip memory to provide performance gains of up to 70x over other databases at a tenth the cost.

Avaya Dev and Tech Partner Program Helps Improve Collaboration for SMEs Across Industries

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:12:00 +0000

Avaya, maker of business collaboration systems, software and services, today announced an array of application development partners working to drive new and innovative capabilities for Avaya IP Office, the company’s flagship communications solution for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). These partners are part of Avaya’s new DevConnect program, an initiative to promote the creation of a new generation of solutions complementary to unified communications (UC) by integrating products, services and technologies with Avaya solutions.

Avaya DevConnect provides a wide range of developer-oriented resources, including access to application program interfaces, developer tools, and technical support. The company says its membership has grown by over 16 percent in the last year and that there are over 1,400 Avaya compliance tested solutions, with 30 to 40 new solutions being added each month. For the small business arena, there are more than 300 tested solutions from DevConnect members across all Avaya SME communications platforms.

Many Avaya DevConnect partners develop solutions for the SME market, in an effort to help those businesses using Avaya IP Office and Business Communications Manager compete at the same level as large enterprises. These partners develop capabilities tested for interoperability with Avaya SME products, and also help enhance them. Applications that have recently been introduced for Avaya IP Office from partners include:

Presence Tailored to the Small Business: AdvaTel has developed InTouch, a second generation UC application that brings together internal presence and federated presence to all of one’s external contacts via Yahoo!, Skype, MSN Lync and Outlook calendar. The solution, which does not require a server, lets users move between voice telephony, instant messaging (IM), SMS and email with just one click.
Hospitality Applications Enhance Guest Service for Hotels: The DuVoice DV2000 is a messaging system and Property Management System (PMS) interface for Avaya IP Office that is suited for hotels. DV2000 capabilities include everything from voicemail and wake-up call management to enabling employees to handle mini-bar inventories via phone. DuVoice also provides 911 features for Avaya IP Office that alert the front desk when emergency calls are made and pinpoint the location of the room requiring help.
Resource Software International Ltd. (RSI) provides call accounting software—Shadow CMS Enterprise—which performs telecom billing functions and interfaces with a hotel’s Property Management System (PMS). The company interoperates with Avaya IP Office, providing a fully-scalable UC management solution that lets administrators forecast, monitor and allocate communications management expenses. Hotel-centric features include the ability for cleaning staff to enter the status of a room’s condition using a phone, wake up calls, emergency notification and features for deploying messages, menus or advertisements to phone sets.
SIP Capabilities Bring New Value to SMEs: Optimum Voice SIP Trunking from Cablevision’s Optimum Business was designed to deliver high-quality, reliable voice service to SMBs through a converged voice and data network that can scale as needed for up to 100 employees. This capability lets businesses use all of Avaya IP Office’s state-of-the-art features, while it improves the quality and reliability of voice services, simplifies configuration, reduces equipment costs, and provides significant room for scalability at about half the cost of traditional T1 solutions.
Automated Applications Simplify Processes: Computer Instruments offers e-IVR, which contains the components that allow companies, schools, churches and others to reach out to constituents automatically to remind them of appointments, inform them of school cancellations, and alert them of emergencies. These messages may be sent via phone, email or text by seamlessly integrating with Avaya IP Office. Inbound functions allow callers to find out about homework that is due, renew a prescription, or pay their utility bill—via speech recognition or phone prompts.
The combination of Computer Instruments’ e-IVR vertical team and Avaya IP Office helps many organizations simplify how people get information out. The company enhances Avaya IP Office with self-service applications for weather alerts, hospital lab results, or last minute searches for substitute teachers. In education, an absentee application lets teachers use a phone to mark students present, and if someone is absent, a message goes to parents via email, phone or text message.

Salesforce Unveils Next Gen of Cloud-based Service Contact Centers

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:25:54 +0000

At the CloudForce 2011 conference in NYC, Salesforce.com, unveiled their Service Cloud 3,what the company is calling the next generation of social contact centers. Service Cloud 3 was designed to let organizations engage with customers on any social community, including Twitter, Facebook and other social networks via Radian6. The intent is for companies to be able to scale their operations quickly and easily to manage a high volume of service issues, including the millions of conversations that are happening every day on social media sites. Leveraging built-in social analytics, agents can prioritize interactions across any channel and tailor support strategies to meet changing sentiments on the social web.

