Collaboration, Communication and Business Processes: Why They're Connected and How to Get Them There, in 13 Sentences!

1. Every business relies on collaboration and communication to do business.

2. Almost all business collaboration and communication is supported by some form(s) of information technology (IT), whether e-mail, social media telephone or even fax.

3. To win consistently and thrive competitively, businesses need to be able to do the right things for customers, partners and prospects consistently and respond to changing requirements or conditions in a timely, agile fashion.

4. Ad hoc, inconsistent collaboration or communication practices make it unlikely to impossible for businesses to do what they need to do to win consistently or thrive competitively.

5. The key difference between collaboration and communication practices that help a business to win and those practices that don't are consistent business-driven processes implemented and enforced across all business-critical activities and actors.

6. Processes that are crafted, documented and enforced well and consistently help to ensure that all important actions contribute to satisfaction of customers, partners and prospects and business success.

7. At most businesses, critical processes are often inconsistently and poorly crafted, documented and/or enforced, when they exist, are documented or are enforced at all.

8. The businesses best able to capture, define, implement, enforce, integrate and manage critical processes are those best positioned to win and to thrive competitively.

9. A potentially powerful way to achieve these goals is to process-enable the collaboration and communication solutions upon which the business already relies and with which users are already familiar.

10. Fortunately, new IT tools are appearing that make it relatively easy for even non-technical business decision makers to capture, define, implement, enforce, integrate and manage business processes effectively and consistently, and to process-enable key collaboration and communication solutions.

11. Examples include Cordys, which offers cloud-based process and workflow management that integrates with Google's online office applications, and EnterpriseWizard, which combines cloud- or premise-based application building and process capture/creation with an unconditional money-back satisfaction guarantee.

12. Your business needs to begin by capturing, analyzing and optimizing all critical incumbent processes, evaluating and prioritizing key collaboration and communication solutions and mapping out how best to process-enable these -- preferably now if it hasn't already.

13. For more on this (and on EnterpriseWizard), read my recent Focus Brief at http://focus.com/c/B3E/; to discuss, feel free to drop me a line at mdortch@focus.com and/or at medortch@dortchonit.com.

Microsoft Office Web Applications Arrive: Is It Finally Time for Your “Office in the Cloud(s)?”

Microsoft has begun rolling out something many of us in the punditocracy have long viewed as inevitable but unlikely – Web-based, so-called “lightweight” versions of its flagship Office programs. The debut is so far limited to a subset of the Office suite, and to invitees only, but the implications for collaboration – and for the venerable, nearly ubiquitous Microsoft Office itself – are already significant.

Microsoft is in fact focusing largely on support for collaboration with its Office Web Applications. They’re accessible via Internet Explorer, Firefox or Apple’s Safari Web browser (but not Google’s Chrome, at least so far), and the Web-based version of Excel already supports multi-authoring, or simultaneous editing of the same workbook by multiple collaborators. Users can’t yet create Word documents, but should soon be able to create and collaborate on all types of Office documents.

Microsoft plans to make Office Web Applications available in three different modes. Subscribers to its Windows Live service will have no-cost access. Users of Microsoft Online Services will be able to purchase subscriptions. And companies licensing Microsoft Office 10 will also be able to license and provide access to Office Web Applications.

I expect these Microsoft offerings to be very popular, especially at companies seeking to reduce or halt the growth of their licensing and support contract costs for Microsoft Office. Many such companies have deployed or begun exploring other online alternatives from Adobe, Google, Zoho and elsewhere. However, these all offer mixed bags of interoperability and compatibility with native Office applications and file formats. So an online suite from Microsoft should eventually offer an alternative that does not suffer from such limitations. But those other online office/productivity suite providers aren’t going to stand still either.

Microsoft’s official entry into the online collaboration suite market will definitely make the market more interesting. Whether it will benefit Microsoft as much as or more than its cloud-based competitors remains to be seen. But where users are concerned, more online collaboration choice is definitely better, especially if it comes with more seamless interoperability with all of those Microsoft Office files most of us rely upon every day to do business.

If you want to know more, check out these two Focus Research Briefs – “The Productivity Suites War” (at http://www.focus.com/briefs/information-technology/web-based-productivity-suites-war/) and “10 Signs that it May be Time to Consider a Web-based Productivity Suite” (at http://www.focus.com/briefs/information-technology/10-signs-it-may-be-time-consider-web-based-business-software/). And if you have opinions on where online collaboration and productivity suites are headed, please share them at http://www.focus.com/groups/information-technology/topics/view/officeproductivity-applications-desktop-cloud/.

Cemaphore: New Cloud-Based Options for Growing, Protecting, and Reducing the Costs of Microsoft Exchange Deployments

Cemaphore is a company that appears to have cracked the code for painless synchronization of multiple editions of Microsoft Exchange with Google's Gmail and Google Apps. This is important because that means Cemaphore's technologies can be used to provide seamless, reliable back-up of business-critical Exchange deployments, whether premises-based or hosted. It also means users seeking to reduce e-mail licensing costs can use hosted Exchange and/or Gmail as alternatives and/or adjuncts to Exchange Server, while providing a seamless experience to all using or managing e-mail at an enterprise.

This week, Cemaphore announced a new combination of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite offerings with Cemaphore's MailShadow OnLine e-mail migration and synchronization solution. Editions include Microsoft Exchange Online Deskless Worker (Outlook Web Access Light plus a 500-megabyte mailbox) combined with MailShadow OnLine for $7 per user per month, and Exchange Online (Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 plus a 5-gigabyte mailbox) combined with MailShadow OnLine for $13.24 per user per month through June 30, 2009. Other plans also available, Cemaphore said.

Business technology decision-makers have frequently faced frustrating and unsatisfying choices when trying to choose among Exchange Server, some hosted Exchange alternative, and cloud-based e-mail and collaboration solutions other than Exchange. Cemaphore gives those decision-makers and the users they support greater flexibility to mix and match multiple alternatives, without imposing undue inconsistencies upon collaboration users or managers. Anyone pursuing or considering new or expanded Microsoft Exchange deployments should look closely at Cemaphore's offerings, for opportunities to improve reliability and availability of collaboration tools while lowering deployment and management costs and complexities. And once you have looked at Cemaphore and its solutions, do please let me know what you think.