AOL and Google have made it easier for AIM and Google Talk users to communicate. There is now “complete interoperability” among AIM, Gmail and Google Talk, says Ben Parr at Mashable. Although Google no longer lets users sign in via AIM, they do let you add AIM contacts to Gmail. They also provide an import tool to ease the process. AIM users can send messages to their Google contacts and vice versa. And this works no matter what chat client they use. READ MORE
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” This response, from Microsoft shareholder and trust fund manager Hank Smith, quoted in the Vancouver Sun, pretty much sums up the general response to the $8.5 billion Microsoft paid to acquire Skype. Indeed, no matter how you look at it, the price seems kinda high. READ MORE
Times are tough, but you can save your company some cash by taking advantage of many free applications and services to help you remain lean and competitive. This includes many downloadable programs for your BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android smartphone as well as tools for PC productivity, such as online back-up options, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) software, and no-cost office suites. Free apps are sought-after downloads today in business. It’s not just because it makes sense to those watching their bottom line, but the apps are getting a lot more robust instead of simply covering the basics, says Scott Steinberg, publisher of Digital Trends. “You’d be surprise what you can find today when it comes to free applications — and there’s plenty of free apps to choose from for your smartphone, PC, or a cloud-computing solution that bridges the two,” adds Steinberg. Steinberg says he’s most excited about the explosion in downloadable apps for smartphones. “The apps transform phones into notebook replacements, audio recorders, GPS navigation devices, note-taking devices, and even gaming getaways for those in need of an entertainment fix while traveling for business.” Speaking of travel, Chris Silva, an analyst at the Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester, the technology research company, says many of these free productivity tools have an inherent benefit compared to traditional desktop software: “On-the-go businesspersons want to be able to access their content wherever and whenever, and on any device — and while Microsoft recently unveiled a ‘cloud’ component to [Microsoft] Office, we’re finding people are turning to Google’s established and free Gmail for e-mail, file storage, document sharing, and so on.” Caveat emptor There’s little dispute that cost-cutting measures are critical — especially given the current state of the economy — but there are a few things about free software that businesses should be aware of. Silva reminds businesses that these free apps are still not as full-featured as paid versions. “Productivity suites might not have the 500-plus menus and tools built into Microsoft Office, for example, but most people don’t venture outside of ‘create, format, print and share’ anyway,” he says. “Many companies, especially small to mid-sized businesses, are finding these free alternatives to be good enough for their needs.” Silva also warns of two other possible downsides to free apps. “It’s no secret there are occasional Gmail outages, which means you can’t access your e-mail, or Skype congestion that can affect call quality, along with other issues associated with Internet-based solutions,” he says. “Plus, there are always increased security risks in allowing your employees to use any kind of software they want. You’ll need to take steps to educate employees about risks, about some company information that shouldn’t be shared with Gmail or IM, and mitigate these with policies.” Best bets for free apps If you’re looking for completely free apps for your smartphone or PC, consider the following recommendations: Skype – Available for PCs and select smartphones (iPhone and Windows Mobile), Skype lets you make free phone calls to any other Skype user on the Internet via VoIP technology. PC users can also chat using video, swap files, or pay a few cents a minute for “Skype Out” calls to landlines and cell phones. Gmail – Google’s free Web-based e-mail solution reliably keeps you in touch with others, regardless of the platform you’re using it on. Benefits include loads of storage, little spam, contact and calendar management, and support for Google Talk between multiple devices. OpenOffice.org – Sun Microsystems’s free Microsoft Office alternative offers a suite of productivity tools, including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, and graphics. It supports multiple operating systems and has a portable version that runs off a USB key. Documents To Go – With a free version included on newer BlackBerry devices, this clever app suite allows for viewing and editing of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. It’s usually bundled with PDF To Go, as well, supporting Adobe’s popular Portable Document Format. Zoho – Free for individuals, Zoho’s range of productivity and collaboration apps include Zoho Mail, Zoho Chat, Zoho CRM, Zoho Writer, Zoho Discussions, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Show, Zoho Creator, Zoho Docs, Zoho Invoice, Zoho Notebook, Zoho Projects, Zoho Wiki, Zoho Reports, and others. Windows Live SkyDrive – Microsoft is offering up to 25GB of free online storage. Only a Windows ID is required (such as a Hotmail e-mail address) and this password-protected virtual drive can be accessed for virtually any online computer in the world. Some folders can be set up for sharing, while other are for your eyes only. Remote Desktop Lite – Use your iPhone or iPod touch to securely access a Windows XP Professional computer, anywhere on the planet. This software provides full access to your PC — via Wi-Fi or EDGE — as if you were in front of the machine you’re accessing. At the time of writing this, Remote Desktop Lite is the no. 1 free business app at Apple’s App Store. Call Time Tracker by momentum – As the name suggests, Redwood Technologies’ free app for Blackberry helps business professionals account for their time in order to bill hours and recover expenses. Ideal for lawyers, consultants, salespeople, realtors and IT professionals, this app pops up at the end of calls and you can easily mark it as billable time. Nice Office – BlackBerry users can manage their e-mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks from this one free suite of tools. Nice Office securely also grants access to forms and documents, lets you record sales activity while on the go and automatically logs device activity, and provides a detailed report on mobile interactions with your contacts, including calls, messages, and appointments. Google Maps – While it doesn’t provide audio-based turn-by-turn commands, Google Maps is a completely free and powerful tool for your smartphone that can help you find nearby establishments (such as restaurants, gas stations, or hotels), show overhead street views (even with satellite imagery), and give you accurate directions to a destination. It works via GPS or even cellular technology (though the latter isn’t as accurate).
