collaborate

A recently released report from IBM (PDF) shows that midsize businesses (100-1,000 employees) are taking advantage of technology better than both their larger and smaller peers to grow during lean economic times.

According to the report, as economies around the world continue their recovery, midsize companies have been the engines driving economic growth--reacting to a "new normal" in terms of spending and growth.

In previous periods of global economic difficulty midsize companies have struggled, often because they have had less capital available to invest in new products and also because big businesses have tended to exploit their … Read more

Facebook is holding an event next week as part of the Web 2.0 Summit taking place in San Francisco, and, according to ZDNet, the topic du jour will be deeper integration between the 500 million user-strong social network and Microsoft's Office Web Apps service.

Facebook and Microsoft already collaborate on a variant of the Web-based Office suite called Docs, which the two companies launched together in late April. However, ZDNet says that this new version will be more closely integrated into Facebook's in-box experience, which is said to be getting an overhaul that builds in Microsoft's … Read more

Adobe today announced the latest version of its Acrobat suite of products.

Set to hit the market in the next 30 days, the new Reader X and Acrobat X products are promising tighter security, better collaboration, and easier PDF reading.

The free Adobe Reader X will offer a new Protected Mode to sandbox, or isolate, JavaScript code, 3D rendering, and image parsing in order to better secure PDFs. Adobe has seen an increasing number of security holes in its PDF technology over the past few years, creating trouble for the many people who use the ubiquitous file format. The company … Read more

IBM announced a new cloud-based service today for LotusLive that allows users to access collaborative tools and connect with others over the Web. The service attempts to "accelerate the adoption of cloud-collaboration services" in the corporate world, the company said.

According to IBM, the new LotusLive Collaboration Suite, available now, includes "enterprise-class e-mail, calendaring, instant messaging, Web conferencing, file sharing, and social-networking services."

The company has also added a "communities" collaboration feature to LotusLive, which allows users to tag important data, share files, keep track of projects, and more. The feature provides access to … Read more

Cisco is debuting a trio of new and enhanced products that it believes will help people better collaborate and share content with each other, as more companies go virtual and more employees work remotely.

Announced on Friday, the company's new Quad, Prosumer Video, and updated WebEx Connect IM products each serve a specific niche, allowing business users to find and connect with the right people and share information within their organizations, said Cisco.

Cisco Quad is an enterprise collaboration tool that offers voice, video, and social networking in one application. Through Quad, people will be able to search their … Read more

Scenios is a new video host launching Monday that hopes to find the sweet spot between traditional storage services and high-end digital asset management software. In many ways it's not so different from the former, except that it's entirely dedicated to video files and the collaborative video-creation process.

To get files onto the service, users need to upload from their browser. There is no desktop or mobile component yet, though Scenios CEO Mark Davis, whom CNET chatted with last week, says a piece of desktop software is on the way. It will sync up local files with their … Read more

In a somewhat Quixotic quest, Jive Software has been showcasing a white paper titled "Jive vs. Open Source" (PDF), with a page devoted to what it claims are the negatives of Drupal and Liferay.

On one hand, as CMS Watch argues, it's Marketing 101 to accentuate one's positives while highlighting the competition's weaknesses.

But by choosing to focus on open source, in general, and Drupal, in particular, Jive has effectively taken out a billboard advertisement that essentially proclaims: "We're really worried about Drupal. It's a big-time threat to our business."

No … Read more

It's 2010. The Internet is pervasive and mobile. Business processes, supply chains, and financial markets are globally connected and electronically executed. There are no flying cars, but in many other ways, the future has arrived. Yet when we look at the tools and processes organizations use to create and update documents--the lifeblood for business processes--they're straight out of the 1990s playbook. The world's changed, but the office applications most in use today--our word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation programs--basically have the same priorities and follow the same strategies they did two decades ago.

Sure, today's office apps … Read more

Electric power companies and industry groups on Tuesday launched the SmartGrid Consumer Coalition, a nonprofit with the goal of getting consumers involved in managing their energy consumption.

As previously reported, the newly formed coalition is made up of utilities, smart-grid companies, research groups, and one consumer advocacy group. During a press briefing at the DistribuTech utility conference, representatives said members intend to do research on consumer preferences and collaborate on ways to inform consumers about smart-grid technologies.

"We don't think the smart grid is smart until the consumer is actually involved," said Katherine Hamilton, a president of … Read more