Breaching the corporate firewall

Forrester's Q3 2011 Mobile Collaboration report compares different approaches that vendors are adopting to get their products/services into the corporation.  2 comments stood out for me:

I'm not sure how many CIOs would go along with the notion that client/server achitectures are dead.  I tend to go along with Forrester on this one but there will be a lot of wailing and nashing of teeth before it is more widely accepted.

This is a key point with many of the services covered in the report.  Demand from employees, clients and suppliers will erode CIO resistance to cloud solutions as many are already being used in the corporation even if managers are not aware of it.

GQueues - looks interesting

I just came across this task manager app called GQueues that integrates with Google Calendar.  The video below presents a good overview.  There is also a mobile version that is web-based but uses HTML 5 to allow off-line use.  I've not had time to play around with it yet - will post some comments soon.

What seems to be missing? Integration with Gmail contacts.  That would set it apart from many of its competitors.

Price? There is a cut-down free version with a paid for version costing only $25 a year.  On the surface that seems pretty good value.

(If the embedded video below has the right side cut off click here to see it directly on YouTube)

What's in your GTD toolbox?

Over the last few weeks members of the GTD Group on LinkedIn have been posting what GTD tools they use.  It's been an interesting thread and I've seen the names of tools and services I'd never heard of before.  I thought it might be useful to summarise what tools are most popular and the graph shows all those which have more than one user.  I did the analysis on the 4th April when there were 86 responses.  I've only looked at software and left out hardware devices, notebooks and other GTD paraphernalia that users mentioned.  My observations:

Evernote comes out well and reflects its cross-platform nature as well as its good integration between web, desktop and mobile applications.  The fact that its basic offering is free and it is an excellent information capture service is obviously also an important factor;

Outlook at number 2 is probably no surprise.  Many of us have to use it at work and its task, email and calendar integration makes it a useful GTD tool, particularly when set up using the GTD guide;

OmniFocus at number 3 is a bit of a surprise in that it is Mac only and not cheap.  However, I guess there may be a Mac bias in the sample and, although I have never used it, I hear it is an excellent product.

One of the interesting things to come out of the comments is the variety of tools used ( I counted 84) and the complex systems that some of the users had set up.  I guess if it works for them then that's fine but in some cases it seemed like a lot of tools to keep track of. I've written about the ever-increasing number of GTD-type solutions coming on to the market before and this unscientific survey confirms that. This is a dynamic and exciting segment of the software/web market to be in but eventually there will be a shakeout as users congregate around a smaller number of tried and tested solutions.  However, with the rise of tablet devices and increasing demand for cloud-based, low-cost, collaborative solutions it's anyone's game to win.  I suspect that the more traditional software vendors that don't embrace or migrate to the web will be the biggest losers.  One of the biggest challenges facing new cloud-based entrants will be persuading the corporate market that their solutions are secure and reliable.  Many freelancers and micro-businesses seem to be convinced but their more conservative and larger cousins are not there yet.

Social Business Summit 2011, London - some thoughts

This was the London leg of the 4 global events organised by Headshift/Dachis Group.

The day at The Imagination Gallery got off to a good start with tea and bacon rolls and an interesting chat with one of the Headshift team about social CRM - he outlined his thoughts on how to make CRM systems more effective by linking into social networks like LinkedIn rather than everyone trying to update their own systems.  I guess Salesforce.com's acquisition of Jigsaw is a move in that direction as well as smaller startups like Batchbook.

JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist of Salesforce.com reminded us that business has always been social and that social business is about remembering what we've forgotten.  "We engineered the social out of business and now we need to bring it back."  I'm not sure how effective the current tools will be at doing this but I wouldn't argue with the sentiment.

John Hagel, management consultant, writer and co-founder of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation expanded on his recent research and argued that we are moving from a world of diminishing returns into a world of increasing returns through the power of collaborative networks.  While the idea of reduced transaction costs and friction brought about through networked companies/people is not particularly new, John gave some good examples of how this is working in practice.  "Change management is most successful when it starts at the edge not the core of the organisation". John wins the "No PowerPoint" award for his talk - not a slide in sight.  

Stuart McRae, Executive Collaboration Evangelist at IBM, talked about the IBM Jams that have taken place over the last 10 years and helped the company clarify its core aims as well as drive innovation through networked discussions.  Stuart asked an interesting question, "Is social software an aspirin or a vitamin pill?".  His conclusion was that to generate interest in social software you need to identify a problem in the organisation and offer a solution.  This is similar to John Hagel's point that you need to identify pain points and then work out the metrics you will use to determine whether the solution has been successful.

Dion Hinchcliffe, Senior Vice President at Dachis Group showed some interesting slides about where social technologies are heading and made the point that "technology is changing faster than companies can keep up".  This is certainly an opportunity for companies like Dachis which can help organisations navigate their way through the confusion.

Lee Bryant, Headshift co-founder, wrapped up the day by talking about the importance of data to improving business performance and built on the points made previous speakers. I liked his point about exposing companies to the "fresh air of customer insight" through greater interaction and listening.

