Shared Spaces ... the Collaboration Advisor

News for Today, Nov 18

Interesting news of the day:

• Instant Technologies introduced an IM archiving solution for IBM Lotus Sametime. The product is called IMtegrity for IBM Lotus Sametime, and supports the IM archiving regulations of SEC 17a-4 and NASD 3010. Providing a secure, extensible, searchable and easy to navigate UI for both browser browsers and Lotus Notes clients, IMtegrity for IBM Lotus Sametime allows you to analyze and search all IM usage, incl. 1-1 chats, n-way chats and even meeting room chats for both native Sametime and public AOL IM chats. This puts Instant-Tech into competition with others who have been in the IM archiving market for 2-3 years, such as FaceTime, IMlogic and Akonix, although the tight integration with Sametime, and its deep knowledge of the product, are clear points of differentiation. Instant-Tech IM Planet. Instant Technologies acquired IMtegrity from Principle Software. Instant-Tech Press Release
• Think Outside introduced a full-sized external keyboard for the Research In Motion BlackBerry 957 and 857 wireless email devices. After a while, typing on a thumb-sized keyboard gets painful, and a full-sized one is much faster, particularly in meetings. Forbes Think Outside
• Telstra, the largest telco and ISP in Australia, is looking for a new ISP-based email platform. The line up of vendors include Sun Microsystem, Microsoft (with Exchange Server), and a couple of others. Telstra wants support for up to 3.5 million email customers, up from 1.6 million today. And it's considering Exchange? ... sure, they use it internally, but for 3.5 million hosted customers? Hopefully its considering Mirapoint, Rockliffe, and Openwave too as decent service provider focused vendors. Australian IT
• The scourge of voice and e-mail ... an interesting reflection on the problem of getting too many messages by voice mail and email during the day, and how to handle it. Options suggested include: deleting everything without reading it, having two addresses only one of which is for important people, and establishing separate folders for automatically capturing new messages by category or project. TheStar.com

Guest Account in Exchange for Sending Spam

Sites running Exchange Server 5.5 and 2000 may be inadvertently aiding spammers if the site has not disabled the Guest account in Exchange. A Harvard University junior, Aaron Greenspan, published a paper last week saying that even if the spammer can't guess the password for Guest, if the Guest account is enabled, the spam will still be sent.

Microsoft's response?
" ... the problem is relatively minor and [we] haven't had many complaints ... "
" ... the problem ... is leveraging weaknesses in the protocol ... "
" ... Exchange Server 2003 is unaffected ... "

CNET Asia
Aaron Greenspan's Press Release

News for Today, Nov 17

News items of interest for today (via a catchup on my inbox):

• Tom Yager reviews the Research In Motion BlackBerry 7230 wireless email and mobile phone device, finding that its alignment with corporate email systems, particularly Exchange, is greatly enhanced. It also offers over-the-air synchronization with desktop mailboxes, a feature which had been in development for some time, but which Good Technology delivered first ComputerWorld
• Bowstreet announced that its Portlet Factory will work with Lotus Workplace for the rapid creation, customization, maintenance and deployment of portlets, via a Lotus Collaboration Extension from Bowstreet. The extension "exposes existing, custom Domino applications and data as portlets, and allows users to access these portlets from within the Lotus Workplace environment" Bowstreet

Cisco Buys Latitude

Cisco announced a definitive agreement to acquire Latitude Communications for US$80 million in cash. Latitude provides a behind-the-firewall enterprise conferencing product called MeetingPlace, which offers integrated voice, video and web conferencing. Cisco will add the Latitude technology to its AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data) product portfolio.

MeetingPlace has some neat features:
- Integration with Notes and Outlook for scheduling meetings
- Integration with IM products, such as Lotus Sametime and Windows Messenger, for escalating from a text chat to an online meeting
- Tight integration with the voice network. For example, the web browser window for an online meeting displays the name of the person currently speaking, which is great for groups that don't meet regularly and so can't recognize voices perfectly.

