Collaboration Breaking News

Lotus chief defines imminent battle plan
Integration of traditional on-premises Notes-based collaboration, new unified communications tools, Symphony productivity applications, content management, Web-based services and the potential to mash it all together with new-fangled development tools and social networking innovations pouring out of IBM's research labs are just a few of the challenges facing IBM's Lotus Software division chief, Bob Picciano. More..

Magic Johnson discusses video phones, Celtics-Lakers rivalry and today's NBA
Magic Johnson's businesses rely on Cisco TelePresence videoconferencing to communicate, cut costs on plane travel. More..

How to Make UC and Collaboration Work for You
Like many technology buzzwords, unified communications (UC) has had many meanings in its short life. It's now an umbrella term that covers an array of technologies—including instant messaging (IM), web conferencing, IP telephony, expertise identification, e-mail, unified messaging, mobile devices, etc.—that can be delivered behind the firewall or through the computing cloud. More..

IBM exec says bad economy could be good for unified communications
The economy is driving business changes that unified communications can help address -- which means that end users might finally start using the collaboration tools that have been deployed in corporate networks for years, an IBM executive told VoiceCon San Francisco 2008 attendees Wednesday. More..

IBM debuts Lotus Foundations Start appliance
IBM is making another run at Microsoft small and medium-size customers, announcing a software-hardware appliance on Monday that combines an IBM-branded machine with its Lotus Foundations Start collaboration software. More..

Salesforce.com and Google execs blast Oracle, SAP, Microsoft
Salesforce.com and Google executives had fighting words for rivals Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, saying those vendors are late to the Web-hosted software party and will pay the price for it. More..

Oracle buys IP from Tacit to boost Beehive platform
Seeking to beef up the capabilities of its recently launched Beehive collaboration platform, Oracle said Monday it has bought the intellectual property of Tacit Software and hired all of its software engineers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. More..

Social networking changing face of collaboration
An infusion of social software is helping fuel an evolution of enterprise collaboration that will eventually give users more flexible and distributed tools for finding, organizing and sharing data, according to a conference of experts exploring the topic. More..

Yahoo's Zimbra reaches for the cloud
Yahoo's Zimbra, the provider of a communications and collaboration suite that rivals Microsoft's Office and Outlook/Exchange, will make its cloud computing debut on Tuesday. More..

Gartner: SaaS enterprise app spending set to soar
Spending on software-as-a-service enterprise applications will top $6.4 billion this year, a 27% jump over 2007, and will catapult to $14.8 billion by 2012, according to the research firm Gartner. More..

Google Apps portal pages malfunctioning
Google Apps administrators are complaining that their Apps "Start" portal pages are malfunctioning and wreaking havoc in their organizations. More..

Microsoft to release OCS 2007 update in February
Microsoft plans to add VoIP, collaboration and Web presence enhancements to the next version of its unified communications software, which is due out in early February 2009. More..

British start-up to launch pro Web collaboration service
A British startup is preparing to launch an enterprise version of a Web-based collaboration service with a screen-sharing feature that lets a person interact with an application on someone else's computer. More..

Why security pros hate SharePoint, and what to do about it
Microsoft SharePoint has many fans these days, but Andre Koot isn't among them. More..

HP, Tandberg team for soup-to-nuts telepresence
HP and Tandberg are uniting to provide a single source for telepresence gear as well as installation and monitoring. More..

Secrets to virtual team success
The emergence of telepresence and collaborative technologies has made virtual teamwork an increasingly popular option, especially given soaring travel costs. But just as important to virtual teams' success as the technology are the policies and procedures to support them. More..

IBM opens beta for Bluehouse online social networking and collaboration service
IBM is expanding the free beta trial for Bluehouse, a Web-hosted social networking and collaboration service based on Lotus software. More..

Socialtext 3.0: Bringing Facebook, Twitter to the enterprise
Socialtext, a Web 2.0 vendor that has sold social software (primarily wikis) to businesses for internal collaboration and knowledge management, officially launched Socialtext People (enterprise social networking profiles) and Socialtext Signals, an application that allows business users to share short messages (in 140 characters or less) inside the enterprise like consumers do on Twitter, the microblogging service. More..

Top 10 ways collaboration, mobility amplify data leakage dangers: Cisco study
Numerous behavioral risks taken by employees in increasingly distributed and remote locations can lead to the loss of corporate information, according to a study commissioned by Cisco. More..

Cisco bolsters collaboration lineup, including new WebEx ties
Cisco this week rolled out a new collaboration product portfolio designed to help companies accelerate business processes and increase productivity, and further mine a $34 billion market for Cisco.  More..

Green's effect on branch collaboration
We are bombarded lately with "green" everything. No longer does green simply describe the mixture of blue and yellow. And the Irish? Sorry, no longer do you have exclusive ownership of this hue. Now it describes everything from recycling to hybrid vehicles to energy-efficient IT organizations. More..

Cisco to acquire Jabber
Cisco this week announced its intent to acquire privately held Jabber, a provider of presence and messaging software. More..

Data networks won't cut it for convergence
Today's data networks won't cut it as foundations for real-time applications like voice and video, experts said this week at the Interop New York conference. More..

IBM to launch social networking center
IBM will open a social software center to encourage collaboration among IBM, its partners and its customers in developing Web 2.0 applications. More..

Mobile users spur better business apps, RIM CTO says
Businesses need to develop the same level of support for mobile devices that they have for their wired networks if they are to take advantage of expanding capabilities of handhelds, David Yach, CTO of software for Blackberry developer Research in Motion, told Interop attendees. More..