competing to deliver collaborative communications - electronic whiteboard

If you want your employees to work better together, give them less fragmented enterprise communication.
Make the desktop more like a smartphone, and make the enterprise experience more like a consumer technology.
None of these are new goals, but they seem to start to become easier to achieve.
So far, despite years of unified communication technology and rhetoric, I think the most unified communication most people have is on their phones, this is a call, message, acquisition and more than a dozen other modes of interaction that have been improving all the time.
Now that the desktop experience is catching up with smartphones, the enterprise experience is beginning to approach the convenience of the consumer experience.
Looking back at last week's corporate connectivity trade show in Orlando, I 've been thinking about the interaction between communication and collaboration and how the equation has changed.
As a core experience to stimulate collaboration, team messaging is becoming increasingly important and integrated with audio and video calls.
When I wrote my social collaboration book for dummies in 2013, the initial version of Slack's team messaging service was just released, but I 've never heard of it ---
I admit that I may not realize that teamchat products will become so important.
At that time, Microsoft's $1.
The 2 billion acquisition of Yammer is just the past year, and its grand plan to integrate Yammer and SharePoint for more social collaboration experiences is still vague.
Cisco also launched a product called Quad in the corporate social collaboration market, later renamed WebEx social, and finally abandoned its partnership with Jive Software (
As an independent ESN supplier, it is still on the market at present).
A notable feature of Quad should be that you can start phone calls and video calls with your contacts.
Since then, Microsoft has launched some social and teamwork experiences independent of Yammer, the latest of which is the Microsoft team.
Of course, this can cause confusion: Yammer group or Outlook/Office group?
Skype chat or Microsoft team chat?
Fortunately, I did hear some clarification about yammer's relative positioning with respect to the Enterprise Connect team, which I'll talk about later.
Meanwhile, Cisco has been refining Cisco Spark, which went public as a team collaboration space a few years ago for sharing messages and files before and after online meetings.
Over time, Spark is becoming a more complete unified communications client, a super collection of different online collaboration tools that the company has created over the years.
Cisco has its own product line and has overlapping challenges with WebEx and Jabber, but the trend seems to be to re-shape the brand of Spark.
One of Cisco's main members
Stage presentation is a touch screen whiteboard Spark Board, which is a remote rendering system.
The traditional focus of enterprise connectivity is Internet telephony and video, but team information appears in the picture as a launch pad for both, and where it is connected to other software through the application programming interface.
As general manager and deputy general manager of the conference
Chairman Eric Krapf said, "APIs is a big part of the reason why teamwork is so promising.
"API integration is an important part of the Slack story that allows other applications to be published into the team message stream, such as reporting that tasks tracked in another productivity application have been completed.
The Api can also allow chatbots (or just "bots")
Listen in a conversation and respond to keywords or commands.
The most complex robots use natural language processing, collect information from many sources, and have enough artificial intelligence to respond in context.
For example, the robot may remind you of the phone, chat information or email you exchanged last time with a colleague or customer contact, or voluntarily share relevant documents according to the conversation to minimize the need for search.
This makes assembling various APIs and bot partners a major battleground for the future of team messaging.
At the recent corporate IT trade show, the discussion of team messaging and collaboration as usual, no elephant in the room is slack ---
As a model of collaboration, this startup brings the most exciting experience to team chat and gets the most viral adoption.
Slack came to the market as a reincarnation of Internet Relay Chat for social and mobile networks, which was first seen in the design and software development team.
Although Slack responds to competitors from the unified communications world by adding peersto-
Point-to-point audio and video calls, I don't think Slack will aspire to be a commercial phone system when he grows up.
While Slack has recently launched the Enterprise edition of its products, it avoids the tradition of enterprise technology sales and marketing, as it appears in these events.
HipChat, Atlassian's competitor, attended the meeting because it provided integrated video calls, and Oji udezuecharized, group product manager, described remote collaboration as being the same
He said: "It should be like if you spin in your scene and say, 'Hey, let's fix this, 'it should be-
Like Uber.
"Like Slack, HipChat is not a phone player, but a unified communication that combines multiple modes of communication and collaboration.
I consulted RingCentral, one of the main sponsors of enterprise connectivity, and should not be mistaken for being an objective journalist of their concern.
What impressed me was that I saw the convergence around the vision of "collaborative communications.
"I didn't think of this sentence, but I like it because it helps to explain the importance attached to the communication that led to the collaboration, rather than taking the collaboration or social networking as a core experience.
Every industry player has a different view of the experience, and of course they say their version is the best, but they are competing to offer something similar.
In 2015, RingCentral acquired Glip, a team messaging service struggling under the shadow of Slack, but it has some interesting features like integrated task management and video chat.
Ideas to start a conversation as a team message before moving to the real world
There is already a TIME video experience.
RingCentral offers business telephony in the cloud and other communications services such as online meetings in its RingCentral Office suite.
RingCentral added Glip as part of the bundle-
Click call and conference call to start.
Initially, phone integration relies on desktop software to make phone calls from your computer.
With Glip-based next-generation RingCentral Office, making and answering calls becomes part of the same network
User Experience for sending messages and sharing files.
Voice mail and fax pop up as attachments in the same message stream.
The call function utilizes the WebRTC standard implemented in Google Chrome (
Or desktop client with the same open source base).