E-mail is the central nervous system of most modern organizations, from startups to large corporations. Every communication, from the most important (planning for the big client meeting tomorrow) to the most trivial (fresh donuts in the kitchen) takes place through the corporate e-mail system. The results: e-mail overload and lowered productivity for the entire organization. Employees are tethered to their e-mail via BlackBerrys even over the weekend leading to communications burnout. The biggest single reason for this is the inherent nature of e-mail itself: it is a point-to-point communication medium. The sender has to decide both the content of the message as well as whom the recipients are. If the recipient list is too large, it contributes to e-mail overload. If it is too small, that could lead to communication gaps and “informational silos” in the organization, where one group in the company doesn’t really know what the other group is doing. Another problem is that each e-mail message is a single unit, making it hard to track conversations among multiple parties. Many e-mail readers thread conversations, but that is done at a syntactic rather than semantic level. Finally, putting everything in e-mail makes it difficult to build institutional memory. We hit the e-mail wall at my company Kosmix recently. When we were less than 30 people, managing by e-mail worked reasonably well. The team was small enough that everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Frequent hallway conversations reinforced relationships. However, once we crossed the 30-person mark, we noticed problems creeping in. We started hearing complaints of e-mail overload and too many meetings. And despite the e-mail overload and too many meetings, people still felt that there was a communication problem and a lack of visibility across teams and projects. We were straining the limits of e-mail as the sole communications mechanism. We knew something had to be done. But what? Sri Subramaniam, our head of engineering, proposed a bold restructuring of our internal communications. He led an effort that resulted in us relying less on e-mail and more on three key Web 2.0 technologies: wikis, blogs, and instant messaging (IM). Here’s how we use these technologies everyday in running our business. Blogs Each employee and each project has a dedicated blog. People can post as often as they wish to their personal or project blog, but they are required to post at least one weekly status update. All blogs are visible to everyone in the company. Anyone can subscribe to the feed for any particular team or individual blog. So for example, Josh in engineering can follow the blog of Mike in sales, if he’s curious what Mike is up to. This results in complete 360-degree visibility throughout the organization. People can also post comments on these blogs. Someone might post a problem they are facing, and others can post comments providing suggestions. This results in automatic grouping of conversations based on topics of interest. The biggest advantage of the blog approach is that it is a publish/subscribe mechanism. I don’t need to decide who to direct my communication to; I just post on my blog. Anyone in the company who is interested in what I’m doing can subscribe to my blog to be notified of updates. And if someone just has a passing interest, they can always read my blog periodically without subscribing to it. This approach also breaks silos, for example, between engineering and marketing, or between marketing and sales. Sometimes the best product ideas come from sales people. And sometimes the best sales ideas come from engineers. No one is required to read any particular blog, with two exceptions: Managers are expected to read the status updates of their team members and post feedback. People working on a project are expected to read each other’s blogs. The blog approach has reduced e-mail overload at Kosmix and even reduced the number of time-consuming “status update” meetings. Most important, the blog serves as an institutional memory — an electronic record of our business. Conversations do not get lost in the ether but are recorded and can be searched at any time in the future by new people on a project or new company employees. Wikis While blogs are great for status updates and discussions around ideas, they are not the best place to put items that serve as reference material: for example, documentation, specs, reports, and so on. The problem is that blogs are in reverse chronological order, and each blog can have just one author, preventing collaborative editing. For these situations, we use a wiki. The internal corporate wiki has sections corresponding to each project and each functional group in the company. Documentation, specs, and reports go into the wiki. The other critical section on the wiki is the “team” section. Every employee has a homepage on the wiki, with a recent photo, describing their responsibilities at work and interests outside of work. As the team grows, and you see a new face at the office, this is a quick way of finding out who that person is. Instant messaging As Kosmix has grown, we now have people working from more than one physical location. In addition, we promote a culture of people working from home whenever it is compatible with their job responsibilities. Thus, we need a substitute for the face-to-face hallway conversations that cannot happen because someone is working from home or from another location. E-mail is not the best option because it is asynchronous and thus loses the spontaneity of a hallway chat. IMing fills this need very well indeed. The entire Kosmix team is on IM. Each team member is required to set the “status” message on their IM client during normal sane working hours to indicate where they are working from. They can also