“The explosion of social technologies has changed the game for customer service,” said Alex Dayon, executive vice president of CRM, salesforce.com. “Facebook and Twitter taught consumers to expect social customer service in real time. Service Cloud 3 is the next-generation social contact center that lets companies prioritize and manage a high volume of customer issues over any social channel.”

“We decided to make social media an important component of our overall KLM customer service strategy after handling stranded customers via Facebook during the volcanic ash cloud that struck Europe in May, 2010. Leveraging the Service Cloud 3 is going to enable us to recognize patterns, handle cases via social media throughout different teams, and discover commercial opportunities. We believe this will allow us to pro-actively build a strong and loyal relationship with our customers and fans and enhance our service to them,” said Martijn van der Zee, vice president, E-Commerce of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

Service Cloud 3 is meant to enable organizations to monitor and engage instantly with customers across the social web directly within the product. Companies will be able to instantly monitor and capture conversations about their brands on Facebook and Twitter, and use Radian6 for Salesforce to monitor blogs, forums and discussion groups. Agents will be able to engage directly with customers using any device, including the iPad 2, to deliver customer service in real time.

Salesforce for Facebook: With more than 500 million members, Facebook is the fastest-growing social network in the world. Companies will be able to manage interactions with their fans in real time by converting Facebook wall posts and comments into cases within Service Cloud 3.
Salesforce for Twitter: More than 110 million tweets are posted to Twitter every day. Agents can now join conversations with customers on Twitter by creating cases and sharing knowledge—all inside Service Cloud 3.
Radian6 for Salesforce: This new AppExchange app will let agents work entirely within Service Cloud 3, engaging with customers via Twitter, Facebook and other social channels including blogs and video and photo sharing sites.

Fully automated case creation will mean that social media content is automatically added to Service Cloud 3 based on the customizable Radian6 workflow rules engine.

Managing High-Volume Social Interactions and Respond in Real Time

The proliferation of social technologies has forced a massive shift in the customer service industry and the sheer volume of social media conversations places incredible demands on today’s contact centers. An unanswered, public complaint can cause a company to lose decades of hard-earned brand equity overnight. A seemingly innocuous afternoon tweet can become an Internet sensation by the next morning if left unaddressed. Providing an optimized agent experience, Service Cloud 3 allows companies quickly wade through millions of public comments and cut through the social media noise.

With the next-generation Service Cloud Console, agents have an optimized, tabbed screen for managing all social media and case activities with fewer clicks and less scrolling. Chatter for Cases lets agents follow important cases in real time and collaborate as a team to resolve issues faster. Teams can collaborate with Salesforce Chatter around knowledge articles in real time for increased accuracy and article relevance. Using Chatter, agents can contribute comments, see input from internal experts, and stay up to date on the articles they follow.

Prioritizing Interactions Across Any Channel with Real-Time Social Analytics

With Service Cloud 3, companies can prioritize social interactions across any channel, such as phone, e-mail, chat and social communities, according to built-in social analytics. Drawing on these real-time insights, agents will be able to determine the best channel to respond to customers and tailor support strategies to effectively address changing sentiments on the social Web. Social Analytics: Companies will be able to monitor and manage customer interactions across every social channel with real-time reports and customizable dashboards that give complete visibility of the metrics that impact business. Social channel reports, customer conversation analyses, and social dashboards will help agents identify trends and alert managers of issues that are impacting the business.

Service Cloud 3 will give companies the ability to resolve a higher volume of customer issues with less agent time using live chat. Live Agent can be embedded into the company’s web site for instant chat functionality—and instant answers for customers. Live Agent will be fully integrated with Service Cloud 3 and Salesforce Knowledge.

Saleforce notest that more than 15,000 companies are delivering social, mobile and open customer service. According to a recent third party survey, companies who have deployed the Service Cloud have seen a 41% increase in agent productivity, a 34% increase in first call resolution, a 35% increase in customer satisfaction, and 85% indicated they offered improved customer service and support.

Inbox Love – A New Conference on Email

Ben Gross — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:59:01 +0000

Inbox Love, a new conference on email, will be held on February 25th at the Microsoft Conference Center in Mountain View, California. The speakers and sessions look great. 500 Startups’ (Dave McClure) is producing the conference along with OtherInbox (Joshua Baer) and AwayFind (Jared Goralnick).

