Facebook‘s business communication platform Workplace has grown by one million users since February, bringing its subscriber total up to three million, the company announced at its annual Workplace-focused Flow conference.

The company’s quickly-expanding user base reflects that Workplace is learning how to compete with other business collaboration software providers, including Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Workplace is also rolling out updates that better target frontline employees (those who are often in the field and without email addresses), gauge worker sentiment, and make video collaboration easier, proving that the company is learning to cater to and anticipate the needs of businesses.

Workplace has been segmented off from its corporate parent, so Facebook’s public relations, data, and regulatory challenges won’t necessarily transfer over. The platform also gives companies full control, doesn’t take corporate data, and ticks certification boxes for security and data management.

There are currently three different tiers of Workplace software available: a free subscription, an advanced subscription for $4 per person per month, and an enterprise plan for $8 per person per month. A $1.50 plan for frontline workers is forthcoming.

At Flow, the Workplace team detailed a handful of upgrades to its software, including a Workplace app for Facebook’s Portal smart video screen, through which Workplace users can make audio and video calls using Portal’s smart camera to make collaboration more natural.

Updates also include an AI and machine learning tool that will facilitate automatic captioning on Workplace videos and generate transcripts.

Workplace sets itself apart from other collaboration tools with its employee engagement and experience software, Insights, which can gauge sentiment through functions such as ‘like’ buttons and emojis, much like a social media platform. Based on this, Workplace can provide analytics on how workers feel and help improve employee engagement, which can boost productivity, lower rates of employee turnover, and improve customer service.

Frontline workers in particular stand to benefit from corporate collaboration via Workplace. These employees make up 80% of all staff, according to head of Americas at Workplace Christine Trodella, but are typically left out of company discourse due to their lack of an email address. Workplace, which is accessible even without email, opens a route for those employees to join the conversation and connect without training costs.

“The C suite needs to connect everyone, not just knowledge workers,” said Facebook vice president and head of Workplace, Karandeep Anand.

Anand sees augmented and virtual reality tools becoming a part of Workplace in the future, but the company’s immediate next steps are to expand its customer success teams and enterprise sales infrastructure. Workplace also aims to continue upgrading its video conferencing tools to provide the most accessible, connective services possible and solidify its place in the crowded landscape of business collaboration software.

It’s no secret that the workplace is evolving, with advancing technology and our changing expectations enabling new ways of working that were simply impossible before the advent of Wi-Fi, file sharing and online collaboration. As meetings form such a large part of many people’s jobs, it was inevitable that the way we organise and participate in them would transform, too.

Indeed, these shifting paradigms – particularly agile working – have placed new demands on meetings, as colleagues who no longer occupy the same building rely on them more and more as a way of catching up and sharing important updates. This means that, more than ever, it is vital to get the best out of our meetings, which – let’s face it – are vulnerable to disorganisation, and can easily be a waste of time rather than a productive exercise.

Let’s take a look at the best practices and tools that will ensure your meetings live up to their potential.

Planning and organisation

One key element of executing a productive meeting is the same as it ever was: organisation. Knowing why you’re having the meeting, what you need to cover and what the outcomes are will leave you in very good stead.

You undoubtedly know the basics, but just because they’re simple doesn’t mean they aren’t vital. Before you even begin the meeting, make sure you’ve set and shared an agenda to define your objectives and keep the meeting on track. Assign someone to take minutes as a record of what was discussed and what ideas and plans were generated. The minutes will also help inform action points which can be given out at the end of the meeting so that the relevant people can follow-up on anything discussed. Sticking to the allotted time will help keep people focused. These simple processes remain as important and effective as ever, and are the best place to start to boost productivity.

Your guest list should also be scrutinised. We’ve all attended meetings where we’ve found ourselves staring into space and wondering why we were invited at all. Limiting your invitations to people who have something relevant to input will avoid wasting your colleagues’ time as well as creating smaller and more focused meetings (Google, for instance, suggests avoiding any meetings of more than 10 people). Consider which colleagues will be better served by being updated on the meeting’s outcomes rather than attending.

On a related note, assure your colleagues that, if they genuinely believe that they have nothing to contribute, they can decline their invitation without penalty. That will make sure that everyone in the room is engaged and ready to contribute, rather than sitting in silence and wishing they were getting on with something else.

Environment

The advent of Wi-Fi and agile working practices has meant that meetings can technically be held anywhere – but that doesn’t mean they always should. Although it’s very useful to be able to call in from a cafe or park bench if you have to, optimised meeting spaces are still the best place to communicate with your team.

