Archive for November, 2010

Nov 26 0 comments
Collaboration Software, Email Overload, Online Collaboration

Make Way Fmail, Gmail. All hail Hmail!

Most of us get entangled in the frenzy of the moment, the immediate bickering in our environment.

But the discerning ones amongst us can take a step back, and see clarity in the chaos, a method in the madness, a sublime logic in a torrent of haphazard information, if you will.

What will you make of the mountain of coverage surrounding the recent launch of Fmail (Facebook Messages)? “This spells the death of email!” some say, “Fmail will kill Gmail!” others pitch in, “Apocalypse!!” What are you supposed to make of it all??

Look closely…

Email, Fmail, Gmail……

Can you see it yet? The pattern?

Yes! Evolution, development, progress are what you see! And the logical next step is the series is, you got it, Hmail!

The Evolution of Email

HyperOffice Mail or Hmail brings the next level of what businesses want from email – Email deeply integrated with all the essential productivity tools in the organization. Pundits for years have waited on the death of email (like vultures hovering over a weak animal?). But rather than growing weak with age, becoming passe’, email keeps going from strength to strength.

Yet, the weaknesses of email are widely recognized as well. Email overload is one of the biggest bottlenecks in information worker productivity today. Some of us feel like we spent our entire work lives sifting through our inbox, which fills out faster than we can ever hope to empty it. We are all Sisyphuses trapped for eternity in our inboxes.

Email is evidently ill suited for some purposes – document collaboration, schedule coordination, task tracking and group discussions. Better “collaboration tools” have been invented for a few years now, to best handle each of the above areas – document management, shared calendars, project management and discussion forums respectively. No wonder collaboration tools have become almost universally adopted across businesses.

But such creatures of habit we are, almost Sirenlike, email uses false promises of simplicity to tempt us to use it “just this once”, to delegate a task, share a document, or coordinate a meeting. The torrent of mails that follow has only us to bear!

But what if the other collaboration tools were integrated in the same system as email? What if using the right tool for the right purpose was as simple as using email, since they are in the same system anyway? What if with a single click, you could push information from email into the right system – a task, a document?

That is the promise of Hmail. Collaboration software tools integrated with email, in a single seamless web based system.

Read the following article for detailed benefits of integrated email and collaboration software.

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Nov 22 0 comments
Cloud Computing, Collaboration Software, Online Collaboration

The Wisdom in Web 3.0

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – T.S. Elliot


Technological innovation isn’t simply accelerating; the rate at which it’s accelerating is itself increasing. On a daily basis, the geometric rise of computational power makes possible new advances that were incomprehensible a decade before. As you hurtle ever-faster towards the future, you’d be forgiven for keeping your head down, heeding only every fifth technology promising to “change the way we [blank] forever.” - Windows 7, Unicode 6.0, HTML5, 4G, USB 3.0, H264, and a cyborg partridge in a pear tree. Right?

The Early Years

Web 1.0’s overly optimistic monetization of the Internet imploded, but thankfully left us with Amazon.com (whew) and eBay. Web 2.0 has shown even the most curmudgeonly Luddite that it’s not him/her against the Internet—our friendly Facebook pages are nodes on a global grid of goodwill (and a goldmine of marketing data) and LOL cats can make the upload-friendly H264 codec mentioned above sound warm and fuzzy. Web 1.0 was brave, rugged and individualistic; 2.0 inclusive, accessible and egalitarian.

Move over for Web 3.0 - The Semantic Web

Not that Web 2.0 can be entirely spoken of in the past tense—but make no mistake, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, is here. And while Web 2.0 brought people together, its successor is bringing information together. You’ll hear more and more about semantics over the next few years, and many of you readers might already grasp the technical details at a deeper level bouncy castle for sale canada than does this humble blogger. Regardless, humanity has generated massive stores of data during the short life of the still-adolescent internet (which we’re on a familiar basis with today, and therefore needn’t capitalize any longer), and has learned that more information doesn’t necessarily equal more knowledge. Commercials for Microsoft’s Bing search engine (watch) emphasize that a search isn’t simply (or even mainly) about finding matches for the words typed into the box; it’s about gathering the knowledge being sought.