I attended and spoke at the pre-event meeting for Inbox Love in December. The attendees and speakers were excellent and it looks like the main event will be even better. I wrote about it in Inbox Love and Recent Innovation in Email.

If you had asked me a few years ago if I thought that in 2011 there would be a new email conference and a whole host of fantastic new email products and services, I would have said no. I’m happy to say that I would have been wrong. Registration for Inbox Love is now open.

Sessions at Inbox Love include:

The Implicit Social Graph
Inbox Infatuation: Will They Still Love Your Product in the Morning?
The Psychology of Behavioral Change: Proven results from 1 million+ emails that delight, engage, and influence users
WHEW! This Email Smells Bad…Has It Expired?
If They Mated: Email, Voice, SMS & The Next Generation of Communication
The Love Connection: Platforms & The Future of Consumer Email
The Love Connection: Platforms & The Future of Business Email
The Integration of Email & Social
Privacy vs. Personality: What’s in an Email Address?
NextGen Email Apps

The list of Speakers at Inbox Love includes:

Joshua Baer - Founder & CEO, OtherInbox
Victoria Bellotti - Principal Scientist & Manager at PARC
Bill Boebel - VP of Strategy, Rackspace
Jeff Bonforte - CEO, Xobni
Manlio Carrelli - CMO, Intermedia
Amy Ellis - Head of Integrations & Partnerships, MailChimp
Miriam Geller - Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Mail
Jared Goralnick - Founder & CEO, AwayFind.com
Auren Hoffman - CEO of Rapleaf
Fletcher Jones - Product Lead, AOL Mail
Pierre Khawand - Founder, People-OnTheGo
Jeff Lawson - Co-Founder & CEO, Twilio
Dan Martell - Co-founder, Flowtown
Dave McClure - Founding Partner, 500 Startups
Paul McDonald - Product Lead, Gmail
Scott McMullan - Google Apps Partner Lead for Google Enterprise
Josh Merchant - Co-Founder & CTO, Lymbix, Inc.
Alex Moore - CEO, Baydin
John Robb - Senior Director — Zimbra products & marketing, VMware
Isaac Saldana - Co-founder & CEO, SendGrid
Tom Sather - Email Deliverability Consultant, Return Path
Mark Schmulen - General Manager, Social Media, Constant Contact, Inc.
Ramit Sethi - Author, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”
Jonathan B. Spira - CEO & Chief Analyst, Basex
Rahul Vohra - Co-founder & CEO, Rapportive

Some Thoughts on Lotusphere

Michael Osterman — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:53:33 +0000

Lotusphere, IBM’s annual conference for all things messaging and collaboration, was held last week in Orlando. It was my fifth Lotusphere—always a good and informative conference held in a place that gets a bit more sun than our home base of Seattle. Here is my two cents on this year’s conference:

I did not see attendance figures, but the show seemed busier and better attended than last year. The keynotes were very well attended, particularly the Monday morning session that began with Kevin Spacey’s appearance, and the exhibit floor was packed at times.
The focus of the conference was on social business—using social media as a means of growing business, enabling decision making and making business more efficient. I really liked the focus of beginning the communication and collaboration discussion with personal interaction instead of technology, in large part because it aligns with the way that I think technology should be used in the context of how people interact.
People tend to exhibit enormous levels of inertia—they are resistant to change and tend to do pretty much what they want in the workplace regardless of the technologies or policies that are in place. Using that tendency and adapting the technology around the way that people are going to work anyway is more effective than implementing technology and then trying to mold people around technology or work processes. That seemed to be one of the foci of the event, and one that resonated with me quite well.
Also interesting was a rather frank admission from Jon Iwata, IBM’s senior VP for marketing and communications, that IBM’s senior management did not initially embrace the notion of social business. When it was first introduced, the naysayers outnumbered the proponents, citing the risks of lawsuits, losing intellectual property, the loss of key personnel to poaching by competing firms, etc. It took quite a bit of effort to achieve the acceptance of social business by key decision makers.
There was quite a bit of emphasis on the cloud as you might expect with IBM’s push of LotusLive and other cloud-based offerings, including LotusLive Symphony—a direct competitor to both Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. The online version of Symphony, expected to launch later this year, will be an interesting adjunct to the growing base of cloud offerings from IBM.
Ed Brill, Lotus’ director of messaging and collaboration, noted that Notes/Domino is holding its own in the market—not growing its share relative to other offerings, but not losing share either.
Lots of emphasis on smartphones and tablets—the new RIM PlayBook was featured prominently. IBM is developing for a variety of platforms, but seems to be putting most of its efforts into the Android, Apple and RIM smartphone and tablet offerings. On a side note, I saw more iPads than at any conference I have been to recently. This was the first conference at which I used an iPad almost exclusively—extremely impressed with its battery life despite significant use.

