Easily Manage Your SMB’s Content Across Platforms

Content Management Suite by IntelliTek helps your SMB manage content within the organization or on its Web sites. It consists of four modules: Digital Asset Management; Document Management; Records Management; and Web Management, all of which are custom designed for your business and hosted over the Internet.

Complete the form below to access this White Paper from IntelliTek Systems:

While Google was purchasing DocVerse this week, Mainsoft was releasing a free Beta that lets you access and share Google Docs documents from within Outlook. The tool isn’t from Microsoft, but it does put Google Docs users back in the Microsoft ecosystem, so I’m sure it’s a tool that must at least make the folks in Redmond smile, especially in light of Google’s recent actions.

In addition, users can also access documents found within Microsoft SharePoint from the Harmony pane. It enables users to share a single copy of the document instead of sending attachments to emails, and ensures that participants should have the most up-to-date copy of the document.

Since many business users spend a great deal of their day inside Outlook, this tool could be very useful. After you install Harmony, it creates a new pane in Outlook.

Matt Cain, research vice president and Gartner’s lead email analyst, thinks this tool provides users with a key function that’s been missing from email. ”We believe the ultimate role of the email client is to aggregate communication and collaboration streams from many modalities into one common interface. In this way, the email client becomes the communication and collaboration master console–a universal queue, so to speak.”

Harmony should provide a way to access documents from Google and SharePoint, providing users with a useful service for no cost. At the very least, it’s certainly worth trying out and seeing if it works for your organization.

For more information:
- see the Mainsoft press release

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Last week, Socialtext, the Enterprise 2.0 company, released version 4.0 of its product, which brings together a number of initiatives they have launched recently, including Socialtext Signals, which is their microblogging tool, and a spreadsheet they created in conjunction with spreadsheet pioneer Dan Bricklin.

Specifically 4.0 includes the ability to:

• Create collaborative groups around a project, department or area of common interest,
• Send a microblogging message to one of these groups,
• Search microblogging traffic to find nuggets of information lost in the information stream,
• Filter by group within a Signals stream,
• And see who is available (as you can with an instant messaging tool).

Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee says these tools can help increase the likelihood of collaboration and knowledge sharing inside an organization. “Socialtext 4.0 takes that an extra step forward. It allows people to circulate information, ideas and updates in a targeted way with teammates, so they can move quickly to take advantage of new opportunities.”

You can purchase 4.0 as a hosted service or as an appliance you install behind the firewall. The product is also accessible on smart phones including the Blackberry, iPhone and Android phones.

A tool like Socialtext can help enterprises looking for new ways to collaborate and share information. These new tools provide the means to narrow the focus of the larger information stream and find the nuggets that are often hidden in the stream and that’s a big step forward. At the same time, it provides ways to share information via blogs and Wikis around a single issue that requires more space than a microblogging tools can provide.

The video below explains how Socialtext works in a larger context:

For more information:
- see the Socialtext press release

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EMC announced this week they were releasing EMC SourceOne Email Supervisor, a tool that can automate email monitoring. This could be especially important for companies which are required by law to monitor email for certain information such as social security numbers or other sensitive data. For instance, U.S. brokerage companies are required to monitor email to make sure employees are complying with appropriate laws and government regulations. This tool makes it easier for these companies to do that by creating a set of rules against which the electronic monitor checks the email.

Sara Radicati, CEO of The Radicati Group believes that it’s prudent for all organizations to get a grip on electronic communications. “Supervision of electronic communications has become increasingly important for all industries and business functions and customers should consider it as an essential element of their information governance strategy,” she said. She adds that a tool like this makes the monitoring process easier and more cost-effective.

The tool lets organizations define business policies about which types of information should not be sent in email, then check against the email stream and deliver reports to appropriate management or supervisory personnel. It will even produce a report that offers proof of compliance that an organization can show to government regulators.

Tools like this that help companies comply with government regulations are part of a growing business around eDiscovery and compliance issues. EMC created SourceOne last year as part of an effort to take advantage of this market and provide a set of modular products that companies can pick and choose from to suit their unique requirements. 

For more information:
- see the EMC press release

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Last week Google purchased DocVerse, a tool that lets multiple users share and edit Microsoft Office documents online. The purchase gives Google a way to bring Office users under the Google Docs umbrella. Google recently made it possible to upload any type of document into Google Docs. DocVerse provides a way to make the Microsoft Office ones (of which there are likely to be many) editable within the Google Docs framework.

As they reported in their blog post announcing the purchase, they understand there are many businesses still committed to using Office documents:

“But we recognize that many people are still accustomed to desktop software. So as we continue to improve Google Docs and Google Sites as rich collaboration tools, we’re also making it easier for people to transition to the cloud, and interoperate with desktop applications like Microsoft Office.”

And even while Microsoft is making a bigger and bigger play to the cloud (as I wrote recently on DaniWeb in “Microsoft Supposedly Commits to the Cloud“), Google has found a way to undermine that play by making Microsoft’s documents work in its environment. It’s a brilliant move, and one which should help companies committed to using Office (at least for now) to begin to transition to Google Docs if that’s what they plan to do.

You can learn more about how DocVerse works in this video:

DocVerse from Amir Khella on Vimeo.

For more information:
- see the Google Blog post announcing the deal

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