Altrincham –UK Interact, a leading supplier in intelligent intranet software, announces the release of Interact Intranet version 4.9 – a significant update to Interact Intranet, which includes Interact Teams, Improved Microsoft Outlook Integration, Collaborative Image Galleries and Real-Time Twitter Integration amongst its new technologies and tools.
collaboration
Blackboard Launches New, Real-Time Collaboration Platform Built for Education
Blackboard Inc. announced today the launch of Blackboard Collaborate™, an education-focused platform for real-time collaboration that helps institutions shift more learning, networking, and communication online to improve education quality while reducing the cost of academic operations.
The Future of Open Atrium
In February of this year, Phase2 Technology acquired control of the popular Drupal-based Open Atrium system from its creator, Development Seed. Open Atrium is a team collaboration solution built on the Drupal CMS. Open Atrium is often used in team situations, including intranets and project management environments. The system comes with a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.
We tracked down the Phase2 Technology team to ask them about their plans for Open Atrium. CEO Jeff Walpole and Product Manager Karen Borchert were kind enough to take the time to answer our questions.
Q. What are Phase2's plans for Open Atrium?
Phase2 is very excited to be involved with Open Atrium, but we did not want to move too quickly to change something so many people use and love without first serving the community and providing maintenance to its underlying module stack. Earlier this year, we released support packages around Atrium that allow more users the ability to implement and use Atrium with the help of our team's services. In the months since taking over Atrium, we've been delving more deeply into the involved and vibrant Atrium community to try to understand best what users are looking for in this product. We've talked to users about everything from technical needs to theming to documentation to community involvement. We've built some training around Atrium that we've conducted with some clients, and we're currently preparing a stable 1.0 release (it is officially still in "Beta" status). One thing that is certain is that we are looking to this community to be part of that road map and part of the growth of the product. We want to start by giving the community a more public place to see and find contributed Features that they might use for their own Atrium instances. And then we want to see more community involvement in building and improving Atrium in the future.
CMS Expo: Social Drupal
CMS Expo in Chicago last week gave me a great opportunity to learn about a variety of content management systems. I spent most of my time at the conference getting out of my comfort zone by visiting with those companies and open source projects that I knew the least about their products and services. Unfortunately, this strategy also prevented me from visiting with my personal favorite CMS, Drupal. By the end of the conference, I felt I needed to treat myself by attending one of the final sessions in the Drupal track, Social Drupal.
What key activities should you integrate? In what scenarios might you be smarter to leave the heavy lifting to an outsourced solution? What elements are critically important right now when building your social relevance in the market? Find this out and more at this practical advice session on how you can be using Drupal to capture the Social Media audience which awaits.
My hope for the session was that it would give me good pointers for how to connect my Drupal sites better to the social web. Lullabot's Blake Hall led this information packed session. Blake began the session by pushing his vision that this session should not just be called "Social Drupal" but also "Community Plumbing (without the crack)". The proposed rewriting of the title for this session is a reminder to the audience that Drupal has always been social.
Blake started the session reminding that one needs to take a look at the bigger picture by taking a look as your site's Social Media Strategy. This strategy would include the following elements:
- Authentic Story
- Honest Dialogue
- Engage your audience
- Activate the social media
While the big picture is always nice consider it's the details that help determine whether your site is going to succeed. From this point forward Blake focused on specifics and I feverishly did my best to keep up. Some of the notable remarks from Blake that caught my attention:
- First step is to take a look at your business goals and the resources you have available when building/supporting your site. Blake of course sees Drupal as being able to address both ends of this equation.
- Some of the social modules for Drupal he recommends include Feeds, Flag, Twitter, Dashboard, Fivestar, Messaging, Radioactivity (gotta check this one out!), and Organic Groups.
- Speaking of organic groups, take a look at groups.drupal.org: especially Social Networking Sites group to tap into Drupal community's expertise on social publishing.
Hay Group Uses Axceler ControlPoint to Streamline Management of Complex SharePoint Environment
WOBURN, MA – May 9, 2011 –Axceler, the leader in Microsoft SharePoint administration and migration, today announced that Hay Group, a global co
Six Tips for a Productive Intranet
Peter Barron is an Intranet Connections Fan; he provides significant feedback on our blog, Linkedin and Facebook pages and speaks candidly about our software as it applies to his organization. Over the past ten years, Peter has managed the Rio Rancho Public Schools intranet, which is internally called “Rionet”. With over 20 school district departments that use the rionet, Peter targets applications and widgets that make the intranet process fast and easy for thousands of users. We recently interviewed Peter to find out what makes his intranet so successful, and today we are delighted to share his responses with our intranet community.
Here are Peter’s six tips for an efficient intranet::
1. Time: Seeing as Rio Rancho is a school district, the majority of intranet users are teachers. Teachers are incredibly busy with students during the day and they lack freedom of time to peruse their intranets. In order to overcome this timing issue, Peter leverages the notification capabilities of the “rionet” with subscriptions to departments that the teachers have invested interest in. This subscription service has been a big push for Peter and the Rio Rancho Schools because it decreases searching time on the intranet by targeting topics of interest for the user.