The other speakers also offered useful insights into the deployment of social technologies in the workplace but the above 5 were probably the most interesting for me. 

Overall, it was great day and I had some interesting discusions in the breaks.  It felt a bit like some of the knowledge management events and conferences I went to in the late 1990s; lots of talk about the potential of new technologies to improve organisational performance and knowledge sharing with some examples thrown in for good measure.  There was a bit of this yesterday but, as one of the delegates I spoke to in one of the breaks said, "perhaps this time it is different".  I tend to agree; there is a lot of hype around the transformative power of social technologies in the workplace but the reality is that they are creeping into organisations from a number of directions and that is only going to increase.

UPDATE: Jim Worth's wiki of the event has lots of links to pictures and blog posts for those interested.

User Interview - Dan Norris of Web Circle

This is the first in a series of interviews with users of the productivity and collaboration tools covered in this blog.  Dan Norris, founder of the web design agency Web Circle, gives an insight into his company's move into the cloud.

What does Web Circle do and how many people work with you?

We are a small web design agency established in 2006 specialising in open source technologies like Joomla, WordPress, Magento etc. The team is just me and one other full time employee and the rest contractors. We have around 150 active clients and operate out of the Brisbane Technology Park. 

You recently moved from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps - what was the thinking behind this move?

Last year we invested quite a bit of money in physical infrastructure. We bought a Microsoft Server for the office, setup Exchange, bought a PABX etc. The main reason for it was to be able to better work together on projects and not be so independent in terms of what we each had to manage. This worked to some extent. However, there were ongoing performance issues with Exchange, ongoing costs with maintaining the infrastructure as we didn't have the in house skills for the more complex setup. We also found that more and more, the tools we liked to use were moving to the cloud and integrating everything with Exchange wasn't easy (just maintaining a standard shared contacts list on Exchange and our hosted CRM was a nightmare). In addition we found the physical infrastructure locked us down too much to the office and made working away from the office difficult. The VPS was painfully slow compared with something like DropBox. We decided to simplify the physical infrastructure and move our main day-to-day functions to cloud solutions (project management, task management, email, calendars, CRM etc). 

Why did you switch from using SugarCRM for CRM and Project Pier for project management to using the Google App, Insightly?

The Sugar CRM and Exchange Sync was a nightmare for one thing. We weren't able to easily get the shared address book to sync with Sugar. We had to sync with our own address books first and required a few different programs to do something which we thought was pretty basic.  Sugar CRM was too complex for a micros business - I hardly used it. Project Pier was a good free open source project management solution but there was no integration between our systems. With Google / Insightly the integration is fantastic. We get an email that we need to act on and I can create a task or a project right there in the email and allocate it to Steve. If a lead comes in I can create an opportunity right there so only the decent opportunities get added to the CRM (we previously added all leads from our website into Sugar which loaded with all sorts of junk). We can have a shared contact list with Insightly and email direct from within Insightly and associate emails with projects / tasks / opportunities etc. Best of all we can use the exact same systems with the exact same performance no matter where we are for zero dollars - it's a no-brainer really for a micro business. 

What have been some of the key benefits of moving to Google Apps and Insightly?

The integration between email, task, contacts, and project management, the price (free), the ability to have systems that we don't need in house skills and infrastructure to maintain and the ability to work from anywhere under the same conditions. 

What have been some of the challenges/issues arising from the move?

There are some things that Google Apps doesn't do that well. There isn't presently a shared address book which seems crazy. It doesn't have shared email folders so previously I had about 10 main folders and probably 100 or 200 folders within each of these (one for every client) and we'd each drag all emails into the folder as they came in (we could all see any email from the client no matter who it was sent to). With Google Apps this isn't possible which means important info in the emails has to come out of Google and go into Insightly to ensure everyone has access to it or we have to forward emails to each other. And even managing your own emails isn't as easy because GMail uses filters instead of folders which don't support nesting. Because it's impossible to have a few hundred different labels I have moved away from dragging client emails into folders / labels at all and instead I just leave them as read and search for them (part of the reason I used to have a folder for each client was because Outlook's search capabilities were pretty limited). 

There are some other little things with Insightly like you can't choose to update the person who owns the task when you add comments, you can't drag tasks up and down to prioritise them like you can in Basecamp, you can't see a list of only the tasks that are assigned to you - if you choose to show a task you have assigned someone else then it displays in your list so it looks like you have a lot of work to do!

What has been the reaction of your clients?

They don't even know. Actually the email deliverability with Google is much better than it was with Exchange so that's a positive. 

What advice would you give to anyone thinking of using cloud services like Google Apps in their business?

My advice in general for a micro business is don't spend money on anything until you have ruled out the free options and don't choose any computer-based software solution before you have ruled out the cloud-based options. Micro businesses need to be tight with money and they need to be flexible and not locked down to the one place. Some of the cloud based technologies now are embarrassing the PC-based solutions with what they can do (for example, accounting software) so look to the cloud first.