The setup of you conference room can have a major effect on productivity by creating a space free from distractions and – as conference calling and remote working become more prevalent – one in which you can communicate clearly with colleagues who are unable to attend in person. Consider soundproofing rooms in which ambient noise from air conditioning, passing traffic or noisy colleagues can be heard filtering in from outside. Bad acoustics can render audio communication incomprehensible, so take steps to limit reverberation with carpets, panelling and soft furnishings.

A quality audio-visual system is naturally vital for conference calls. It is worth employing the assistance of an AV expert in setting up microphones and speakers in the best way to minimise feedback and ensure that communication is as clear as possible. Think about the positioning of cameras and screens so that everyone can easily see each other. Weak and unreliable lines of communication can rapidly eat into your time and overshadow the matters that the meeting was called to discuss.

Meeting management tools can be used to perform data analysis that can also help you refine your meeting room usage and conference spaces, and plan better strategies in the future.

Technology

Advances in technology have enabled many of the changes to how we communicate and conduct meetings, and the proper use of the tools available can greatly boost productivity.

Selecting the right collaborative platform, such as the Intel Unite® solution, can help significantly streamline processes, keeping internal and remote team members on the same page, as well as serving as a tool to crunch the aforementioned meeting data. Intel Unite is an open platform that supports plugins for popular collaboration tools such as Skype for Business, Zoom and Cisco Webex, as well as in-room controls, whiteboarding and other systems, so that you can select and seamlessly combine the best tools for the job under one roof. The classic Intel Unite® solution requires a hub computer based on an Intel® Core™ vPro® processor in every meeting space, an on-premises PIN server and the Intel Unite app on users’ devices – there is also the new Intel Unite® Cloud Service that offers the option for you to access a cloud-hosted PIN service instead of requiring an on-premises server.

It’s vital to ensure that your employees are properly equipped with the most up-to-date hardware and software so that they can take full advantage of these systems and log into remote meetings with minimum fuss. High-spec cameras, microphones and speakers will allow them to see, hear and be heard, while new laptops with fresh batteries will prevent them from losing power and getting cut off halfway through your meeting.

With technology continuing to evolve at a rate of knots, it pays to keep abreast of the newest developments. Artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things are widely expected to further streamline meeting processes and offer new insights that will increase productivity in ways we are only beginning to understand. IoT promises increased connectivity to everything from projectors to climate control to make meeting management easier than ever. AI is projected to develop virtual assistants that can help with admin like managing calendars and scheduling meetings, as well as source relevant data to answer questions as they are raised and generate new ideas. By keeping up to speed on the latest cutting-edge tech developments, you’ll always be in a position to make informed decisions when it comes to adopting the best tools for the job.

Discover how the Intel Unite platform can help your business here

The world of work is changing. Businesses are becoming increasingly decentralised, with flexible and agile working practices on the rise and developments in technology revolutionising our jobs. Inevitably, this has had a huge impact on one key office ritual: the meeting.

So how do you make sure a modern-day meeting runs smoothly and efficiently? From technical difficulties to fears over security, there are plenty of collaboration challenges brought about by the evolution of the workplace. Ensuring your tech is helping, not hindering, discussions is essential to making the most of your time. And with technology now being specifically designed to make meetings more efficient and effective, you’re missing out by sticking to outdated, clunky systems.

The rise of agile working

One of the biggest business shifts in the last few years is the move towards more agile ways of working. Motivating employees with flexible working options has been proven to boost productivity while encouraging remote working has tangible financial benefits, from lower travel costs to reduced overheads.

Inevitably, the traditional meeting setup has moved with the times too. It’s no good allowing staff the flexibility to work from home if they have to physically come into the office for meetings. And busy employees are far more likely to be engaged and productive in a session if they don’t feel like their time is being wasted with mandatory office hours and pointless presenteeism.

It’s not just a case of adapting meeting arrangements to meet employee expectations, there are real business benefits too. Gone are the days where everyone has to be sitting in the same room to have a productive discussion. In fact, sometimes the most productive meetings bring together employees virtually from all over the world – some of whom may never have met in person. Once restricted to who you could physically get together, technology is making it far easier to get the right people together in one virtual space.

Getting the most out of the room

Bringing everyone together – remote and onsite – is a great step, but lack of productivity is a universal meeting gripe. When employees are taking an hour out of their busy days to meet, that time needs to be used efficiently to produce meaningful results. Basic tech tools have enabled more flexible meeting models, but for many businesses, the existing tech is more of a hindrance than an asset.

