collaborate

Who is Microsoft's biggest competitor? Some say "itself," and with good reason, as Computerworld points out. Microsoft's biggest Windows competitor is pirated Windows.

But there's another company that is increasingly setting its sights on Microsoft, and it's doing so largely unnoticed. The company is networking giant Cisco, which through a mix of open-source software and collaboration technology is launching a credible campaign to deep-six Microsoft's desktop dominance.

In the past year Cisco has acquired PostPath, which enables it to move Exchange users to its Linux-based, drop-in Exchange clone (PDF), and Jabber, which adds presence and instant messaging. … Read more

Online storage service Box.net has a new tool for internal collaboration. Multiple Box users can now work on a shared Web document, using a built-in editor the company has made from scratch.

While there is no option to work on a single document at the same time, like you can with Google Docs and Zoho Writer, it features all the things you'd want for putting together a sturdy document. You can pick from various fonts, format to your heart's content, and drop in photos--either from your hard drive or a URL. All the while it saves what … Read more

More than a decade ago, Microsoft won the office productivity suite war against WordPerfect, and arguably, Office has seen little innovation since.

Just as Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker has argued in the browser market--namely, that once Microsoft had beat out browser competitors, it failed to innovate for years--so, too, has Microsoft rested on its Office laurels for far too long.

Enter DocVerse, a stealth San Francisco start-up created by two former Microsoft employees that aims to make Microsoft Office operate more like Google Docs, as reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. DocVerse provides a 1MB plug-in to Office 2007 that … Read more

A few months after Barack Obama’s historic election, and a couple of weeks after the release of Barry Libert’s and Rick Faulk’s book Obama Inc. (and, of course, Obama's inauguration), the first start-ups are popping up that directly apply some of the widely heralded business lessons emerging from the innovative campaign. The fact that most of these lessons lie in the marketing domain supports the view I’ve expressed earlier and on numerous occasions: 1) Marketing will (again) become the number one change agent in business, 2) when it follows the new rules of “marketing with … Read more

The new issue of our design mind magazine is out. The theme is "Motion," and it features a great interview with famed ballet choreographer Alonzo King, who discusses the risks and rewards of collaboration with San Francisco Chronicle dance columnist Rachel Howard:

"Collaboration is always risky. You don't have total control. Also, with choreography you have such a short amount of time to do it. If you're writing a book you've got years; a film, you can shop it around; Broadway, take it out six weeks for previews. With most choreographers, you've got … Read more

Even as Forrester Research predicts a 3 percent drop in global information technology revenues, as reported by The Register, investment bank Goldman Sachs is piling on the woe it promulgated in an earlier report that CNET covered with a new report entitled "IT Spending Survey: Mapping 2009."

As detailed in the report, incumbent vendors are about to see their sacrosanct maintenance revenue streams get pillaged:

Accounting for more than 50 percent of revenues at vendors such as Oracle, this is going to be painful, indeed, though the report also calls out that some of the bigger brand names are likely to weather the downturn better than most.

Even so, my company, and others that I advise, are seeing a flight from expensive maintenance contracts to open-source alternatives. At least half of my pipeline is filled with existing customers looking to dump their maintenance contracts with incumbent vendors.

Why? Because a solid open-source product can easily cost 10 percent of a proprietary vendor's maintenance contract, while delivering equivalent or better functionality. While any change will likely necessitate some third-party consulting--the No. 1 target for the budget ax in 2009--the cost advantages of doing this can still be substantial.

That said, any benefits from new projects must be near-immediate:… Read more

Correction, 2:02 p.m. PST: This story misstated the number of Allin's businesses being acquired by Dell. It is two.

Dell has acquired Allin's Microsoft IT consulting business, as well as its collaboration and business applications services business, in a $12 million stock deal.

The acquisition, announced Friday, aims to bolster Dell's consulting work in the areas of designing and implementing scalable networks and application architectures via Allin's technology infrastructure business, as well as in the areas of collaboration and business applications.

"The expertise we gain from Allin further deepens our ability to help … Read more

Cisco has debuted an iPhone application that can make use of the company's popular WebEx collaboration tool. The new app, available free from the App Store, allows users click to join and actively collaborate in WebEx meetings. A company statement reads:

"The online meeting experience gives users the ability to take advantage of simultaneous web and audio conferencing capabilities from Cisco on both the 3G mobile and 802.11 wireless (Wi-Fi) networks. The solution supports multiple telephony configurations including SaaS-based telephony from Cisco WebEx Meeting Center, premises-based telephony from Cisco Unified MeetingPlace, or telephony from Cisco's service … Read more

In a recent discussion with enterprise CTOs, I asked why they don't contribute more code back to open-source projects. There were a variety of answers, but one of the biggest sticking points was a preference for avoiding their legal departments.

In an interesting twist, however, Martin Fowler points to a different way to engage in open-source development that is unlikely to cause angst among one's JD-ridden colleagues: intra-company open-source projects.

Think about it. A company like GE employs over 300,000 people, with wide-ranging subsidiaries and departments. A project built by GE Finance might have direct relevance to GE's NBC Universal unit, for example, and greater efficiency can be created by providing open-source development methodologies within large companies. Indeed, this is what Collabnet and other open-source development infrastructure companies have long promised large enterprises.

But it's not just about large enterprises, as Fowler suggests:… Read more