The most interesting takeaway from a Wired article on Box’s move to include collaborative editing in its file sharing service:
“…what’s happening now is that the applications are becoming the primary portals to our data, and the notion of the file is fading away. As Levie indicates, you never browse a PC-like file system on your phone. You access your data through applications, and so often, that data resides not on your local device, but on a cloud service somewhere across the net.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHp6Q5RMMR8
In this segment of Cloud Corner, former CEO of Qoncert, and new GreenPages-LogicsOne employee, Lou Rossi answers questions around how unified communications fits into the new IT paradigm moving forward.
We’ll be hosting a free webinar on 8/22: How to Securely Enable BYOD with VMware’s Next Gen EUC Platform. Register Now!
Inforama has released the latest version of its Cloud Document Production and Automation Platform which includes a number of new features and enhancements. Inforama is delivered as a SaaS application that allows users to manage their projects in the cloud and switch seamlessly between public cloud, private cloud and on-premise solutions. With Inforama, users can manage their projects and templates in the browser-based studio and generate documents via the Inforama API.
Version 3.0 includes a number of new features including the ability to produce Open Office letters from templates while inserting custom data fields, text blocks and images. Also included are enhancements to document packs where output formats can be specified and background files can be applied to generated documents. A 30 day free trial is available at http://www.inforama.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLYCeloSXMk
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In this video, GreenPages Solutions Architect Ralph Kindred talks about the latest industry trends around unified communications and video collaboration and the positive impact it has on businesses today.
To learn more about how GreenPages can help your organization with unified communications & collaboration, fill out this form
FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company, and Bluewolf, the global business consulting firm “born in the cloud,” today announced a strategic global partnership. Together, Bluewolf and FinancialForce.com will help companies access and improve visibility into data that speeds bookings-to-billing cycles and enriches customer engagement.
Bluewolf and FinancialForce.com will provide cloud-based applications and services to joint customers that eliminate the borders between the front and back office, and consolidate information across disparate customer relationship management (CRM), back office and supply chain applications. This will allow companies to organize as teams around their customers, instead of internal departmental structures.
“Rather than invest in the maintenance of rigid, on-premises systems, the cloud frees us to focus on customizations and innovations that meet customer needs and create a first-mover advantage in the market,” said Jonathan Adlerstein, CIO of Plymouth Rock Energy. “Working with Bluewolf and FinancialForce.com, we have integrated our sales, customer care, marketing and billing information in the cloud, enabling employees at every level to own any customer interaction.”
Two areas of focus for the Bluewolf and FinancialForce.com partnership will be media billing and general accounting processes.
“Billing reconciliation is a problem for online media companies as most back office systems used to manage ad billing are unequipped to handle changes in orders and invoices. This can result in long billing cycles, unacceptable Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and in some cases, lost revenues,” said Jeremy Roche, president and CEO of FinancialForce.com. “FinancialForce.com’sMedia and Accounting offerings coupled with Bluewolf’s expertise in the industry will make us the go-to team for customers seeking a proven end-to-end solution.”
As partners, FinancialForce.com and Bluewolf will provide customized and scalable cloud-based billing solutions that reduce the time it takes organizations to send invoices, resulting in a faster turnaround on receivables.
Guest Post by Eric Burniche of AvePoint.
File Shares can be a blessing and a curse when it comes to storing large quantities of data for business use. Yes, you enable a large number of users to access the data as if it were on their local machines, without actually having the data stored where disc space may be at a premium. But native management capabilities of file shares aren’t always ideal, so a third-party solution is necessary to fully optimize your file shares.
The primary benefit of file shares is simple, quick, and easy access to large volumes of data for large volumes of users at marginal infrastructure cost. With little or no training required, users can easily access file shares that consist of individual documents to large files and rich media like videos, audio and other formats than can range up to gigabytes (GB) in size.
The Simple Truth: Organizations are quickly realizing native file share limitations, including notoriously poor content management capabilities for search, permissions, metadata, and remote access. As a result, many have turned to Microsoft SharePoint to manage and collaborate on their most business-critical information and valued data.
The Problem: Organizations have various types of unstructured content on their file servers, which is data characterized as non-relational data– e.g. Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) — that when uploaded into SharePoint, are stored by default with the platform’s Microsoft SQL Server database. Once file share content is uploaded, the overall time taken to remove unstructured content from a structured database is inefficient, resulting in poor performance for SharePoint end-users and exponential storage cost increases for IT administrators.
Difficulty often arises when determining what content is business critical and should be integrated with SharePoint as compared to what content should be left alone in file shares, decommissioned, or archived according to business need. File types and sizes also create difficulty when integrating file share content with SharePoint because SharePoint itself blocks content types like Microsoft Access project files, .exe, .msi, .chm help files, and file sizes exceeding 2 GB violate SharePoint software boundaries and limitations.
The Main Questions: How can my organization utilize SharePoint to retire our legacy file share networks while avoiding migration projects and performance issues? How can my organization utilize SharePoint’s full content management functionality if my business-critical assets are blocked file types or larger than Microsoft’s 2 GB support contracts?
One Solution: Enter DocAve File Share Navigator 3.0 from AvePoint. DocAve File Share Navigator 3.0 enables organizations to increase file share activity and take full advantage of SharePoint’s content management capabilities, all while avoiding costs and disruptions associated with migration plans.
With DocAve File Share Navigator, organizations can:
The native capabilities of file shares are unlikely to improve, but fortunately there are third-party solutions such as DocAve File Share Navigator that can help turn your file share from a headache to an asset, allowing you to continue to collaborate with confidence.