Slow, complicated equipment can take time to set up, different cables may be required to connect each attendee’s portable device and some devices may not be supported at all. Content sharing can also prove a challenge – when everyone’s using a different screen, time is easily wasted making sure everyone has access and is looking at the right part of the presentation or document. Plus there’s the chance that this flow of information inside and outside the office may not be secure – and with cybercrime on the rise and hefty fines for data breaches, this is a big worry for any business.

This is where businesses can benefit from making the most of the latest tech solutions. Designed specifically with collaboration in mind, tools like the Intel Unite® solution resolve common issues by using an open platform to bring applications, document sharing and presentations into one hub in each meeting room. From this hub, there are multiple means of joining the meeting and the option for up to four presenters to switch between their screens seamlessly.

The system is designed to work with the OS and applications organisations already have, supporting plugins for tools like Skype for Business and IoT equipment such as smart in-room control systems. It is also built to work seamlessly across all common devices, so there’s no need to invest in new uniform hardware. All you need are an Intel® Core™ vPro® processor, managed PIN service, and the app on whichever devices you choose to use.

To tackle the issue of security, the Intel Unite solution is encrypted with an SSL connection between the hub and client, ensuring content is only shared with approved participants. The Intel Unite hub is PIN protected and security codes are regularly refreshed.

With the mechanics of connecting easily and safely with your remote workers ironed out, you can turn your focus to the built-in features designed for enhanced collaboration, whether the meeting involves external participants or not. The system is touch-enabled so users can make the most of the latest touchscreen technologies and there is also an annotation feature, allowing the presenter to use their screen like a whiteboard. Unlike a whiteboard, this will be visible to anyone accessing the shared screen, allowing presenters to draw participants’ attention to precise areas of documents or add shared notes as they speak.

For businesses needing extra flexibility, Intel also offers the Intel Unite® Cloud Service. With this, you get all of the features of the original service, but with no need to manage an on-premise PIN server – everything is managed through an admin portal. As with the on-premise option, you’ll need an Intel Core vPro processor and the app on each device.

AI and the meeting room of the future

So where can this go next? Artificial Intelligence is evolving from an intriguing future technology into an office reality. While you’re not going to find a robot running your meeting any time soon, AI assistance technologies are on the rise in the workplace. In meetings, they can take out the monotonous admin tasks and free up time to focus on creative, meaningful discussion.

One ever-advancing AI technology is the voice assistant. Many of us are already kitted out with AI voice assistants in our personal lives, and the principle is largely the same when transferred to a meeting room environment. With voice control, you can run the meeting without the distraction of having to manually scroll through or share content on screen.

With the increasing sophistication of these applications, handy tools are becoming vital ‘co-workers’. AI technology is already able to perform basic admin tasks and offer voice control, and it is well on the way to being able to take minutes, distil action points, check schedules to set up follow up meetings and pull up data and information as participants speak.

With the right technology, you can not only solve your meeting headaches but get so much more out of your discussions. Plus, if you invest in the right flexible solutions, you’ll be poised to make the most of new cutting-edge technology as it’s released.

Discover how the Intel Unite platform can help your business here

We live in an increasingly interconnected world, and the main driving force behind this is digital technology. Most of the top ten companies by market capitalisation focus on the digital space, and it’s now nearly impossible to do business without taking your corporation through some form of digital transformation. The advantages available are manifold, and how you can now work with colleagues and other companies remotely is one of the benefits that can be the most valuable of all.

There’s no denying that collaborating face-to-face still has significant value. But it can also have a major cost in both travel expense and time. The more you can do remotely, the less you need to meet up with collaborators to develop new projects and keep existing ones on track. However, effective digital collaboration tools can also enable business practices that weren’t economically viable before, such as working closely with colleagues in foreign countries. It’s also now possible to collaborate with those closer at hand where the logistics of needing to meet physically made this inefficient, and this can have a considerable benefit for productivity.

For effective collaboration, you need a powerful, flexible system that all your employees can rely on to deliver the features they demand. The Intel Unite® solution is the perfect basis for a cohesive but expandable and inclusive provision – it’s a wireless in-meeting room collaboration solution designed to improve meeting efficiency by enabling fast meeting start-ups.

The Intel Unite solution includes three components – at the centre is a hub computer based on an Intel® Core™ vPro® processor in every meeting room, a separate PIN server and the Intel Unite® app on the client devices. Now with the Intel Unite® Cloud Service the customers have the option of having the PIN server on-premises or hosted in the Cloud. This still relies on a local Intel Core vPro processor-based hub, but PIN services are provided via the cloud, meaning that your IT department doesn’t need to spend time and resources managing this function. Your company also won’t need to spend so much on infrastructure and administration.