In short, Lotusphere was a very useful conference and, as always, is on my short-list of events to attend each year.

What to Focus on in 2011: Web Security, Outbound Controls, Social Media Security, and Next Generation Threats

Stephanie Jordan — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:06:16 +0000

Although economists and other experts believe we are seeing light at the end of the recession tunnel, and IDC analysts expect IT spending to resume in 2011, we nevertheless still need to be very careful with our resources this year. If we are to be wise in the outlook for 2011, what should we be focusing on? This is the question that was put to several messaging insiders and the responses are as varied as the messaging field itself. How best to prepare for the road just up ahead? While it depends on a number of variables and there is no one-size-fits-all answer, presented here are a few thoughts on what to expect or what to think about this year in messaging. (Also see the related story “What to Focus on in 2011: The Road Ahead” for more views from messaging insiders.)

Social Media and Web Security

When Facebook emerged several years ago it was a common strategy to simply block the site. Today, the site is mainstream, and while it may or may not be right for marketing your company, you can bet a lot of your employees are on it. “One of the most popular questions from businesses around Web security is how to control Facebook specifically,” observes Paul Judge, chief research officer for Barracuda Networks, Inc. Judge notes that the types of questions are evolving. “A year ago people would ask: ‘Can you block Facebook?’ Now, we get more complex questions, such as: ‘Can you allow Facebook, but block chat? Can you allow Facebook, but block access to FarmVille during business hours?’ Just this week a customer asked about allowing access to fan pages, but not personal people pages.”

Judge goes on to say that responding to administrators and management that ask for more complete ways to control Facebook and how to create specific policies around Facebook that allow people to use it in limited ways has resulted in changes in their product line. “We have been adding a lot of functionality in the last six months,” he says noting that others in the Web security space have been doing the same. “We have seen Web security go from ‘control my users’ back five or six years ago attempting to keep people from going to porn sites and sports sites. Then it morphed to threat protection, AJAX protection, JavaScript protection and now we are once again seeing requests about control, but it is around the social networks.”

Getting granular with Facebook is probably the better approach, over trying to shut down the application. With the popularity of Facebook, many companies are using the application as part of their marketing efforts and as such people within the organization need access. “It has been all too easy for security folks to take a rigid stance on a lot of things that are blocked at the corporate level and just denied,” says Tim Helming, director of product management for WatchGuard Technologies, Inc. “However, it is getting to be where ‘no’ isn’t always the right answer. With something like Facebook, for example, most companies don’t want their employees wasting a lot of time at work just looking up Facebook and sending photos to their friends.” Helming says companies need to be able to control who can use it or during what hours or even getting more granular than that, doing things like controlling who can post to Facebook or use the games versus using the more basic functions. “That is going to become very important to organizations. These apps that were never designed for businesses are going to become a new reality, we are never going to go back to complete allow or deny.”

While the marketing advantages some companies have achieved with social media are very real, so are the possible threats. “We have spent a fair amount of time tracking malicious activity on social networks—especially Facebook and Twitter,” says Judge. “In the last year to year and a half, we have spent time analyzing behavior on Twitter network and also looking at how many accounts are legitimate and how attackers are evolving in how they try to use the network. We have recently done similar studies on Facebook.” Barracuda plans to announce the findings of these studies in February when it releases its 2010 Security Report.

Search Engine Malware

Another place to watch for next generation malware this year is search engines. According to Judge, Barracuda Labs is trying to quantify how much search engine malware is happening, and in particular study the types of topics that attackers are targeting most. Why target malware towards Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others? Barracuda Labs 2010 Midyear Security Report states that search volumes have reached new highs with 88 billion per month on Google sites, 24 billion per month on Twitter, 9 billion per month on Yahoo! sites and 4 billion per month on Microsoft sites. As the report notes, that is a lot of eyeballs. Judge reports everyday hundreds of pieces of malware are found by simply searching for popular terms and that search engine ranking and optimization contribute to the effectiveness for attackers.