post a “Do not disturb” message to indicate that they don’t welcome interruptions at the moment. IMing leads to quick resolution of many issues without spawning interminable e-mail threads. The effects of the communication restructuring have been immediate and very visible. They include a lot less e-mail and almost none on weekends; better communication among people; and 360 degree visibility for every member of the Kosmix team. After we instituted these changes, everyone on the team feels more productive, more knowledgeable about the company, has more spare time to spend on things outside of work. Online Resources We use twiki for our wiki and blog software at Kosmix. The wiki functionality in twiki is great, but it took a bit of customization work from our indefatigable Subramaniam to make it work well as a blogging platform too. We are planning to release Subramaniam’s twiki tweaks as open source in the next couple of months. Another great option for blogs is WordPress, which allows you to host blogs internal to your company. We went with twiki because of the integrated wiki/blogging solution. We have standardized on Yahoo! Instant Messenger for instant messaging. However, the other IM products such as MSN Instant Messenger and Google Talk have comparable functionality. I would suggest you pick the one most people in your company already use for personal communication. Anand Rajaraman is co-founder of Kosmix with consumer properties www.RightHealth.com, www.RightAutos.com and www.RightTrips.com. He also sits on the board of several technology companies and is a consulting faculty member at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University. His latest thoughts and discussions can be found at http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky.
It’s no secret that instant messaging (IM) is wildly popular. It’s faster than e-mail, and so discreet that two people in the same business meeting can use it to communicate across the room virtually undetected. To top it off, it’s easy to get: many public IM software packages, such as Google Talk and MSN Messenger, are offered as free downloads. But IM carries the same security risks as e-mail — it can fall prey to worms, viruses, Trojans, and “spim” — unwanted spam sent via IM instead of e-mail. It can be intercepted by competitors, allowing trade secrets or confidential client information to fall into the wrong hands. And all of these risks can create the same types of security problems for your business — including regulatory and e-discovery non-compliance risks — that e-mail can. Chances are, you already know what type of e-mail system your office uses, have established guidelines for its use, and are vigorously protecting it with firewalls, anti-viral software, and the like. But are you aware if public IM systems are being used in your office? “It’s one of those stealth technologies, where people just install it, and it’s not blocked by an organization’s gateway,” notes Richi Jennings, an analyst with San Francisco-based Ferris Research. “You could ask many companies, ‘do you use IM?’ and they would say no, but they actually do.” Here are some tips from the experts on ways to minimize your risk: Develop an office-wide IM policy. Put together a written policy for your employees, and take the time to educate them about it. While it’s best to shut down any public IM systems in use in your workplace, companies need to decide such things as whether to allow employees to use public systems for personal use only, such as to family members. “You have to make a decision and stick with it,” says Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst for information and knowledge management for Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. Choose an office-wide internal IM tool. Invest in a secure product, such as IBM’s Lotus Sametime, that features encryption, limited access, and top-class antiviral software for internal business use. Don’t use consumer-based products, such as Google Talk or Yahoo, experts warn. Limit access.Joel Dubin, an independent security consultant and author, recommends configuring buddy lists to only known parties, and limiting internal access to those employees who must communicate real-time. Oversee screen names. Because IM is a very casual form of communication, some employees use offbeat, irreverent, or even racy, screen names that might not fit the corporate image, notes Jennings. “It’s important to not only control who uses it, but to control the screen names employees choose,” he says. Monitor use. As with e-mail, experts recommend monitoring use to detect any internal improper use or external efforts to sabotage the system. Some solutions, such as FaceTime’s, will warn employees in real-time that they are violating acceptable use policies. For businesses wanting to bundle their corporate IM service with other technologies, experts note, there are “a number of anchor points,” notes Koplowitz. “If you have an on-premise e-mail system, you may look to [link IM in with] e-mail,” he says. “But you can also link IM with telephony, or with some other business vendor.” Companies that offer full-service packages that include IM include FaceTime, whose Unified Security Gateway solution provides URL filtering, public IM, VoIP and P2P, and can work with unified communications suites offered by IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft’s Office Communications Server, according to Frank Cabri, FaceTime’s vice president of product management. These types of integrated solutions are likely to become more common at the enterprise level, and to trickle down to small and mid-size business-scale products as well, says Koplowitz. Whatever option you choose, experts advise that you take IM security as seriously as email security. The risks are real.
