The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• West Corporation made a friendly tender for Genesys Conferencing; if it gets it, it will combine Genesys with Intercall.
• Virtual PBX released an upgrade to its hosted PBX service, with new Caller ID capabilities and recording services for greetings. “The new VPBX SmartID feature goes beyond the standard Caller ID function and adds customizable digital displays and verbal information about the purpose and nature of each call. Traditional Caller ID merely shows the originating phone number of an incoming call. With VPBX SmartID, business professionals can easily see and hear when an incoming call is a business call rather than a personal call, find out what business it is for, and know what function inside the business has been dialed, such as sales, support, or customer service.“
• Mozilla announced that Thunderbird 3.0 will be available at the end of 2008, and will include integrated calendaring functionality. “Although Mozilla Messaging’s priority is to produce good software, not specifically to dethrone Microsoft’s dominant Outlook software, the new calendar ability makes Thunderbird a more viable competitor, particularly in corporate environments.“
• PocketMac released a sync conduit for Lotus Notes and Apple devices. “When you’re ready to sync, launch PocketMac GoBetween for Lotus Notes. It will sync all of your Lotus Notes data to iCal and Address Book. Then run iSync to sync iCal and Address Book to your device.“
• How can email be made a better channel for communication? By writing better emails.
• Just how addicted to email are you? Ben shares his experience: “We thought it would be a worthy experiential-journalism project to record how often we checked our email and to share the results with all of you. We planned to do this for a day. We called off the experiment after an hour. The reason: We’d already checked email 12 times, often for no reason at all.”
• SharePoint: It has the same weaknesses of Notes. “The final conclusion is that while SharePoint can handle maybe 30% of any given apps functionality out of the box, the other 70% needs to be covered by BizTalk, .NET coding, and other Microsoft technologies. SharePoint is not living up to its marketing. The most ironic part of it all is that SharePoint shares exactly the same weaknesses as Notes. So if we did move entirely to SharePoint, we’d still have a system that is weak on reporting and on transactional processing.“

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• How do you become more productive? Decide that you want to be more productive. “Many of us have probably known someone in the workforce who was going through the motions, fulfilling their job duties with no particular zeal, and sometimes even beginning their retirement while they were still on the payroll. And yet this same person may be a hardworking volunteer for a charitable organization they believe in. The difference is having a purpose that has real meaning.“

Other Noteworthy Insights

• In a complex world, do you simplify the complexity for your customers, or expect them to do it themselves?
• The HP iPAQ 210 is now available.