Semantics is about embedding meaning in our information so that a given word, phrase, sentence, etc. displayed is part of a granule of contextual, standards-driven metadata tags. Rather than a human searching for an article and manually linking it to or syndicating it alongside another page, an article’s words, sentences, paragraphs, even images and videos can be, with increasing automaticity, associated with precisely relevant content on other parts of the web. A given word can have several denotative definitions, connotative meanings, and/or slang usages, and any one of those definitions could take on slightly or drastically different meanings in the jargon of myriad professions, fields, social units, geographical areas, etc. But weight that given word with contextual tags, and the intended meaning emerges—ready for association, translation, categorization, ad infinitum. It’s not totally absurd to think of Semantics as empowering data to “friend” other data, and only fairly absurd to conceptualize Web 3.0 as a great big e-Harmony service for information.inflatable game

The Semantic Web and Collaboration

You might not have friended your co-workers, but your goals and objectives should be aligned and your tools should allow you to collaborate for better, faster results. It shouldn’t matter if your co-workers are in the cubicle next to you or in Madagascar. Collaboration isn’t talking about working together. It isn’t discussing what will be done between the current meeting and the next. It’s about actual making immediate micro-decisions within a team environment; the assembling in real time of a project by living, breathing knowledge bases. Getting up and walking across the office to discuss a topic with a colleague is still a nice thing to do; but we have the technology to automate inquiries and responses, tasks and tickets, change notifications and event reminders. Isn’t getting up and walking across the office to chat with a colleague so much better after you’ve cleared from your plates the morning’s dozen action items?

My roundabout point is that we, like the contextualized data of Web 3.0, are granules of information. Maybe your AOL-Time Warner stock didn’t do so well; maybe Twitter gives you migraines—but the Semantic Web is much more than an evolution of e-commerce and hashtags. It’s a rapidly expanding and interweaving net of data connecting partners in collaboration based on the information they seek and have; increasingly immersing us in knowledge; integrating knowledge bases with each other to achieve—with increasingly precise tools in the hands of increasingly knowledgeable people—wisdom.

The way we work is changing, and the rate of that change is increasing. But don’t worry; just think how great you’ll be at your job with a shiny, new-fangled wisdom base…

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Nov 17 0 comments
Collaboration Software, Online Collaboration

Facebook Mail, Gmail & the future of communication & collaboration software

facebook email killerYes, it is that time of the year again. When everyone predicts the death of email.

As you know, Facebook announced it’s email feature yesterday, or should i say, emailsey feature, because it is not quite email. What is rather unglamorously called Facebook Messages, brings multiple formats of information - email, IM, phone text messages, in a single email style Inbox, and allows you to choose to recieve and send messages in any of these formats. There are no subject lines or CC fields, and all communications from the same person are wrapped in a mega-thread. At an invite only beta stage at this point, FaceBook will allow all users to request an @facebook address once this goes live.

Has email finally found its nemesis?

Facebook Messages give email a “social” spin and are in line with the “ongoing” style of conversations in Facebook. Although Mark Zuckberg emphasized that the new feature is “not an email killer”, this certainly is an effort to piggyback email’s popularity and wean users away from traditional email. Unlike the erstwhile Google Wave, which sought to replace email in epic fashion, Facebook Messages enter in friendly garb through the backdoor, with the covert intention of nudging email out. The Social Newtork would have us believe that it is all the frustration of being dumped by a girl, but clearly, a master strategist’s mind is at work, because this will give Facebook access to a large chunk of email users not yet on Facebook.

But as email has proved time and again, it is not going away. Since Facebook borrows from email’s structure, yet adds to it, there might be a gradual shifting of what people expect from email. You can be sure it will have some amount of success, because of the ready made user base of Facebook.

Fmail and Gmail

As expected, everyone is also assessing the impact of “Fmail” on Gmail, the new age poster boy of consumer email (not quite reflected by its market share). One can’t help but feel a little for Google. Before it could even fully bask in the glory of pushing out Microsoft and Yahoo out of their position of pre eminence, a young whipper snapper in the form of FaceBook has come along nipping at its heels.

Clearly, Facebook is not content with a position of being a mere social network. It seeks to be the internet destination of choice, or the internet ecosystem of choice, if you will, just as Google search has been for close to a decade. It is already well on its way, when it became the #1 most visited site in the US earlier this year.

If Fmail catches on, Gmail is clearly in trouble, in-spite of being the superior email solution, since users want access to all their information at a single place, and clearly social networking is today’s hub. When they spend a majority of their time on Facebook, they will have less of an incentive to leave and go to Gmail for mail, if they can have it right in Facebook.

Is this indicative of the future of business Communication and Collaboration?

Although there are no near term implications of Fmail in businesses, as Facebook is a pure consumer play company for now, one can speculate at its long term impact.

Fmail attempts to break down the barriers between different text based information, and keep everyone in the loop irrespective of device, and preferred mode of communication. This “convergence” and “device independence” is indeed the way of the future, and we ourselves have attempted to achieve this with HyperOffice for the SMB market.

