A recent IDG report highlighted that there will be 40 trillion inbox clogging spam e-mail messages this year resulting in smart companies building separate email system - email systems that are detached from the Internet.On the surface, it may seem excessive to build a private email system to avoid spam. But the strategy does have merits. Its not that employees won’t be able to email the outside world (many of them need to just to do their jobs) but rather it’ll separate external email from internal communications.

Now lets see if we can take this thought process a little further. What if employees were limited to say a hundred emails a day. And if they went over that limit they were charged 25 cents per email sent. What would that do to the organization? Would it mean more meetings? More stopping by each other’s desks? Better and more efficient uses of the corporate intranet? A reduction in knowledge sharing? Increased productivity as employees would be spending less time cleaning up their inboxes? 

It is hard to know but it might be one way to fight what I’m going to call “internal spam” just as private email systems fight public spam. This doesn’t get much attention but I’m willing to bet it hampers productivity and fuels laziness. 

Wi5Connect has built a learning platform that integrates three capabilities: learning management system, communities, and analytics.  I recently spoke with Matthew Bowman, their President and CEO.  He described the education model they created which I think nicely integrates formal instruction with peer learning and knowledge management.

First, there is a learning management system that supports multiple presentation formats (video, audio, Powerpoint and others).  After participation in the formal part of the learning experience, two types of assessment can be conducted. There are traditional testing formats. You can also do a more dynamic Flash-based assessment that can provide more content in the assessment format.  Then participants go through a goal setting process for how they will take the learning back to their work place.  Next, they apply the new skills and come back to a community of peers and share their experiences.  Below is an image of the learning module and the pedagogy used to help users learn and apply the contents of each lesson.

Here is screen shot of the Wi5Connect goal engine that allows people set goals to help them put into practice the new knowledge they gained from the online training.

I think that the community experience is where the much of the impactful learning in achieved. Many studies have shown that much of real business learning occurs in informal conversations with peers. The community provides a platform for these conversations and a focus for them. Below you see some of the components of the community as you can see the tabs from the home page of the community.

This community sharing provides a knowledge capture function for the enterprise as it captures insights and lessons learned by the participants.  Then the community members score the value of the lessons, as well as the impact of the skills obtained from the lessons. This sharing and scoring is preserved in an accessible format, rather than lost in conversations or buried in emails.

Matthew said that this type of program helps with employee retention in several ways. First, the investment in learning in helps the employee to do their jobs better and shows a willingness by the enterprise to invest in their employees. Second, the social network developed during the experience helps with on the job social networking and helps build greater commitment to the enterprise. Since this is a virtual experience, it helps build the social network across geographically diverse areas that might not otherwise occur. At the same time it gives a business purposes to the social networking. This type of networking also helps reduce political barriers between departments and fosters better overall communication within the company. All of this makes sense to me.

Wi5Connect has two versions of this approach. There is LearnSocial that is applied within the enterprise.  Then there is CommSocial that is designed for customers and prospective clients. CommSocial provides firms a chance to offer training in the products they sell and receive useful customer feedback. It also provides a platform for customers to cross sell to each other and to prospective clients. Secure login is provided for security purposes. CommSocial can separate communities for any reason such as keeping competitors apart.  Wi5Connect has found high use for the communities in both versions and this is not surprising. You can also integrate CommSocial with a CRM tool to track customer and prospect use.  Here is a screen shot of the learning piece in action.

The virtual environments are especially useful in a down economy as they are very cost effective. LearnSocial allows a single person to literally coach and train thousands of employees across the globe. I like the integration of social networking with learning. It puts an enterprise 2.0 spin on the platform with all the advantages of transparency, accessibility, and built-in knowledge capture. 

As you know if you’ve been tuning in to Bill’s reviews, he spends considerable time talking to the companies’ product managers and assessing the apps for a hard look at how these 2.0 tools can help individuals and organizations better communicate and collaborate, catalog and share knowledge, engage users and customers, manage projects and further support existing business processes.

And while other directories of 2.0 apps exist, we believe Appopedia serves a particular purpose, focusing specifically on work-related tools that help you manage and grow your business rather than every Web 2.0 app under the sun (in fact, AppGap contributor Anita Campbell called for just such a resource before she knew we were toying with the idea of it).  We’ve been developing the new section over the past month or two and hope you’ll check it out and provide input on what admittedly is a work in progress (we’ve already got a few tweaks on the way).

As you’ll see we’ve organized the reviews by various criteria, e.g., product category, we hope you’ll find useful. If you’ve used any of the tools please feel free to weigh in with any feedback in the comments of the respective reviews.