Whether using an internal PIN server or the Cloud Service, Intel Unite is an open platform that supports plugins for popular collaboration tools including Skype for Business, Zoom and Cisco Webex video-conferencing solutions. There are plugins for in-room controls from Logitech and whiteboarding from Bluescape, FlatFrog and Nureva. Intel also offers its own plugins for functions such as analytics of room usage and service status, which can be used to keep track of how your employees are using Intel Unite to collaborate. There’s even an SDK so that companies can develop their own third-party plugins to further extend functionality.

Of course, an open and expandable platform also potentially creates greater security risk. But the Intel vPro platform based hub computer has security built in at the hardware level. All content shared on the platform is encrypted via 256-bit SSL, with access codes that refresh regularly for added security and the capability to lock a session for sensitive meetings.

The open extensibility and reliable security come together through a user experience that is seamless and transparent. It’s easy for users to join a conference and share content, whilst presenters can be switched over with a click. Each connected display can support up to four displays, facilitating document collaboration and comparison. Many legacy meeting platforms waste participant time whilst they try to get joining, sharing and switching presenter to work properly. Intel Unite takes all the stress out of these often-frustrating aspects of virtual collaboration.

Whether using your own in-house PIN server or the Cloud Service, the same Intel Unite app gives your local, remote and guest users their interface to the system. The touch-enabled interface makes starting and joining meetings a cinch on any device. There are clients for Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome, iOS, and Android, with the latter two available via their respective app stores.

There is a range of options for the hub at the centre of an Intel Unite setup. Small form factors such as the Intel NUC 7 offer a cost-effective entry point. The ViewSonic ViewBoard and Prowise provide integrated Intel Unite support through display, whilst all-in-one PCs (like the Dell OptiPlex 7460) and small form factor systems from Dell, HP, Fujitsu and ASUS are certified for Intel Unite.

Intel Unite lets you turn your meeting and conference rooms into interactive collaboration spaces. The end result can have a significant impact on your business profitability. According to research by Forrester Consulting commissioned by Intel, investing in Intel Unite provided a 470% return on investment overall for the companies assessed, and they paid back the initial capital outlay in less than six months. In fact, this is a clear case of IT services becoming a revenue generator rather than a pure cost. Forrester calculated a net present value from the investment of $612,000 across the companies surveyed, compared to existing legacy solutions.

These returns came from a variety of sources. The lion’s share was the result of Intel Unite’s ease of use. The quick connection and rapid switching between presenters reduced meeting downtime by up to 15%. But meetings were also 5% more productive, saving 2.25 minutes on average per meeting. This may not sound like a lot, but if your employees have multiple meetings a day, it adds up. The final saving was from the use of a generic IT platform, which didn’t require the installation of any extra cabling or adapters.

Forrester also cites less quantifiable benefits. These include how telemetry data can be used to optimise workspace usage. If you know when and how your employees are using your collaboration spaces, you can reduce or increase them as required. The flexibility of Intel Unite can also be used creatively for additional functions when not in use for collaboration, such as displaying company metrics on a conference room whiteboard. The easily deployed security that meets existing requirements also makes for simple integration into a company’s architecture.

Online collaboration in all its forms has been one of the key features of internet connectivity. But businesses can benefit the most if they deploy the right technology – technology that makes the process easy, reliable, flexible and secure. Intel Unite provides all these features and more, allowing your company to collaborate more effectively, improving employee productivity.

Discover how the Intel Unite platform can help your business here

SAP has announced several improvements to its business technology platform for enterprises to allow customers to exploit business insights and gain value from data points.

The company has released services pertaining to data warehousing, analytics and cloud deployment through its business technology platform, offering enterprise customers a single platform from which to deploy SAP technology.

The SAP Cloud Services suite, set to get a raft of improvements, includes SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud.

“Our business technology platform brings SAP HANA and analytics closer together with SAP Cloud Platform so users can make smarter, faster and more-confident business decisions,” said SAP CTO Juergen Mueller.

“SAP ensures high levels of openness and flexibility including out-of-the-box integration, modularity and ease of extension in cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment models. With this open and flexible approach, SAP is committed to helping our customers achieve superior business outcomes.”

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud serves as a platform that ties in all aspects of a business’ data together before translating the dataset into insights relevant to its specific field. The feature will be released towards the end of the year, with approximately 2,000 customers currently registered for the beta programme.

The tool goes beyond conventional modelling to encompass aspects like data governance and creating a single data landscape from several sources such as cloud and on-premise from within a company, as well as externally.

