Enterprise 2.0 Blog

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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Oracle has recently made some significant announcements surrounding their partnership with Amazon Web Services. Oracle solutions can now be deployed on Amazon’s EC2 through a new licensing agreement.

Why is this important?
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Unless you have been hiding under a proverbial rock, you know that T-Mobile and Google finally outed what has to be the worst kept secret in product launch history the Android-based phone from HTC, aka G1. You can find pretty comprehensive discussions of the G1 speeds and feeds here and here.

The overall attitude of being “underwhelmed” by the G1 misses the larger motivation for Google to even get into the mobile space - which is to extend their search and advertising empire to the next inevitable frontier.

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Plantronics has announced two new headsets optimized for Microsoft Office Communicator: the wideband .Audio 630M USB binaural headset and the .Audio 615M USB monaural headset. Both promise an excellent quality of experience for users of OCS, and both retail for less than $50.

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