(For vendors: if you’re a company with a tool that’s already been reviewed, we encourage you to visit the review and provide any information on updates in the comments or contact us if you think your tool could be better classified by product category or function. For those that are interested in having your app reviewed, please visit our contact page where you’ll be prompted for information that’ll help us add you to the queue.)

Again, we hope you find Appopedia a valuable resource. It builds on the The AppGap’s mission - to help individuals, large organizations and small businesses better understand how work and our tools for working are changing - and aims to provide a practical destination for those looking to assess which apps can help them better manage and grow their businesses.

So lesson learned: backup, backup, backup. But how to do it?

Well, the traditional way is to backup via email clients: Outlook, Thunderbird, or others that you may be partial to. This is a fairly safe, tried and tested method which would suit most users.

Another way is to use services like MessageBunker that back-ups all your mail to the cloud. It’s currently still in beta and I haven’t tried it myself, but it looks promising. Their servers are housed in an ex-nuclear bunker, which might help your peace of mind.

Lastly, there’s Gmail Backup, a free application that was specially developed for this purpose. It’s interface is pretty simple. You only need to enter your email address, password, the backup directory in your computer, and the inclusive dates of the messages you want to fetch.

If you haven’t yet, you’ll need to enable IMAP access on your Gmail account. Don’t worry because your emails will not be deleted on the server. They will be saved in your computer as standard EML files, which you can then open in any email client, including their attachments. Fields like dates, labels and “From” are also preserved. Gmail Backup will fetch everything in your “All Mails” folder, including the contents of the Inbox, Sent, Received, and Drafts folders. If you’re planning to transfer your files to another Gmail account, you can also use this program to do it for you.

Those interested in giving it a try can download Gmail Backup here.

Three things scare developers away from serving the small business market:

1) Price sensitivity: The value of a dollar is not created equal – small businesses need to see value and need to see it fast! Offerings will need to be priced accordingly.

2) Making it work with other apps: Software providers selling to the enterprise can send in swat teams to perform backend integration – who can afford to do that for a 5 person business?

3) Customer “reachability”: With roughly 26 million small businesses in the US alone, the market potential is enormous, but how do I reach them without a national TV campaign or shelf space at Staples?

We’ve seen this dilemma played out over the last few years. Millions of Small Businesses wanting more choices that fit their needs. And thousands of developers with expert domain knowledge on how to solve their needs, but no confidence they can do it and make a return on their investment.

Enter the Intuit Partner Platform – matchmaker extraordinaire, we believe. By leveraging the roles we’ve played in serving millions of small businesses with our own technology development over the last 25 years, we’re in a unique position to bring these two groups together. So how does it work?

For Developers: We offer a Platform as a Service that allows them to quickly and easily build a Software as a Service (SaaS) application for specific small business needs. We host the application/service, take care of the billing, user management, and much of the other stuff that makes SaaS expensive for the developer. In addition, we offer the developer one-click data integration with an SMB’s back-office – which is almost always their QuickBooks data. We handle the data synchronization, security and storage of the data, and free up the developer to apply their expertise to solving the customer’s problem. And lastly, we put their app in a marketplace and drive traffic through our marketing channels. We have 25 million employees in our QuickBooks customers and some good experience reaching the SMB market.

For Small Businesses: They get a single marketplace to discover and use a wide array of applications to help their business — and they can be confident that these new apps and their data is on a platform they trust.

So how does this all come together? Here’s an example: yesterday Universal Mind launched an application on the platform that allows small businesses to geographically visualize their customer data (check out this CNET story on the news). The app brings in a company’s customer data from QuickBooks and allows a small business to manipulate the data to glean valuable business intelligence. With map overlays of census data such as median house-hold income, SMB’s can now be far more intelligent in their business decisions. (Where are my best customers coming from? Where should I consider expanding? etc…)

Technology like this was previously unavailable to the small business community. But through the power of Software-as-a-Service, data integration, and customer accessibility, both the small business and the developer win, in our humble opinion.

ShowDocument is a web application that tries to fill in this gap:

The service is free and requires no registration. By following the simple directions on the site’s home page, I was able to go live within seconds - easy and fuss-free. You can invite other people to join you in a session by sending them email or providing a code for that session. Once they’ve accepted, you can all talk via web chat on an embedded client on the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

Below the chat box is the Tool Box, containing a pen, a highlighter, an eraser, and a text tool, all of which you can use to write on top of your document, as if it was ordinary paper. All the people invited to the session can use this tool box. Here’s a screen shot of my (rather clumsy) first test to play around with it:

If you made a mistake, you can use the Undo button for incremental changes, Clear all of the marks on the screen in one click, or just the marks created by each tool. After you’re done, you may save the document, along with the notes drawn during the session, into a PDF file (from my trials, this worked flawlessly).