Suffice it to say, the BlackBerry has become an indispensable tool for millions of small and mid-size businesses, largely in part to its reliable push-mail solution that delivers messages to your phone as soon as they arrive in an inbox. But in order to maintain its competitive edge, the Waterloo, Ontario-based Research in Motion understands it needs to open up its doors to third-party applications to help businesses remain productive while on the go. “There has been phenomenal growth in applications available for the BlackBerry platform,” confirms Tyler Lessard, director of independent software vendor alliances at Research in Motion. “We are signing new partners every day and being approached constantly by people who are looking for ways to increase the mobile capabilities of their applications using the BlackBerry solution.” The following are a few recommended applications that can help you and your employees stay in touch, keep organized and remain competitive, wherever business takes you. Be sure to check with your cell carrier for availability and pricing. TeleNav Rather than purchase a separate GPS unit to help you navigate from point A to B without getting lost, or finding relevant location-based info, a GPS-enabled BlackBerry lets you have it all on one device. Small and mid-size businesses “especially benefit from services like TeleNav because they save on travel time and they reduce the need for road warriors to call in for guidance,” says Carmi Levy, senior vice president for strategic consulting at AR Communications, a Toronto-based marketing communications firm. “[Employees] work more independently, consuming less office time and spending more time in front of customers.” eOffice from DynoPlex eOffice lets you easily access and manage all your documents, wherever and whenever — all stored remotely on your office PC, through a password-protected virtual hard disk on the Internet. As if it were stored locally on the smartphone, you can now retrieve, review, edit, and save documents — such as Microsoft Word or Excel files. “Attachments are an increasingly frequent reality for anyone who sends and receives e-mail, and although the basic BlackBerry OS allows Office files to be viewed, the experience is severely limited,” says Levy. “DynoPlex’s eOffice is often good enough that users can leave their laptops at home and travel lighter on business trips.” SpinVox This voicemail-to-text service can save you time because there’s no need to dial in to pick up your voice mail. Instead, an accurate transcript of the voicemail message is text messaged to you automatically so you can simply read the message on your BlackBerry. After all, you might be in a meeting and unable to answer that important call from a client, your boss, or a member of your staff. Well, now you can discretely glance at a text message which has the content of the voicemail message on your phone. Nuance Voice Control from Nuance Communications Consider it an alternative to using your thumbs to type your way through all of your BlackBerry’s functions — such as making calls, drafting an e-mail or adding a calendar entry — as you can use the power of your voice to take command. Your spoken words are transcribed into text for, say, an e-mail message, or you can choose to send your voice clip as an e-mail attachment. “Voice-activated control and navigation can remove the last barrier to on-the-road productivity — the tiny keyboard — from potential objections to wider mobile deployment,” explains Levy. WebMessenger from Apptix This all-in-one instant messaging (IM) client supports a broad range of services, including AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber. For small and mid-size businesses with mobile employees that need to routinely interact with the home office in real-time, “the presence awareness offered by an always-on IM client can be a compelling driver of productivity,” says Levy. “Road warriors can get answers to their questions more quickly, which allows them to spend more time servicing customers and less time waiting around.” Other BlackBerry applications to check out: “We find that organizations are interested in applications that access [small business] CRM and accounting packages such as Goldmine, ACT, and Quicken,” says RIM’s Lessard. Impatica Showmate allows mobile professionals to deliver PowerPoint presentations directly from their BlackBerry smartphone. MobiMate’s Worldmate Live and Handmark’s PocketExpress can greatly enhance personal productivity and efficiency while traveling with tools that include flight status updates, rental car information, and world weather. Virtual Reach’s Viigo is an RSS reader that can track, download, and display critical pieces of regularly updated content, such as news, stock values, and sports.
