Enterprise 2.0 Blog

Siemens Enterprised Communications has annnounced its mobile UC client for Blackberry, Simbian and Windows Mobile Device users. Unlike other solutions that purport to be “mobile UC,” but which really deliver only fixed-mobile convergence, OpenScape Mobility offers users all UC capabilities from their mobile devices. Whether they take advantage of mobile video and web conferencing remains to be seen, but presence, chat and telephony are key capabilities in the mobile UC world. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning at VoiceCon Amsterdam Microsoft announced Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2 (which I’m guessing will end up being named OCS 2009 when it finally ships). This release beefs up Microsoft’s telephony features and is designed to enable Microsoft to better compete in the VOIP/IPT market. It also delivers a number a new enhancements around mobility and real-time collaboration.

Microsoft has not tried to hide the fact that it hopes to take a significant chunk of the IP-PBX market over the next several years by offering a system that is built around UC from the ground up. It faces increasing competition from the likes of Avaya, Cisco and Nortel (not to mention IBM Lotus) even as it builds on partnerships with many of its competitors. It also faces the challenge of trying to win a market in which most organizations are already moving forward with VOIP and have already selected strategic vendors. Participants in our recent Unified Communications and Collaboration benchmark largely discounted the ability of Microsoft to replace the PBX, citing concerns over features, scalability, and resiliency, concerns that Microsoft hopes to address with OCS R2.

Sequoia being something of a bellwether in startup circles, their opinion matters. Here is an interesting slideshow from them, with their view of the financial situation and its impact on technology. How do enterprise takes differ?

This week I was speaking to a group of IT executives about the value of unified communications, and best practices for implementation. One person in the audience asked about call quality, and whether users have grown more tolerant of poor voice quality as a result of cell phone use. I think he’s right: Most of us have grown accustomed to sketchy connections on our cell phones, which will likely translate to higher tolerance for sketchy voice quality on any device. Read the rest of this entry »

It is that time of the year. Enterprise IT architects everywhere are nervously watching the economic and financial mess, and crossing their fingers as they put in budget requests for investment in 2.0 infrastructure in the coming year. Much of the cost of IT is human labor, since at one end of the spectrum, the software pieces can actually be free (yes, as in beer). So I thought I’d share this picture I drew for a long riff on headcount on ribbonfarm.com. What do IT architects think? Whimsical, thought-provoking, silly, or all of the above? Are you thinking about headcount and resource planning any differently around 2.0? How do you actually decide how to assign people to different projects? How do you actually estimate resource needs?

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox.

In an effort to put a new spin on teleworkers, Plantronics is hosting a contest asking people to find a new name for the term “teleworker.” If you think you’ve got an alternative for how to identify those of us who toil away at home, go to the contest site by October 24 and enter. The prizes include lots of cool gear, but really, wouldn’t the best part be knowing that you coined a hot new trend?

IBM announced Lotus iNotes this week, bringing Notes calendar, e-mail, and address book access to iPhone. It looks like this approach is based more on providing a stand-alone iPhone app rather than synching the iPhone’s own apps with Domino as is possible using Microsoft ActiveSync with Exchange. Still, this just knocked down another argument for using the iPhone in the corporate environment, especially when the cost of an iPhone is on par with most BlackBerry’s. But IT architects need to understand the impact on their server and network environments of enabling their remote users to sync directly with messaging servers versus using a hosted proxy in the RIM/Good models.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that China is monitoring text-based communications for users of the Tom-Skype service. As the debate continues on whether or not public services are sufficient for enterprise communication and collaboration, organizations ought to keep in mind the risks of using public services, especially without any opportunity to independently validate security and privacy controls.

You’d think Knowledge Management (KM), that venerable IT-based social engineering discipline which came up with evocative phrases like “community of practice,” “expertise locater,” and “knowledge capture,” would be in the vanguard of the 2.0 revolution. You’d be wrong. Inside organizations and at industry fora today, every other conversation around social media (SM) and Enterprise 2.0 seems to turn into a thinly-veiled skirmish within an industry-wide KM-SM shadow war. I suppose I must be a little dense, because it took not one, not two, but three separate incidents before I realized there was a war on. Here’s what’s going on: KM and SM look very similar on the surface, but are actually radically different at multiple levels, both cultural and technical, and are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0. And the most hilarious part is that most of the combatants don’t even realize they are in a war. They think they are loosely-aligned and working towards the same ends, with some minor differences of emphasis. So let me tell you about this war and how it is shaping up. Hint: I have credible neutral “war correspondent” status because I was born in 1974.

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On the heels of acquisitions of PostPath and Jabber, Cisco yesterday unveiled its broad roadmap and strategy around enterprise collaboration.

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