“Thanks to the data virtualization capabilities, we can connect all our data without creating redundancies,” said Andreas Foerger, manager of the analytics and reporting team at SAP customer Randstad Germany.

“The semantic layer that SAP Data Warehouse Cloud comes with helps us sync all our data from different sources in a way that makes perfect sense to the business.”

SAP HANA Cloud, meanwhile, aims to bring customers an interface that offers virtual interactive access with a scalable query engine. This service, alongside SAP Analytics Cloud, which comprises tools that improve internal business planning, will also be released towards the end of the year.

Oracle plans to hire some 2,000 additional workers as part of further expansions of its cloud computing services, according to reports.

The cloud giant is said to be rolling out computing services in more locations around the world as it seeks to better compete with AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Jobs will be added in Oracle’s software development hubs in Seattle, San Francisco and India, along with positions being made available at new data centres, according to Don Johnson, executive vice president of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure unit (OCI) – an area of its business that was subjected to job cuts at the beginning of the year.

Oracle also plans to open 20 more cloud regions by the end of the year, which Johnson said it was “driving very aggressively”.

“We are very rapidly converting what’s a complex footprint to be a very simple footprint: Everything everywhere runs on our generation two cloud infrastructure,” Johnson told Reuters.

IT Pro has approached Oracle for more details, but it is believed the company will expand on its current 16 cloud regions, with new builds in emerging markets such as Chile, Japan, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates and reportedly in other Asian countries and Europe.

Just seven months ago, in March, the company announced job cuts of more than 350 so it could better focus on its cloud business. This was despite having already trimmed its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) business.

As always, the plan was to stay as close as possible to AWS which is the largest provider of cloud storage infrastructure, according to Gartner. At the time, it meant Oracle had to make cut-backs in other areas of its business, specifically the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) unit and its IaaS business.

Johnson, who spent seven years in Amazon’s cloud unit, joined Oracle in 2015 and has helped build out its second generation of cloud infrastructure after a difficult first attempt.

Some 352 jobs disappeared on 21 May, including 255 at its headquarters in Redwood City, California and 97 jobs from its Santa Clara campus.

“As our cloud business grows, we will continually balance our resources and restructure our development group to help ensure we have the right people delivering the best cloud products to our customers around the world,” an Oracle spokesperson said to Bloomberg.

End user apprehension towards moving to the cloud is dissipating, according to an IDG Connect survey. Of those polled, half felt more confident in migrating workloads off-premise, a trend that can be attested to stronger security measures on both the vendor’s side and the end user’s side.

Since its inception, cloud computing has forged paths towards efficiency and enhanced customer experiences, enabling the digital transformation necessary to ensure businesses remain competitive. Storing data and applications in the cloud though, brought to the surface a host of security issues that have dissuaded many IT decision makers from transitioning.

Cloud providers do offer security layers that end users can take advantage of to shore up vulnerabilities, yet despite this, a lack of understanding and expertise within IT departments has led to many organisations struggling to deploy the security measures, which are often  complex and require specific knowledge. The result is vulnerable data and applications. Paired with severe breaches hitting the headlines regularly throughout 2018 and 2019, it is no surprise that many companies were hesitant to store their applications and data off-premise.

In response to end users’ fears, vendors are implementing stricter security controls which can restrict access to data centres, ensuring only those who need to access are granted access. This eliminates internal vulnerabilities by preventing the wrong employees stumbling upon information that wasn’t meant for their eyes.

Stronger security measures are ensuring companies can reap the benefits of hybrid-cloud provisioning by optimising their application and service delivery. Find out more in this whitepaper.

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Microsoft is taking a leap further: Integrating its Azure compute infrastructure with customised hardware components with embedded protection against unauthorised access, also reducing complexity by providing a one-pane solution. Additional security layers are provided by partner-companies feeding into the original vendor’s cloud offering. In the Microsoft example, Red Hat, the open source software specialist, is protecting workloads at the virtualisation and application application levels.

Vendors are also taking it upon themselves to test their security features regularly. Penetration testing has developed out of the ethical hacking concept, allowing vendors to realise vulnerabilities in their software before the chinks can be targeted by malicious hackers.

IDG’s survey reveals that these measures are feeding back to customers. In addition to the 50% reporting confidence in transitioning to the cloud, 58% indicated that they trust public cloud providers’ data security platforms and protocols rather than their own IT departments, while 54% implied they weren’t worried about losing control over application and infrastructure provisioning and management as a result of cloud migration projects.

For vendors, existing customers are happy and retained, and new customers are attracted. And with security remaining a top priority for software companies, cloud computing may continue it’s surge in popularity for years to come.