The current beta version of ShowDocument accepts .txt, .doc, .pdf, .ppt, .xls, and even image files like .jpg, and .gif. Aside from English, it also supports documents written in Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Arabic. If you’re worried about security, according to the site, documents are erased from their databases shortly after the sessions are terminated.

I can see this web app being useful in school projects, remote lawyer-client consultations, article editing, and a host of other situations. I, for one, am planning to use ShowDocument with some co-workers. Being free and having no need to register, it will be easy to get others to use this with you. Great idea, great execution.

Remote workers admit to risky online behavior and insecure data practices with 24 percent altering security settings and 23 percent delaying security updates on devices. Even more, 43 percent, have download personal photos and videos and 31 percent cop to downloading software for personal use. About one quarter, 25 percent, admit to clicking on blacklisted or banned Web sites on company devices.
Source: “Employees Like Mobility Despite Extra Work Hours” by Judy Mottl, InternetNews.com

While the remote workers who commit these mistakes are the minority, over 20% for each offense is still an alarming figure - considering that almost every remote worker has sensitive business data in their devices.  It may be easy to point one’s finger at the naughty telecommuter, but studies also show that the businesses themselves are lacking in providing adequate privacy and security measures.

In a survey conducted by the Center for Democracy and Technology, it was concluded that “many organizations today are not effectively managing the risks to personal information presented by the telecommuting workforce.”  The results showed that only half of the 73 organizations surveyed developed telecommuting guidelines for their employees.  If such a big percentage of organizations don’t have these guidelines, then it’s no surprise that these security leaks occur.

In the end, we can’t solely blame the employer nor the employee for poor security risk management.  The truth is, without firm security policies that are discussed between employer and telecommuter, the latter wouldn’t know what the boundaries are.  As for the telecommuters themselves, it’s about following company policy even if no one appears to be watching your back.

There are case studies that suggest that the implementation of web 2.0 technology itself can be very successful and can be adopted immediately and readily into the organisation. Others suggest that you need a bottom-up approach, a ground-swell of individual opinion that uses these tools and that this, in turn, drives change for adoption at the enterprise level.

Stuart French has been researching the data on adoption of social computing tools in small to medium enterprises and suggests that perhaps the both of these models of adoption are correct. After some twittering between the two of us, and two brains doing far too much ‘theorising’, I proposed to him the following model.

In some organisations the “build it and they will come” attitude works, with wikis and blogs being adopted with relative ease. Supportive leadership (or management) and clear ROI are likely to be the key factors for successful adoption here, with the influences of culture being either minor or supportive (covertly or overtly) of change. The model also suggests that the bottom-up, personal use, of social computing as an information management tool is also likely to be just as effective and adopted at the enterprise-level, given the same limitations of affect of culture. In time, as the benefits to individuals and to the enterprise are acknowledged and shared, the culture can change to a point where the Personal Domain can affect the Organisational Domain, and vice versa.

Of course, the model also suggests that should corporate culture run counter to the introduction strategy, whether from a top-down or bottom-up perspective, social computing initiatives are likely to be not as effective as to result in participation. These cultural factors are likely to be:

• low readiness for change
• high risk-aversion
• preference for hierarchy and processes to create knowledge over personal freedom to collaborate and share
• individual preference for position power and legitimate power over referent powerand expert power

When considering adoption strategies for moving to Enterprise 2.0 the message is clear — think strategically and take into consideration the effects of culture from a personal as well as an organisational perspective.

M

Tizra Publisher is an online sales and distribution platform for electronic books and other document-based content.  The MIT Press CISnet (seen below) site is one of the sites built on this platform. Recently, I spoke with two of the co-founders, David Durand their CEO, and Anne Orens, the CMO.  Tizra is delivered on a SaaS basis that is a departure from most web site development tools.  David said he was involved in the development of many custom web sites for content distributors such as Oxford University Press. He saw many of the problems associated with outsourced custom and customer web site development and wanted to provide an easy to use solution.

Tizra enables publishers to bypass the content conversion, software development and maintenance costs traditionally associated with custom publishing websites. At the same time, it provides publishers with precise control over online product definition, sales terms, merchandising and marketing.  This control can be exercised directly by non-technical people using web control panels. This allows for more experimentation as marketing and editorial staff can test product and marketing ideas and respond to market feedback quickly without IT developer support.