Archiving

When money is tight even the things you might like to implement may not happen. One of the observations towards the end of last year, as the recession started to loosen its hold, and as we move into this year is a spike in the demand for archiving. “We saw a rapid increase in the number of customers that were purchasing message archiving solutions,” reports Steven Pao, vice president of product management with Barracuda Networks, Inc. “It’s been a largely predictable growing business for us, but we saw an initiation on the part of end customers beyond what we were pushing as a vendor. When we asked what was driving this, we’re told by customers that they had been deferring it.” Pao also suspects that enough time has elapsed where “poor email administrators have had to manually go through and hunt for messages” in response to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and other similar mandates for document management and retrieval.

Mobile Devices

All experts agree that the prevalence and popularity of mobile devices will continue this year. The recommendation is to ensure that the device is as secure as if the user were in the office. “We have a number of customers coming to us asking how do I protect the iPads that I just launched to my marketing group, or my BlackBerry devices, so we have spent our time as it relates to mobile to get to the same level of security that you would have at your desk,” says Judge.

Securing devices is essential, agrees Julian Lovelock, senior director of product marketing for ActivIdentity Corporation that has primarily government, enterprise, healthcare, banking and high technology customers. “Wind the clock back 10 years, all those emails that the average government employee got came to their desktop. Today a good proportion of them, from the President down, are now coming in through BlackBerry, so securing mobile devices, as communication devices with all the same areas around encryption and signing is an area that we work heavily on.

The device itself is growing into a security tool in its own right. Companies are finding the use of the mobile phone as a replacement to a credential you might otherwise carry—to get into the building, or to securely access the network when out of the office, etc. “I’m still communicating through a desktop whether it’s a Skype session, email or IM chat, but rather than use my smartcard to secure that communication, the credentials are managed through my mobile device, and I am using my mobile device to actually secure the communication from the desktop,” explains Lovelock.

In many ways the mobile device is perhaps more secure from loss than a token. “If we lose a token, we might not notice for a couple of days, if we lose our phone, we notice that within 20 minutes,” states Lovelock “Because it’s a device of more importance to you, you notice it quicker.” Lovelock also points out that a phone is a device that is always connected. “I can remotely deactivate a phone in terms of it being used for security purposes, but I cannot remotely deactivate a token or a smartcard or other authentication methods. This is another reason why the mobile phone is actually more secure.”

Multi-Platforms

In companies of all sizes IT organizations are struggling with the sheer variety of devices coming into the workplace. This year the expectation is that the diversity will continue, especially as employees bring in more media tablets. “iPad is making serious inroads into businesses,” states Helming. “For so many years tablets have been trying to push their way into organizations and up until lately, we have said ‘no thanks’ but now everybody wanted an iPad for Christmas and they are popping up everywhere.”

Helming goes on to say that all Apple products, not just the iPads but OS X in general have been widely adopted in businesses. “I would urge IT folks to take Apple security seriously. Apple OS has the most vulnerability, according to some of the security research I have seen. There has been this assumption—whether it has been tacit or explicit—that Apple is more secure than Windows or that it was less prone to attack. Boy, that is just not the case right now. It is so important to have good anti-virus and intrusion prevention at the gateway and also on the device itself. Taking Apple security seriously is paramount.” He also sees Android “growing like mad.”

One of the benefits of the multiple platform mobile device trend might be that malware writers may not show as much interest in targeting a specific maker. “We will see some big headlines that will get a lot of airplay,” predicts Lovelock. “In reality, with the proliferation of mobile platforms, we will not see malware on mobile phones because as a fraudster, there is no one single point to compromise that can get 90 percent of the users. Fraudsters will go to where the easiest targets are. If I can write a virus that will compromise 90 percent of the machines, I am going to focus on that. The cost/benefit analysis for investing time in writing a virus to compromise Android doesn’t look that appealing, because it only gets a relatively small proportion of the market. Yes, we will see some compromises. Yes, they will be high-profile because they make good headlines, but whether they actually represent substantial percent of the fraud in 2011, I doubt it.”

