Cisco on TelePresence … Cisco announced plans to extend the reach of its telepresence offerings around the world. “In less than two years, Cisco has enabled eight of the world’s top service providers spanning five continents to deliver intercompany Cisco TelePresence services, extending availability of the technology to more than 150 countries and thousands of cities. Intercompany Cisco TelePresence gives businesses the ability to use Cisco TelePresence to meet with key suppliers, customers and partners to improve their competitive advantage, speed the time to market, and foster better collaboration in their businesses. The service providers, AT&T, BT, Orange, NTT, Tata Communications, Telefonica, Telstra, and most recently Telmex, have announced commercial intercompany Cisco TelePresence services, enabling the more than 350 organizations that have already selected Cisco TelePresence to communicate reliably and with high levels of security and across different networks.” Cisco also announced a new single-screen, single-camera telepresence product. More

Better Email Habits … Bill comments on one firms plans to reduce the burden of email through better training (and shared agreements about usage). “ CIO Tony Murabito of Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc. explains how the investment of $50,000 in “training employees how to better use one of the basic tools of the modern office” is paying off. I applaud the effort and would like to add the following observations … eg, The other e-mail regime bullets are good: Effective use of the subject line, adopting the ABC format (action, background, close) for e-mails, increasing the in-box refresh interval, and routing e-mails to folders other than the in-box.” More

Metalogix Partner Program … Metalogix is expanding its partner program for its Exchange and SharePoint tools. “Metalogix Software, a leading provider of migration, restoration, and archiving solutions for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint®, today announced that it is actively building the company’s global channel partner network of systems integrators and distributors for its award-winning product line of solutions for email archiving, SharePoint backup and SharePoint migration. To spearhead the expansion of its global partner ecosystem, Metalogix has recruited Miguel Nhuch to develop its International Partner Network.” More

PostBox 1.0 … PostBox, a new email client for Mac and Windows users, went 1.0. Walt Mossberg likes what he sees, “This week I tested Postbox 1.0, a program designed to handle your email in a smart, helpful manner. Starting Wednesday, this program is available at http://www.Postbox-Inc.com. Postbox sorts through your email and detects its contents so you can see Web links, photos, contacts and other items themselves with one button click—whether Microsoft Word documents, PDFs or spreadsheets—without digging through messages. Since its inbox is constantly being indexed, all search queries return near-instant results.” More, postbox-inc.com

Adobe Acrobat.com v.Next … Adobe outlined some of its future collaboration plans for Acrobat.com, its hosted collaboration service. “In the coming months, Acrobat.com users will have the ability to access most of the site’s applications through mobile phones and will have all of these applications on one streamlined interface, eliminating the need to use multiple URLs to access each service. By winter 2009, Adobe will also release shared workspaces that let groups of people work on and keep track of documents. The full list of plans for Acrobat.com in 2009 include adding more real-time document collaboration tools; integration with desktop tools including Adobe products and Microsoft Outlook 2007, plus import from and export to PDFs and to Microsoft and Open Office formats; and increased support for the Adobe developer community.” More

Aberdeen on Video Conferencing … Aberdeen has a new research report, sponsored by Tandberg, on the benefits of video conferencing and collaboration. “By driving deeply into enterprise behaviors, this research shows how top performers have used video collaboration to realize double-digit improvements in accelerating product development, reducing the cost-to-hire for strategic hires, improving the time to close opportunities, and optimizing both the time and cost used for strategic projects …. Although video has been associated with reductions in travel costs and travel time, there has been little research showing more specific business benefits. To document the current benefits of video, this primary research demonstrates how video collaboration is being used to support and strengthen businesses throughout all of their most vital value-creating processes. By demonstrating the people, processes, and technologies used to create optimal video collaboration deployments, this research shows companies how to justify investments in video collaboration based on the business benefits that can be realized.” More

TCO of IBM vs Microsoft … A UK hosting company, Applicable, compared the total cost of ownership of IBM Domino and Microsoft Exchange; it hosts both products. “The findings validate what IBM has been saying about Notes/Domino since we shipped version 7 — IBM Lotus Notes/Domino is far cheaper to acquire, operate, and maintain. In the category of availability, Applicable finds that “IBM Solutions are up to 52% cheaper based on Infrastructure costs and subsequent user support costs.” (That’s without the Office license costs) In the category of adding advanced collaboration, Applicable finds that “IBM Solutions are up to 37% cheaper based on Infrastructure costs and subsequent user support costs.” And in the category of deploying a full IBM vs. Microsoft net-new stack, Applicable also finds a 37% advantage to IBM. These percentages don’t apply at every size customer — they have done the detailed findings on 500,1000, 2000, and 4000 user organizations. And in every case, the finding is that the cost of ownership for Notes/Domino is cheaper than Microsoft Exchange/Outlook. “. More

Other Items
– Palm announced the Pixi, its latest PDA and phone.
– Ubidesk, an online team collaboration service.
– BlackBerry software for Mac from RIM is almost here.