Collaborative

MindTouch closes a banner year

While it's true that open-source companies, in general, are starting from a small base of revenue and adoption, it's equally true that the real measure of any company is growth. If it's good, it will grow.

Hence, it's great to see MindTouch, a commercial open-source collaboration company, booming:

Over 200,000 active installs - 100 percent increase Installs on all major Linux distributions - 600 percent increase More than 3,000 registered members at the developer community - 30 percent increase Translated into 16 languages - 500 percent increase… Read more

Jive's Clearspace: Using Web 2.0 tools to avoid e-mail in business

Are people fed up enough with traditional collaboration software that they'll try this "Web 2.0 in business" idea? Jive Software is betting they are.

The company on Monday is expected to announce the availability of Clearspace 2.0, a set of tools for sharing information and making connections within a business or between a company and outside partners.

Employees create a space to share documents, see what colleagues are online, or have ongoing discussions.

The product was first launched last year, a departure from Jive's software for hosting Web forums. The company raised $15 million … Read more

What I learned from OSBC 2008

Having had a day to ruminate about the Open Source Business Conference 2008, a few key takeaways suggest themselves. It was by far the best OSBC yet, with a far more diverse audience and speaking faculty that we've had before. This naturally leads to a diverse set of "conclusions" arising from the event:

Enterprises love open source but the business models necessary to fuel both their happiness and that of the vendors still need a lot of work. Jon Williams of Kaplan Test suggested in his keynote, as Dirk Hohndel captures, that the more happy he is with his commercial open-source software, the less likely he will be to pay for it. Why? Because his developers will acquire the expertise over time to support themselves and because the product will mature to the point that support will be less necessary.… Read more

What's driving Microsoft SharePoint adoption?

Microsoft's SharePoint has now topped $1 billion in licenses and is perhaps the fastest-growing product in Microsoft's history. What is driving that growth? The same thing that has driven all of Microsoft's most successful products: Microsoft removes complexity (and cost) from existing markets, as Craig Roth notes:

To a certain extent, the excitement about SharePoint has really been a reflection of disillusionment with existing collaboration, content management, and portal products. The people that are interested in SharePoint - despite already having incumbent alternatives - see at first glance a product that may finally provide easy-to-use, inexpensive, web-based collaborative solutions.

Love them or hate them, Microsoft does lower the bar to computing. Its products can be shoddy (SharePoint is no winner in that department - just try scaling it) but that's a trade-off many are willing to make in order to have something, anything that works reasonably well at a reasonable price.… Read more

Extend your Office apps via Live Workspace

I spent Wednesday afternoon getting to know Microsoft's new Office Live Workspace, a free service that lets you store Office files online for easy access and sharing.

Once I got used to what the service isn't--it isn't a way to actually work on the files in a browser--I came to appreciate how easy the service makes it to save Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on the Web, and open them in their original app on any PC with an Internet link.

The biggest downside is how difficult it is to get the service working on a Vista machine running Office 2007. I was uploading and downloading Office 2003 documents on my XP machine in just a few minutes, but I had to jump through a series of hoops to do the same in their Office 2007 equivalents on my newer Vista PC.

I decided to start from scratch by creating a new Windows Live account rather than using my existing Hotmail account. Signing up for the account was a breeze, though I opted out of most of the options the installer presented. For example, I had no interest in downloading Messenger, the Windows Live Toolbar (my browser's cluttered enough already), or anything having to do with OneCare, which single-handedly destroyed my home network when I tried out the beta last summer. Be sure to uncheck the option to make MSN your home page, and you may want to avoid sending Microsoft any more data than the company already helps itself to.

Once the Windows Live installation completed, it took just a few more clicks to get started with Office Live Workspace. You're prompted to give the generic workspace a name and description, which you can change later simply by mousing over the name in the left pane and choosing one of the options that appears.

Of course, there's not much you can do with the service until you get some files uploaded. You can add files from inside the workspace one at a time or in batches, though the batch approach uses an ActiveX control, and thus requires Internet Explorer 6 or higher. Since I normally use Firefox (and had used that browser to create the workspace), switching to IE just to upload a bunch of files at once would have been a major inconvenience. Still, I never intended to use this method to add files to the workspace. Instead, I downloaded the Office Live Add-in, which lets you upload files to and download them from the workspace directly inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

… Read more

Twiddla takes home SXSW award despite sluggish performance

Collaborative whiteboarding applications can be handy tools for small groups looking to do some brainstorming despite geographical displacement. Meet Twiddla, a free tool that lets you mark up media and live Web sites, or simply organize ideas together on a virtual whiteboard. It also tacks on live communication with text chat and free VoIP conference calling that doesn't require additional plug-ins or software.

The application won an award for technical achievement at last night's SXSW Interactive Web Awards. While technologically fantastic, in my testing I ran up against some noticeable speed and local resource problems. At times I … Read more

Microsoft goes public with Office Live Workspace beta

Regular readers of this blog know that I don't believe that Google Apps is a viable alternative to Microsoft's Office.

While Microsoft is not releasing a completely online version of its Office on Tuesday, it is releasing Office Live Workspace, an online-collaboration tool for Office that works in cooperation with the desktop application suite.

Workspace enables users to view documents online, even if their computer doesn't have Office installed. However, if they want to make edits, they have to download it and make changes in the appropriate Office application.

For users who have Office installed on their … Read more

Google goes after Microsoft SharePoint

Google Sites was just launched and its target is clear: Microsoft SharePoint. While it has an uphill battle--security and a lack of the complex features that SharePoint has, for example--its biggest problem is that it doesn't connect with the content production tools that most people spend their (enterprise) content-producing lives in:

Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.

Of course, Google Sites is free, which will cover a multitude of other problems, especially since Microsoft SharePoint turns out to be amazingly overpriced for a Microsoft product. Microsoft has, according to CMS Wire's analysis, completely priced the SME market out of SharePoint.… Read more

IBM's 450 million-strong problem with Lotus Symphony...and how to crack it

IBM is now giving away its Lotus Symphony product for free. Not "free" as in open source, but rather as in "Please take since people won't pay for it," as only a few hundred thousand downloads have been registered since September 2007.

The gesture is intended to take away money from Microsoft - probably a losing cause going head-to-head on Microsoft's territory - but also to provide a platform upon which to sell IBM's collaboration software. This second strategy has a better chance of success, but would be much better off it didn't first require enterprises to adopt Lotus Symphony because, quite frankly, they won't.

A much better route would be to a) extend from Microsoft Office (though this is fraught with problems because Microsoft controls the platform) or b) shift the battle to new terrain that Microsoft doesn't own, as Google has.

If I were a betting man, I'd lay my money on email as the disruptive platform that IBM should build upon, and I don't mean it's widely used by hugely clunky Domino/Lotus Notes combo. I mean Zimbra or Mozilla's new email push.… Read more