Making sense of Microsoft Collaboration

Herein lies the problem: While Microsoft talks about building a seamless, pervasive collaboration platform, many analysts and users complain that the company has done a poor job of clearly sorting out and positioning the many product pieces that constitute that strategy. They believe there are some pieces that overlap each other in terms of core functions and they don’t get an adequate feel for the company’s long-term commitment to some components.

What seem most perplexing to some industry observers are the various communication products and how they might work in concert with server and desktop productivity software to form a more overarching set of solutions. This has contributed to a rather fractured view among users as to the breadth of the company’s actual collaboration strategy.

Read the full story (Redmond Magazine)

Understanding Performance and Collaborative Workspaces

A new term has appeared on the analyst and consultant radar screens and magic quadrants. This term has a few variations – information workplace (Forrester), high performance workplace (Gartner), performance workspace (Accenture) – but the focus is the same, i.e., to provide an integrated information management environment that improves employee performance and productivity. In my presentations, I use performance workspace, and this is the term I will use throughout this article.

I like the approach used by Accenture to describe the role of a performance workspace. Accenture talks about the “nine performance accelerators,” which are learning, performance management, business intelligence, process support, search and data relationships, access to applications, knowledge, access to experts, and collaboration. Whereas these nine accelerators clearly define the integrated information business users need to do their jobs, they raise questions about the relationship of performance workspaces to technologies such as business portals, knowledge management, and even business intelligence and performance management. Let’s examine these relationships in more detail beginning with the business portal.

Read the full story (B-Eye Network)

Power Of A Data Warehouse In The Palm Of Your Hand

What’s smarter than a smartphone?

An intelligentphone–a cell phone that displays business intelligence served up by an enterprise-class analytics system.

Information Builders last week became the first major BI vendor to offer a tool for crunching numbers from smartphones. The company introduced a mobile version of its WebFocus Active Reports, software for collecting, analyzing, and distributing company data. Previously, Information Builders and other BI vendors had made it possible to push data-analysis results to mobile devices, but this goes a step further by letting on-the-go professionals view reports, conduct calculations, create charts, and change chart types from the back of a cab.

Read the full story (Information Week)