The mobile client has the same range of features that you can "flip" the calls that are started on your computer to your phone or desktop phone.
Microsoft, Cisco and others like Unify and Broadsoft are targeting similar experiences.
RingCentral is an exception because it insists on pushing the "pure cloud" approach, in part because it doesn't have any in-house technology to sell.
Competitors with in-house deployment technology installed are more friendly to hybrid scenarios where some user or software features may be transferred to the cloud while others may remain in the company
Speaking of hybrids: Microsoft's Skype for Business is a mix of Skype cloud call and video call technology it acquired in 2011, before it was previously known as Lync or Office Communicator, this is an internal instant messaging platform that adds call functionality.
Skype for business has evolved into a more complete business telephony service and is now available both internally and in the cloud as part of a high-end Office 365 license.
Like SharePoint, Yammer, and many other Microsoft products,
The advantage of the released Microsoft team is that with a wider enterprise license, customers can "get" something for free.
The team uses SharePoint as the underlying data store for messages and documents, taking advantage of a large number of enterprise data management advantages, as well as strong integration with other products in the Microsoft portfolio.
I think it would be even more embarrassing to try to combine SharePoint with previously independent Yammer technologies.
While Skype has its own instant messaging and group chat, these messages are relatively short compared to ongoing messages in the team, which better maintains the conversation threads for ongoing projects and business processes.
Yammer will continue as a platform for social publishing, as in corporate communications, just like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wants to post information to the entire company in a media that invites likes and feedback comments (
I heard an example from multiple Microsoft speakers at different meetings, so this is obviously the official route to the issue).
Teams products are designed to be tight-knit teams.
I agree with one of the generation gaps between "I'm publishing, I'm sharing" social collaboration models, you can "respond" we send a lot of small messages to each other, and share something in the process.
"There is no hard line between the two (
Maybe some of the more successful Yammer communities are "chatters ")
But this is a key issue.
This is also a scale problem. -
Company-wide team chats quickly become unavailable as they generate too much information, but the company-
Extensive social publishing work is good.
Since Microsoft has a dominant corporate email platform, it is unlikely to talk about team information as an email killer as others do, but a Microsoft spokesperson does call it "reducing the bulk of fake emails" and is a better way to share files with a group of people.
Dan Stevenson, Microsoft's chief group product manager, said the advantage of having Yammer, Outlook, Skype and SharePoint was "we got a huge signal from our customers about where the gap is.
"In other words, neither Outlook nor its brothers have completed some team communication tasks.
At present, one of the shortcomings of the Microsoft team is to support the invitation of guest users to join the team Network dialogue, which is a fairly common feature of other team messaging platforms.
Analyst Phil Edholm (PKE Consulting)
Brent KellyKelCor)
Raised the issue at their meeting, "Cisco.
Microsoft: What happened to Titan in the new terrain?
"The comparison between the two is always important because" a lot of people are in their environment, "Kelly said. ".
One advantage of Cisco Spark is that paying customers can invite users outside their organization who are free of charge, although limited to access specific team conversations they are invited to participate in.
"These people can really get involved in Spark's full collaborative experience," Kelly said . ".
Microsoft plans to provide visitors to the team, he said, but has not yet determined how this will work.
Ed Holm said Microsoft also has great advantages, including the wider technology partnership and the fact that the team is packing with Office 365.
Team messaging has the greatest potential to change the work of knowledge workers, and they have also participated in many online meetings, says Ed Holm.
Team messaging provides space for "continuity between meeting events"-
This is how teamwork works.
"I think it's an interesting perspective that matches how Cisco sees the world, because they use Spark as a partner for online meetings, but it doesn't say how much team messaging tools like Slack and Glip are used to avoid the need for meetings, and support online or closed between people who rarely get together at meetings.
At the same time, I have to say that one of the more impressive technologies demonstrated in enterprise connectivity came up in the keynote address of Cisco Cloud Collaboration Technology Group SVP and General Manager jens Meggers.
He shows how the new Spark board meeting room system recognizes him by facial recognition when he goes to the Spark board meeting room, and knows his calendar, automatically voluntarily starting the right scheduled meeting.
Facial recognition also allows automatic subtitles during video conferencing, the names of each participant are displayed on their faces, and digital pan and zoom are automatically re-displayed
Design pictures based on the number of people sitting around the conference table.
Voice recognition built into the same experience allows him to ask questions such as "when is Germany now" and you can imagine that it might be useful to know these questions before making a phone call or video call
There is even a demo of a Spark VR experience designed to use a 3D headset.
With the presentation of all these advanced technologies, there is little mention of team information in the keynote (
Although at other meetings, it was more loved by Cisco speakers).
But the key is to tie together many ways of communication and cooperation.
In addition, you can imagine speech recognition and speech recognition. to-
Text will play a bigger role in the future session UI, including teamwork.
For all the potential of these technologies, I cannot fail to admit that in the main stage group discussion represented by the enterprise technology manager, most people still have-
A list of future tasks.
Mirrill McMullen, AIG's chief technology officer, lamented that half of his company's meetings were still 10-by sending an audio teleconference number and getting people to play-
Digital code accessed.
Just sending a URL that people can click on to start an online meeting will be a big step forward, he said.
"I couldn't reach the team until I had them stop making calls," he said . ".