However, for a Facebook/Facebook Messages type solution to work, the structure of businesses itself has to evolve. The very formality that Fmail seeks to get rid of is an important aspect of working in organizations. The stakes of improper communication are low in informal groups, but in businesses, where people communicate across levels of hierarchy, and across organizational boundaries, the stakes are high. The blocked, formal, approach of business email is ideal for this sort of communication. Imagine sending emails without a subject line!

There is of course the necessity for on-going emergent communication, as well as for real time communication and collaboration. Business communication and collaboration software like IM, forums, and document collaboration serve this need. But merging them in all in a unified format may lead to a new kind of chaos.

The sporadic, ongoing, real-time, minimalistic communication that Facebook encourages might be suitable for informal groups, but work groups need to create voluminous and structured information (documents).

Undoubtedly, as the Facebook generation ages, and enters the workforce more and more, they will bring along with them expectations in terms of working styles and tools. However, this will be a gradual and long drawn out process, as structure of organizations evolves to accommodate these new tools. Tools in the meantime, will continue to become more and more social, but only with much caution, when business benefits have clearly been established.

Tools which strike the right balance between socialness and structure will be the winners.

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Nov 04 3 comments
Collaboration Software, Online Collaboration

6 Ways to Increase Collaboration Software Adoption

The Prelude – grand talk of the strategic potential of a new IT technology, the manifold ROI, the sky rocketing productivity, the competitive advantage.

The Act – 5% of the employees use the software after 3 months of implementation.

It goes without saying. The bare minimum necessary condition for a software initiative to succeed is for end users to use the software. According to a 2008 study by the Sand Hill Group and Neochange, the most critical factor for software success is effective user adoption.

Unfortunately, this is also the hardest to achieve. A simple fact about human behavior is, people are resistant to change (Obama may disagree). There is no greater inertia than that of comfortable everyday habits. Every software implementation plan has to surpass this negative inertia to succeed.

This article lists some simple yet practical strategies you may employ for your new collaboration software initiative to be embraced by the largest number of employees in your organization.

1) The Software – The usability of the software itself is important is garnering adoption. The UI should be intuitive, easy to use and fast. The success of web 2.0 in large part is due to the point and click and user-friendly nature of the software. Employees these days are used to pleasing and fun software like FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube in their roles as consumers, and bring similar expectations to the workplace. As noted by Dion Hinchcliffe in his article, in case of complex enterprise software like SharePoint “inherent sophistication can also mean slow adoption and low engagement by users”.

Usability is one of the cornerstones of our HyperOffice Collaboration Suite, especially considering our customer base of SMBs, which do not have much in house IT expertise. Change

The software is important, but is certainly not enough to ensure wide adoption. It is to a large extent a human problem. Employees are by default going to be skeptical, and unwilling to step out of comfortable modes of action. If you are so used to setting up meetings through email, (notwithstanding the torrent of emails to schedule, reschedule that follow), going to the new company calendar is going to feel like a burden. These are humans that have to be convinced, and won over.

2) Undertake a Marketing Campaign – While launching software across the company, the owner of the initiative should assume the attitude of a marketer. Conduct training sessions, seminars, and circulate materials across the organization, telling everyone how the new tool will help them solve problems they face everyday, and how it will help them work better. The emphasis should be on their pain points, rather than solution features.

3) Reinforce Good Behavior – The more I think about it, the more sense Kurt Lewin’s Model of Change that I learnt in college makes. It is not enough to implement change, but the change has to be repeatedly reinforced, till it becomes the new state of equilibrium.

Reward good behavior. The simple act of applauding an employee who assigns a new activity using the task management system sends everyone a message.

4) Practice what you Preach – No one is going to follow the Law, if the Lawmakers are frequently found infringing rules. Who is going to take a manager seriously, who circulates a policy document by email announcing the new document management system!? The top management are looked up to as idols in an organization. Strict self-discipline is necessary in their part to set an example.

5) Use Fun to your Advantage! – As educators down the ages have learnt, fun and play are great tools for education. Use fun as an excuse to engage users with the software. Non-work related activities around the tool could reap benefits in the long term. How about setting up a poll within your tool to choose the venue for your next company outing? A discussion forum for informal chitter-chatter between employees around their interests? Or something evil, a flash game where players get points for shooting down a competitor’s logo.

6) Deprive Users of Choice – There is some essential information and tool that every employee needs to access during their work day. Make your collaboration tool the single point of access for these tools and information – company events updated only on the shared calendar; essential policy documents, order forms, contract templates available only in shared documents; reimbursement requests only channeled through the expenses application in the company portal and so on. That way, you will sneak the software into the users’ daily routine.

Is there a technique you learnt in your experience? Please share it with us and others!