News for Today, Nov 11

News items and reading of interest to shared spaces today:

• Jabber Inc. announced a joint marketing agreement with Akonix Systems, enabling customers to use Akonix products for reporting and compliance management regarding internal and external IM sessions. That means that IM sessions between enterprise users of the Jabber platform and external users of the public IM networks (AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo, among others) can be captured by Akonix for subsequent analysis Jabber
• IBM WebSphere Portal 5.0.2 includes capabilities from Lotus Workplace Web Content Management, for creating, publishing, managing and archiving Web based content eWeek
• The Investor's Business Daily reported that some companies are choosing to leverage consumer-grade IM services rather than investing in enterprise-grade IM platforms. With the addition of an IM management or monitoring product, such as those from Akonix, FaceTime or IMLogic, the intent is to save the licensing fee being charged by a Microsoft or IBM Lotus. It's an interesting approach, but it means that companies will find it much harder to extend presence-capabilities beyond just the IM client, capabilities which enterprise class products give to a greater degree. IBD
• The TeleWork Consortium released a report on the annual per user cost of additional highways in Northern Virginia that's funded out of public subsidies ... $2800 per commuter per year. That's a lot of dosh that could be re-directed to encourage the development of alternative infrastructure to enable remote collaboration and group working TeleWork Consortium Toni Kistner (NetworkWorldFusion)
• As part of its overhaul of internal IT, IBM is working on a project to increase collaboration between global employees. The main idea is to add interactive communications capabilities to the IBM internal portal, using technology from IBM Lotus and WebSphere InfoWorld
• IBM Research is working on various projects to extend the open source Eclipse integrated development environment, including integrated collaboration via instant messaging (and most likely presence too). Eclipse is an important component of IBM's Workplace strategy, with an Eclipse-based end user client in the works eWeek
• The Toshiba Corporation is using a product lifecycle management solution from MatrixOne to enable cross-functional teams from marketing, planning, design, procurement and manufacturing to collaborate effectively. The secure virtual workspace for suppliers, designers and buyers is called MatrixOne Team Central MatrixOne

Communicator Hub Connex

Communicator Inc released Hub Connex, a real-time team workspace style solution that mixes content distribution, alerting (of messages, content changes, etc.), discussion forums (for persistent transcripts, and notification alerts based on content), enterprise IM and presence (that's Hub IM, which is standards-compliant with XMPP/Jabber and SIP/SIMPLE), and directory services (using Communicator's Hub ID identity management technology for cross-enterprise federated identity).

... on Wall Street, securities dealers can use Hub Connex to distribute market information and discuss it both internally with traders, researchers, and sales teams and externally with clients. In the public sector, where the efficient flow of information is critical to issues like Homeland Security, Hub Connex can be used to coordinate communication and collaboration across disparate agencies, organizations and contractors.

Hub Connex works standalone, or as an integrated component within Web sites and applications. Hub IM is available standalone, for behind-the-firewall deployment if customers want that too.

Available immediately, in two flavors: Professional and Enterprise.

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LINQware Collabrix 3.6

LINQware released Collabrix 3.6, its instant messaging, Web conferencing, audio conferencing, and application sharing product. New features:
- integrated in/out board (to tell colleagues how long you will be away for)
- scheduled meetings, similar to Outlook, but without a reliance on Outlook
- broadcast messaging, for queuing messages to colleagues for when they return
- application sharing within Collabrix
- advanced server features (eg, Windows 2003 Server support)

Available immediately.

One of the items that is particularly nice about Collabrix is the outbound dialing capabilities, whereby if you want all members of your team to join you in a conference call, you click a button and the system dials out and finds them. Sweet!

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Kubi Webinar for Bankers/Financial Services

Kubi is hosting a Webinar on November 13, 2-3pm EST entitled "How Bankers Can Save Time, Win Business, and Improve Deal Management through Collaborative Email". The two Julio's - Julio Gomez (an expert on technology application in financial services), and Julio Estrada (founder and CEO of Kubi) - are hosting the Webinar.

VALUABLE TAKEAWAYS:
- Actionable insight on the productivity of banking teams.
- How new business development tasks can be significantly streamlined and managed using Collaborative Email.
- How this approach gives management improved visibility into deal status and internal processes.
- How Collaborative Email applies to your critical business activities.

Register ...

Kubi Integrates with Salesforce.com

Kubi Software released a connector to bridge the Kubi Client - a team workspace solution that embeds within Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes - and the customer relationship management system from Salesforce.com. The usage scenario sounds like an ideal add-on to the hosted CRM suite:

For example, a sales representative who needs to collect comments and revisions to a sales proposal can easily invite contributors – including people not using salesforce.com, and those outside his organization – to join a collaborative Kubi Space, where they can work together to complete the proposal. The Kubi Connector for salesforce.com populates the shared workspace with relevant customer information from salesforce.com, so that all team members have access to that data. As the proposal is refined, the Kubi Connector for salesforce.com automatically synchronizes the content of the collaborative Kubi Space with salesforce.com, so that a complete and up-to-date history of the proposal project is maintained.

This is the second additional integration connector that Kubi has released, the first in August with DETERMINE, although that only supported Outlook integration.

Available 1Q2004.

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