That’s not to say security is not needed. With so many new device types, not to mention traditional hardware in use today, security is still a major concern. What is the best way to secure a variety of platforms? “One thing that IT can do is ensure that the perimeter is equipped with the latest and greatest generations of security appliances and software,” says Helming. “Also, make sure access points within the organization are under IT control and you sweep for rogue access points. Be sure that those iPads and iPhones are associating to access points that IT controls and runs. Given the reality of so many non-corporate issued devices floating around, those are a few common sense kind of measures that IT can take to help get a handle on security.”

If there is a very limited budget for messaging security, Judge recommends that resources be put towards Web security and making sure that the laptops or mobile devices that leave the office are secured. “We are still seeing glaring holes,” he explains. “Many organizations have something in place for email, and many organizations have some appliance-based solution at the gateway for Web security, but as soon as someone picks up their laptop and goes across the street to Starbucks or goes to a conference; they are out there unprotected. They come back and bring an infection back into the office. So many of the infections we see happen like this. With a limited budget, I’d at least consider what you’re doing about it.”

The Cloud

The popularity of the cloud for business is expected to continue as more companies move to cloud-based email infrastructures. “There are tremendous business benefits to be gained. The cloud is not so much powerful because it is all Internet enabled and all the technical aspects of it, but rather it has proven to be one of the easiest delivery mechanisms on which to do outsourcing and to gain the economies of scale associated with that,” believes Pao. “Email happens to be an application that doesn’t really differ that much as you go from business to business.”

The cloud is also appealing because it isn’t necessarily an all or nothing proposition. Many offer hybrid solutions that allow the use of the cloud, as well as keeping some parts on premises. “Inbound filtering can be done in the cloud, outbound is still best done on-premises,” says Pao. “Just because you decide you want to move your email off premise or outsource the management of email, it doesn’t mean you don’t continue to want granular control of your email policy and it doesn’t mean that you don’t still want to continue to provide the same level of security protection that you always did.”

User Behavior Changing

Perhaps one of the most important pointers for messaging in 2011 is not so much about technology as with the people using it. Lovelock thinks a trend worth watching is the active engagement of the user in security-related decisions. “We have already seen some of that in what Facebook has been forced to do,” he says. “Users have to think about their profiles online, and how much they want to share with people and define a security profile that says this group of people can access this much information and that group of people can access that information. This is a trend that is likely to continue.”

This concept of users being in control is also seen in the way the various devices are coming into the workplace. Users are deciding what mobile phone they want to use or iPad or apps. This might be a carry over to how we as consumers have increasingly become in control of how we want to communicate and using which channel (email, Facebook, SMS, etc.). In a recent whitepaper, “Preparing for Message Convergence: Prescriptive Advice for the CMO and Senior Management,” Dave Lewis, chief marketing officer for Message Systems explores this shift. “Technology is changing the way we communicate. It is changing the nature of how we communicate. We are not only emailing, we use SMS, IM, social and all those forms of communication are being accessed simultaneously. We are on the move constantly; we are not tethered to our desks anymore. The point is, we communicate through multiple channels and we often shift from one channel to the next.”

The user being in control plays a significant part in Lewis’ argument. As an example, he points to Facebook’s introduction of the unified inbox as one more step in this direction. “It’s not just a social inbox, it gives Facebook members an element of control that they have not had in the past to block the messages that they do not want to receive, and block the messengers they do not want to hear from. That form of blocking is making the consumer the final arbiter of what reaches them and that changes the nature of the game, relative to how enterprises interact with ISPs and telcos. If the consumer is the final arbiter of what they receive, they are making the decision not just on email but also across channels. The risk of not meeting the customers’ expectations is that you could lose your connections to the customer.”

Lewis doesn’t think many companies are acting on the preferences, needs and wants of customers, nor are they communicating via the right channel. “Our view is there are significant risks to those enterprises that do not rise to the occasion. Those that do, there are some real advantages.”

Asked if this is only a business-to-consumer issue, Lewis replies, “I don’t think it matters a whole lot. If you think about how technology is affecting us, the line isn’t between B2B or B2C. It is not really between customers and employees. We are all part of this sea change that is taking place. It’s not just a customer issue; it is an employee issue too. As you look forward, the types of employees that you will be taking into the workforce are using communications this way. These changes and the way that we are communicating are touching us all. It is applies to everyone.”