Using software such as AOL’s Instant Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, 50 percent of employees are using consumer instant message (IM) programs via company computers, according to a 2006 survey of 416 primarily small and midsize businesses by the America Management Association and The ePolicy Institute. These consumer IM clients frequently quietly slide their way on to company networks because employees often use the same programs to chat with friends and co-workers when they’re off the clock, too. But consumer IM programs also can enable something that many companies won’t even risk these days when it comes to e-mail: Unfettered, unmonitored and unencrypted communication over the public Internet. What’s worse is that only 47 percent of employers are aware of the IM programs running on their systems, according to the AMA study. “IM is nothing more than turbo charged e-mail — and all the IM risks that exist are the same as with e-mail,” says Nancy Flynn, executive director of The ePolicy Institute and author of several books including, Instant Messaging Rules: A Business Guide to Managing Policies, Security, and Legal Issues for Safe IM Communication. IM poses some of the same risks to a business as e-mail, from allowing employees to disseminate confidential company information to exposing company computers and networks to a virus, worm, or Trojan Horse that quickly spreads. And with those risks come the potential for a firm to be subject to the same legal liabilities for employee conduct over IM. So then the question becomes: Should companies allow employees to use free consumer programs or should they install enterprise IM that come with more security features? Here’s how to do decide if a business should go with business IM: Does your company need to conduct business via IM? Employees might not even have a legitimate business reason to be IMing the outside world, in which case a company could forgo allowing IM programs altogether. But if employees need to IM each other, vendors, or clients to conduct business, then a company needs to use secure IM, says Richi Jennings, lead e-mail security analyst for Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based research firm. “If they are going to use a consumer-based service, IMs should still be encrypted,” he says. “And there is no substitute for having good antivirus, spyware, and malware control in place.” Enterprise IM programs also can assign company-branded, professional screen names to employees. Does your company need to archive IMs? Regulators in the financial services arena, for instance, have made it clear that they don’t make a distinction between e-mail and when it comes to retention requirements. “When employees engage in IM chat via public IM tools, your electronic business records are not being retained,” Flynn notes. “It’s essential for all businesses–no matter what your size or industry–to retain your records if you’re in a regulated field.” For many companies, complying with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley means logging and archiving IM sessions between employees and clients–or anyone. IM management tools or enterprise IM products can offer a built-in logging and archiving feature for legal or regulatory compliance. Free consumer IM programs, on the other hand, do allow users to choose to save individual chat sessions, but they don’t include enterprise-wide records management or archiving features. Does your company need to secure IM? If IM is being used on company time, experts say the answer is always, “Yes.” But there are different approaches to boosting IM security. IBM Lotus Sametime, Novel GroupWise Messenger, and Microsoft Live Communications Server (LCS) are among the enterprise IM programs that offer an entire IM infrastructure installed on a company’s internal servers to enable archiving or defenses against threats like malware or IM spam (a.k.a. spim). Enterprise IM programs can be integrated with a user’s e-mail program or allow Web conferencing as well. For instance, Microsoft LCS can allow employees to IM people who use public IM programs but it still encrypts and logs messages. IMB Lotus Sametime even encrypts users’ buddy lists. IM management or gateway products — such as Akonix, Akeni, FaceTime, or Symantec’s IMLogic–can also add layers of security to existing IM products like Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger or MSN Messenger by archiving messages, scanning for viruses or blocking messages containing restricted phrases to prevent that data from leaving a business’s network. Depending on the level of security, management and additional features offered, enterprise IM can cost up to $5,000 for FaceTime’s RTG500 gateway product to about $500 for Microsoft LCS for five users to $10 to $40 per user for Akeni or IMLogic. AOL’s new AIM Pro powered by WebEx, which encrypts IMs and allows users to securely share documents or conduct conference calls, is free. No matter what the size of a business, experts say there are affordable solutions for adding the necessary security needed if employees are going to be IMing on the clock: “It only takes one employee to accidentally transmit the company’s client list or employees’ social security numbers, for example,” Flynn says. “If you decide to allow IM, you have to decide if you’re going to install an enterprise grade system or use freebies with IM gateway management technology to give your company the ability to monitor, filter, purge, and retain IM chat just like you do e-mails.”
