Productivity
- Suites: OpenOffice's new releases will offer better charting/graphics, display improvements within Writer, better compatibility between Calc and Excel.
- Suites: Lotus Symphony is IBM's version of the OpenOffice (StarOffice is SUN's version, and offered also via Google) offering the potential for document portability across tools.
- Suites: Google - Capgemini is supporting (consulting, integration, helpdesk, and support services) Google Office into enterprise accounts. A lot of Capgemini people are using Google Apps.
- Presentation: Google presentations completes Googles suite of productivity tools (Word processor, Spreadsheet etc.) that complement its communications tools (mail, IM, blog, content sharing - and soon hopefully a wiki etc.) and link to its calendaring solution. These applications allow authoring, review and viewing by multiple distributed teams in real time. They are not as powerful as the desktop suites - but the provide most of the features most people need, most of the time. For distributed teams they more than make up for any lack of sophistication with their: simplicity and their support for distributed teams.
- Presentation: TransMedias' Glide Presenter is designed to work both on the Web and on a wide array of mobile phones (e.g. iPhone) and while it can't produce visuals as pretty as Google's it can annoy people by playing video and music during a presentation.
- Tacit's Illumio suppports collaboration and analyzes information (e-mail contacts, documents, browse history) to identify people best-qualified to answer questions that are posted. It lets keyword topics of interest be specified by users to they automatically receive alerts when RSS feeds include the topic. It integrates with t Outlook, blogs and wikis.
- MS sells hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communications Server.
(they will also make available a SaaS version of Forefront to address the security issues - that their technologies encourage, a shame they don't just produce secure SW in the 1st place). Only customers buying licenses for 5,000 seats or more will be eligible to purchase the new SaaS offerings. MS will offer rebates of between 25%-100% of subscription fees if SLAs are not met.
- Thunderbird's new organisation will focus on improving the user experience for a range of Internet communications and explore how e-mail should work with other technologies such as RSS, IM, VoIP, and SMS.
- Yahoo will acquire Zimbra a Web-based e-mail and collaboration provider (for $350m).
- FaceTime's Unified Security Gateway devices (starting at $5k) is aimed at the full range of unified communications services. USG will include security, management and compliance for IM, VoIP, P2P and secure/manage Office Communications Server and Lotus Sametime.
Spreadsheets as service
Virus vectors
Open XML a farce
Collaboration race still alive
Current conclusions
- IM - still no ideal solution
- Email - any open (that is portable) client and server is fine
- VoIP - hard to determine what the best solution is investments should be tactical
- Video conferencing - as for VoIP
- Presence awareness - as for VoIP - and likely to be affected by location awareness
- Integration capabilities i.e. into applications (in-house and hosted)
- Document production - the focus should be on ODF (and certainly avoid moving to MS's extended document formats e.g. .pptx)
- Document sharing - not a good time to move away from Lotus if you are using it.
- Content sharing - as for VoIP
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