Collaboration is regarded as a working practice whereby people work together to a common purpose to achieve a desired business benefit.
Collaboration enables individuals to work together to achieve a defined and common business purpose. Generally, it exists in two forms:
Synchronous, where everyone interacts in real time, as in online meetings, through instant messaging, or via Skype, and
Asynchronous, where the interaction can be time-shifted, as when uploading documents or annotations to shared workspaces, or making contributions to a wiki.
Therefore, this category is full of advice and the best technology to use for ‘collab’ projects. Check out some of the Step by Step blogs or learn with our eBooks, How To videos and Webinars.
I ran across an interesting article by Rachel Miller summarizing research gathered by her company, All Things IC, and simply-communicate.com, a community for internal communications professionals, that asked an important question for those of us in the broader information management space: What does your organization call internal social media within your company?”
A few months back I was given access to a Widows Azure environment through PFE. The test was to see if I could build a viable virtual environment to fully power a SharePoint 2013/2010 instance. When I say fully I mean 1-domain controller w/AD, 1-SQL Server, 1-2013 App Server, 1-2010 App Server.
I have seen the future and it’s SharePoint Online 2013. I am not totally biased because I love Office 365. A lot has changed since the BPOS days. SharePoint Online 2007 was a start for Microsoft in the Enterprise Cloud business. The platform was descent and many customers were able to create Intranet portals. There were some issue such as no search over multiple site collections and no My Sites. The next step was Office 365 and SharePoint Online 2010. The gap with the big on premise brother became even smaller. A couple years later we get another update: SharePoint Online 2013 and the gap is almost gone. The new online version comes with a set of features that enables external collaboration with customers or partners.
SharePoint managers are under more pressure than ever before to deliver on the promise of dynamic video collaboration. Learn how to deliver live video streaming, embed video excerpts on any page, link videos to other relevant content and add video to employee social communications – all within SharePoint.
The unveiling of our 2011 keynote speakers continues as we release two more fantastic and inspiring videos direct from Berlin, offering valuable insights and visions from our keynote presenters.
Thousands of diversified organizations in vertical markets including technology, pharmaceutical, retail, finance, education and federal agencies all have the same problem: how can you possibly manage the information explosion – and risk – inherent within SharePoint’s collaborative tools? SharePoint offers tremendously powerful social computing tools, but administrators remain rightfully worried about the holes that such capabilities open.
Fortune Global 250 power and automation technologies group ABB is currently rolling out a multi-year, global collaboration program. Designed to improve the company’s competitive advantage, customer satisfaction, and improve work efficiency, this initiative is intended to encourage and improve employee interaction and information sharing among the company’s 124,000 employees. To bring everyone on board, ABB is using harmon.ie for SharePoint to integrate people’s social and collaboration spaces into the email client, where people are accustomed to spending their workday.
You may have deployed SharePoint and had a complaint from a mobile user, by default the experience isn’t great. A legacy design decision was made for SharePoint 2010’s that creates a poor default mobile smart phone experience. In my mind if they would have kept the capability for mobile as an alternative and left the default experience alone things would be much better. Instead, by default, an iPad or iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Android, and even Blackberry… yes essentially all your rich mobile phones have a degraded user experience. SharePoint 2010 inherited the mobile interface that was built in SharePoint 2007, and it was improved slightly for publishing sites in SharePoint 2010, and a whole SDK was built for mobile. Was it a waste?
Demand for Cloud, Mobile and SharePoint Growing
A survey of CIOs and IT directors shows that the sharp increase in cloud and mobile platforms is changing how people collaborate in the workplace, and presenting new challenges to corporate IT departments.
Although desktop email remains the preferred collaboration tool for 71% of workers, 87% of survey respondents generally and 92% of organizations with 3,000 or more employees have deployed SharePoint. While 53% indicated that SharePoint is helping their employees collaborate with colleagues, clients and suppliers, many respondents also expressed concerns about it. For example, 64% of respondents in the financial sector reported that SharePoint requires a high level of customization. SharePoint’s limited reporting and analytics features were another sticking point for senior IT management, as was its poor user interface.