Eric Burniche is a Product Marketing Manager at AvePoint.
ZOO Digital, a provider of workflow management software and services for creative media production, has launched its new Cloud-based platform, ZOOcore.
ZOOcore is a workflow and collaboration platform for creative and production businesses designed exclusively for the Cloud, enabling tailor-made workflow management systems to be configured and deployed very quickly at a fraction of the cost of bespoke software development. It is a centralized system to organize and control production information and brings significant efficiencies to project tracking, online review and approval which enable a reduction in email traffic and spreadsheet management.
ZOO has already deployed ZOOcore systems for a number of clients in diverse business areas including a major film studio for review and approval of artwork, a global TV network for co-ordination of advertising campaigns, a major US book publisher for preparation of eBooks, a post production facility for management of DVD, Blu-ray and digital product creation, a marketing agency for campaign management, and an international printer for job processing.
Such existing clients report that the use of the product eliminates many administrative overheads and enables robust and reliable collaboration, giving shorter time to market and lower operating costs. It is fully configurable and deployments of the ZOOcore Enterprise Edition can be tailor-made to support each client’s unique workflows. For smaller workgroups, ZOOcore is available in simplified pre-configured versions.
ZOO will be showcasing ZOOcore at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas between 8 – 11 April 2013at booth N-CP2.
Gordon Doran , President of ZOO, commented: “We have been delighted with the feedback from early adopters of ZOOcore, who are already reporting significantly reduced administrative overheads in creative and production workflows. We believe that this new platform will enable us to license and deploy workflow systems more quickly and widely than before, delivering highly cost-effective solutions to our clients.”
LiquidPlanner has released new features to their priority-based, predictive project management solution to improve team performance and collaboration. Checklists can now be added to any task in LiquidPlanner, so that all individual steps can easily be listed and crossed off as they’re completed. Checklist items can be reordered by dragging and dropping, copied between tasks, or assigned to other team members who need to review or approve the work.
“Checklists are the ultimate Swiss Army Knife for project teams,” said Liz Pearce, LiquidPlanner CEO. “They can be used for quality control, new hire training, tracking individual to-do lists, managing repeatable processes, and much more. By capturing the steps that go into tasks in simple checklists, teams can simplify their project plans and—at the same time—better ensure that the work is being done right.”
The new release also includes a complete overhaul of key collaboration features. Comments are now threaded (like Facebook) instead of streamed in date order (like Twitter), so conversations can be followed more easily. Conversation threads can be filtered by client, project, or team. Customers can also choose which types of activities or events (such as adding documents or marking items done) trigger email notification, which drastically improves the signal-to -noise ratio of email alerts.
While many PPM solutions brush off simple task management in favor of more robust scheduling and resource management features, LiquidPlanner is committed to serving the needs of both individual contributors and managers with its dynamic solution.
“To help companies be successful, Social Task Management vendors must boost employee productivity with simple task tracking and allow for more comprehensive resource planning,” said Alan Lepofsky, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. “By using predictive scheduling and time tracking in combination with lightweight checklists, teams get the best of both worlds.”
OX AppSuite, with roots in OpenOffice and LibreOffice, is out with a browser-based, cloud-enabled application that seeks to beat Google Apps and improve upon OpenOffice. The video explains more:
A Guest Post by Joel Parkinson, a writer for projectman
In the world of information technology, the “cloud” has paved the way for a new method for managing things on the Internet. In a cloud environment, computing “takes place” on the Worldwide Web, and it takes the place of the software that you use on your desktop. Cloud computing is also hosted on the Web, on a server installed in a “data center”, which is usually staffed and managed by people who are experts at technology management. What does the cloud mean to project management? Here’s an overview of what cloud project management is.
What Cloud Computing Means to Project Managers
Project management is defined as the “set” of activities and processes that are done to execute, and complete, a task that’s outsourced by one party to another. Project management ensures the high probability of success of a project, through the efficient use and management of resources. So what does cloud computing mean to project managers? According to PM veterans, cloud computing offers a greener and more sustainable project management environment, lowers cost, eliminates the use of unnecessary software and hardware, improves scalability, and eases the process of information-sharing between team managers and staff, customers and executive management.
Benefits of Cloud Project Management
In a project management environment, the cloud speeds up the whole process. As cloud services are available anytime, any day, the cloud can help a project management team hasten the process of execution, and provides improved results and outputs too. With the cloud, project managers and staff can also easily monitor, and act without delays as information is delivered on a real-time basis. Let’s look at the other benefits of the cloud for project managers.
Improved Resource Management
The cloud’s centralized nature also allows for the improved utilization, allocation and release of resources, with status updates and real-time information provided to help optimize utilization. The cloud also helps maintain the cost of resource use, whether its machine, capital or human resource.
Enhanced Integration Management
With the cloud, different processes and methods are integrated, and combined to create a collaborative approach for performing projects. The use of cloud-based software can also aid in the mapping and monitoring of different processes, to improve overall project management efficiency.
Overall, the cloud platform reduces the gridlocks and smoothens the project management process, and makes the whole project team productive and efficient in terms of quality of service for the customer, and it also enhances the revenues of the organization.
But does the cloud project management model mean a more carefree and less-costly environment? We could say it makes the whole process less costly, but not overly carefree. Despite the perks provided by the cloud, everything still needs to be tested and monitored, and every member of the project management team must still work upon deployment, and each of them should still be fully supported by project managers, and the clients. The cloud is perhaps the biggest innovation in the IT industry because it “optimizes” the utilization of resources within an enterprise.