The MIT Press CISnet is an addition to their regular web site. It is based on a paid subscription model. CISnet is designed for researchers who want to search and find specific content and may not want to read an entire book. As a former academic, this makes a lot of sense to me. You can search topics and go directly to a specific page of a book with the search term highlighted. You can then read the book page and explore other parts of the book. You can also copy and paste the page to a desktop application such as MS Word.  This is a great feature for the writer who wants to site a specific text. Since you can only do a page at a time, it is not practical for the person who wants to pirate the book.

Tizra is now rolling out a new tiered pricing plan that is oriented to a self-service approach, with self-service sign-ups.  The new product pricing ranges from free sites where they place ads, to fully customizable sites with no ads and complete commerce and branding control.  David took me to the administration interface to demonstrate the site creation and management process. Tizra makes it easy to sell online books and documents by the title, chapter or the page, or to collect, remix and sell pages in any combination.  You can implement a variety of sales terms, including pay per view, subscription access, multipacks, special discounts based on user group or discount code, and institutional access based on IP or login with variable concurrencies.  The branding is very flexible as you can see by comparing the MIT Press CISnet page above with the eat.shop page below.

The eat.shop site provides shopping and dining guidance in multiple cities.  Their site describes them as “noted for their clean and modern design, luscious photography, witty travelogues and perfect throw in your bag size and they feature only locally owned businesses that are in the urban core. Most importantly, you don’t have to worry about slogging through a zillion listings - just 90 carefully chosen gems are featured by the author who does all of the research, writing and photography.” The Tizra based site shows them off very well.  There is a Boston book that I should look into. Below is a sample of the Tizra administration system.

This is the MIT CISnet branded system but the Tizra administration system has same interface for all users. It allows you to set up title author, keywords, tags (invisible keywords like pub codes) that will facilitate search.  You can also have different types of key words such a geographical or topical. You can organize the site into collections and implement access control at this level. The collections are defined by query terms. You can easily reorganize the site into new collections. In addition, Tizra allows you to control content discoverability, selectively enabling Google and other search engines to index content behind the paywall. Below you can see the details associated with an individual book.

You can also organize the site by offers with invitations to buy and associated business rules. The ease of use allows marketing people to experiment with different promotions without an IT person. The branding options start with templates for quick development, progresses to allowing for custom style sheets, and to full custom development for high-end subscribers. This is a drag and drop feature. Once you create a set of pages you like, you save them as a master block for reuse.

I see this service as a great tool for content sellers. It can also be a useful content distribution system for enterprises that need to mange the presentation of their information.  This will be especially useful for verticals with a lot of internal content such as legal firms, pharma, and other research oriented enterprises. The access control features will be helpful here. It can also be useful for firms who want to distribute marketing and technical content to customers and prospects but need to customize its organization or exert control over access. There is also a Tzira blog for more details on what they are doing.  

And grow it did.  Galaxy has added over 1,000 stores since Luke and Tristan showed up.  For the first two years, they used Excel to manage their customer information.  It didn’t scale and Luke nearly lost his mind trying to keep track of it all.  Out of frustration, Luke commented, “It doesn’t matter how good you are in Excel, it’s just not meant to be used as a database.” Yet so many people are using and abusing spreadsheets in this capacity. Luke and Tristan set out on a search for an appropriate database/CRM tool. Their requirements for the solution were that it must be customizable and flexible.

‘We considered Filemaker and Access; but knew it would require a lot of work to get started and we didn’t have that time and energy to put towards it. And Salesforce wasn’t quite customizable enough for our needs,’ said Luke.

So they decided on QuickBase and have been using it since January 2008 for their customer service management needs – specifically tracking the status of customers, where customers are located, what product the customers carry and how much they have in inventory at any given time, as well as other associated activities like in-store demo schedules and staffing. Recently Galaxy has moved their Purchase Order management to the QuickBase platform. Luke said, ‘QuickBase helps us provide a level of customer service and follow-up comparable to that of much larger companies.’

Even though Galaxy Granola is a small operation today, they are serving large customers across the US like Whole Foods, Wegman’s, and Albertson’s. They’ve got big plans for growth and that includes increased usage of QuickBase over time. As their business needs and processes evolve, QuickBase applications can evolve with them.

Luke commented, ‘QuickBase is a customizable online database that can be used for a variety of business functions. We really value the flexibility the product has to offer. QuickBase has a huge advantage there. We can adapt and make changes on the fly.’