2. E-forms: Teachers must attend conferences, so Peter created PDF e-forms for them to request conference admittance and funding in rionet. Directly from their classroom, teachers fill out the request form, and it is processed right away.
Quoting IT: Scott Abel on Help 2.0
"Help 2.0 is about letting go of old-school, preconceived notions about our role as content providers. Help 2.0 forces us to realize that by leveraging the knowledge of the crowd we can help users find the right information quickly and easily, whether we created the content ourselves or not. And perhaps most importantly, Help 2.0 is about creating support experiences in which users can help us learn what they want and need, while also allowing them to assist one another, in ways that are meaningful to them."
-Scott Abel, The Future of Technical Communication Is Socially Enabled: Understanding the Help 2.0 Revolution, Intercom.STC.org, April 2011.
Quoting IT: Throw caution to the wind with Enterprise 2.0
"The more I learn about Enterprise 2.0, the more inclined I am to encourage companies to throw caution to the wind: buy (or build) some well-designed lightweight tools that take advantage of emergence and game mechanics, find a few leaders willing to lead by example, and go live."
- Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way, AndrewMcAfee.org, April 7, 2011.
Axceler ControlPoint Helps City of Charlotte Expand Its SharePoint eGov Environment
City Will Also Turn to Axceler Davinci Migrator to Help Migrate and Enhance Its Growing Central Information Hub based on SharePoint
WOBURN, MA – March 29, 2011 –Axceler,the leader in Microsoft SharePoint administration and migration, today announced that the City of Charlotte, NC, is using Axceler’s ControlPoint, the company’s award-winning SharePoint administration software, to better manage its large and complex SharePoint environment. In addition the North Carolina municipality also will be deploying the company’s Davinci Migrator product to manage its upcoming SharePoint 2010 upgrade.
“Tasks that used to require so much time to handle manually now can be accomplished in a fraction of the time with ControlPoint. The time savings for us is huge,” noted Kyle Wright, SharePoint Infrastructure Support Manager for the City of Charlotte. “ControlPoint is the only reason we’ve been able to stay ahead of our growing environment without increasing headcount.”
Ease of use and the ability to help manage a more formal SharePoint environment were driving factors in the City of Charlotte’s initial decision to choose Axceler’s ControlPoint. With seven SharePoint farms running on nearly two dozen servers – and with both internet and intranet components -- the City of Charlotte’s SharePoint environment serves the needs of some 6,500 employees in the city’s fourteen key business units. The applications supported in its SharePoint environment range from mission-critical capabilities like records management and team collaboration sites, to informational functions such as posting benefits information, to less formal applications like the online employee swap shop. ControlPoint helps Wright better address burdensome but essential administration tasks – such as replacing outmoded web parts – that were difficult to tackle with native SharePoint administrative tools.
“ControlPoint’s ability to handle so many administrative tasks – like generating web part reports by site and by web part – was a key factor in our decision to go with Axceler,” Wright said. “And this turned out to be even more important than we originally anticipated.”
Wright has used ControlPoint to create a new permission and inheritance structure in the city’s SharePoint environment, and to distribute site administration to the city’s key business units. ControlPoint’s analysis and reports also enabled Charlotte to hit the go-live commitment on its new external facing web site.
The City plans to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 this summer with the help of Axceler’s Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010. Besides taking advantage of the latest SharePoint technology, one of the city’s main goals is to restructure its SharePoint farms in order to support a much more modular approach to data backups and restores. “We were originally on SharePoint 2003, and our usage has grown exponentially,” explained Wright. “One of the real benefits of Davinci was that, during the migration, we can completely reorganize our content and sites, create new site collections and create new databases. By reorganizing our data along departmental lines, we’ll make our migration process faster and more efficient.”
Interact Answers: A collaboration feature available on Interact Intranet
Interact, a leading supplier in intelligent intranet software, today announced the release of Interact Answers - an innovative and unique new crowd-sourcing feature which drives productivity by allowing users to post questions on the intranet and receive accurate solutions, using Interact Intranet’s intelligence store and the knowledge of other users.
The easy-to-use feature is available in the core system of Interact Intranet version 4.8. Once a user posts a question on the intranet, Interact Answers will attempt to provide a solution to the question. It firstly uses its intelligent capabilities to supply information that it thinks will answer the question, then Interact Answers will recommend colleagues within the company it believes can help with the question. These ‘experts’ are notified of the question and the question is then open for all employees to answer.
Interact Answers drives internal collaboration as all employees begin to collaborate to answer the question successfully and it unlocks knowledge in the company. Interact Answers prevents relying on internal emails to ask questions, where the answers can be quickly lost and the right answer is not guaranteed. Productivity is boosted as less time is spent searching for answers and it also allows staff to ask an open question to the company if they are not sure who to direct the question to.
Simon Dance, Product Manager comments:
“Interact Answers is an intelligent collaboration feature that grows the more it is used. As users begin to answer questions, a knowledge store is created so vital company information can’t be lost and can be easily searched for.
“What makes this feature unique is that Interact Answers intelligently suggests solutions to the questions asked, using the information already contained within the intranet. It then goes one step further by recommending an expert within the company it believes can help you with that answer.”
Quoting IT: Enterprise Collaboration
"Enterprise collaboration projects are almost always risky propositions. Storing and sharing information, potentially across departments and across the world, holds unquantifiable rewards for the business. Yet, if these rewards can't be realized by individuals, then the project risks failure."
- Matthew Sarrel, Tapping the Positive from Social Networks for Enterprise Collaboration, eWeek, November 15, 2010
10 Most Popular Intranet Collaboration Features via Bitrix Survey
Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces a survey of the top-10 most popular intranet collaboration benefits that allow organizations to improve internal efficiency and raise workforce productivity.
Based on analysis of 1.000+ real-life installations of Bitrix Intranet among small and medium-sized businesses and many years of implementing social-enabled intranet solutions, Bitrix has shortlisted the most popular collaboration features.
| Rank | Intranet Collaboration Feature |
| 1 | Employee availability and presence tracking |
| 2 | Instant messaging and video conferencing |
| 3 | Meetings / conference room management |
| 4 | Virtual workgroups |
| 5 | Shared documents |
| 6 | Workflow management |
| 7 | Routine processes automation |
| 8 | Information and expert discovery |
| 9 | Idea management and social networking |
| 10 | Task management |
The top ten list reflects the most-used intranet collaboration features and correspond to the most popular adoption patterns. Intriguingly, the priority of listings doesn’t match the wide-spread notion of the customer demand among SMBs. Indeed, task management, shared documents and content search are on the list but concede position to the seemingly less important features like presence tracking, instant messaging and meetings management. This is due to the fact that SMBs normally start the intranet implementation not with the most ‘famous’ features but rather those which are easy to adopt.
The survey confirms that SMBs are mainly interested in simple collaboration tools with the shortest adoption period. The organizations prefer step-by-step intranet adoption that starts from the most commonly used features and ends with heavy-weight functionality. In fact, this process may stretch over months depending on the organization’s readiness, internal governance and c-level support.
Considering the growing popularity of the intranet technology, Bitrix predicts that in the next year this list may undergo a major shift. Many organizations will be one step ahead in the intranet adoption and proceed with implementing more comprehensive collaboration features. At the same time, we believe the market will be notable for greater awareness of the benefits of intranets, as vendors provide better guidance to speed up the technology adoption.
To name names, Bitrix anticipates business processes and records management, social CRM and e-learning to become shortlisted. The leading intranet vendors have already integrated these features to let organizations ease the burden of third-party software acquisition, implementation and maintenance. At the same time, these are crucial tools for effective business management.
Bitrix Unveils Multi-Platform Virtual Appliance for Social Collaboration and E-Commerce
Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces Bitrix® Virtual Appliance 2.0 – the world’s first dedicated ready-to-use solution designed to run social collaboration and e-commerce applications in the most popular virtual environments including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Virtuozzo and Amazon EC2.
New intelligent tagging features in Interact Intranet 4.7
Interact, a leading supplier of intelligent intranet software, has announced the availability of Interact Intranet Version 4.7. Highlights from the latest release include new @tagging and #tagging features making it much easier to quickly and easily link content and increase content findability.
The '@ tagging' feature extends the benefits of Interact Intranet’s ’Clever linker‘ tool, which was released earlier this year to provide a quick and easy method for content authors to link to other content within Interact Intranet including documents, events and people. Typing ‘@’ before any word launches a dynamic instant search for content within the intranet making it even easier to create internal linkswith no need for a complicated interface. This innovative collaboration feature enhances intranet content and increases user engagement.
The '# tagging' feature gives intranet content authors and commentators the ability to add keywords to almost any searchable content such as blogs, discussion boards and individual user comments, thus creating greater context. #tags automatically appear as a hyperlink to information relating to the #tag and are ranked higher in search results than conventional word searches.
Hyundai Drives Its Way with Bitrix
The leading car manufacturer powers its business communications with Bitrix® Intranet Portal
ALEXANDRIA , VA. – Bitrix, Inc. (www.bitrixsoft.com), a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, announces its flagship product Bitrix® Intranet Portal has been chosen by the Russian branch of Hyundai Motor Company for business process automation, internal communications and knowledge management.
A customer-oriented business is normally as effective as its internal communications. With Hyundai’s business, this requirement is second to none as the company is widely known for its high-quality service based on pervasive workflow and well-established processes. The company understands that there is a close connection between successful customer relations and the effectiveness of internal communications. And a powerful yet user-friendly intranet solution is just the means for reaching this ambitious goal by capitalizing on transparent business processes and a highly-motivated employee community.
Careful investigation of the company’s actual business needs has revealed key requirements for the intranet system. The IT team decided to concentrate on delivering the following tools:
- Corporate broadcasting
- Workgroup-based collaboration
- Automation of routine processes
- Knowledge management
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