I thought I would offer some comments on some UC predictions offered by Gurdeep Singh Pall, who heads Microsoft's UC group: No Jitter | Microsoft: Gurdeep's UC Predictions UC gets unified The term "unified communications" has long been muddled and miss-used, and the problem is made worse by vendors who slap a "unified" label on products that are anything but. 1. As the category matures, I predict UC will get unified.

With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Interesting - but I remain quite skeptical - especially regarding "MOSS 2007 as your default option for enabling and managing social networks for business use". Solutions that intrigue the most right now (alpha order): Awareness Networks, HiveLive and SelectMinds - but none are perfect, all of these vendors have some gaps in their technical architecture, application functionality or go-to-market effort. Collaborative Thinking Perceptions on collaboration and social software by Mike Gotta

Collaborative Thinking Perceptions on collaboration and social software by Mike Gotta See how were connected Connections February 2009 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

An interesting question was raised in the post, Should Software Vendors Also Sell Professional Services? , Microsoft sells a basic infrastructure on which lots of 3rd party consultants build and customize tools that meet each company?s Stewart then implies that software vendors will not have the objectivity of third party implementers who can use a variety of tools. Here is re-post from FastForward as I wanted to see if I could stir up some more conversation conversation on the topic.

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is a disappointing platform for social computing in my opinion. My position for some time has been that the next release will be a tipping point for Microsoft's social computing efforts. Either Microsoft "gets it right" and delivers a forward-looking release with significant improvements that transforms SharePoint into a market-leading social computing platform, or it delivers a release that has only incremental improvements to existing Rather than list off a "top ten" list of predictions for 2009, I thought I would briefly layout some topics and areas that business and IT decision-makers should pay attention to when formulating Enterprise 2.0

Presence Is Too Important To Leave To UC Vendors Right now, enterprise instant messaging is dominated by IBM and Microsoft. IBM and Microsoft). Presence is also dominated by IBM and Microsoft. The need for better intra-domain I've posted a lot recently regarding enterprise social messaging ("Twitter for the enterprise"): Twitter in the Workplace

or social computing area, it’s not Microsoft’s fault. is NOT about specific products from specific vendors. can be implemented at a tooling level with Lotus Notes or Microsoft SharePoint, or one of the new fancy products. But then I have a book -- Seamless Teamwork -- published by Microsoft Press, that talks about how to do team collaboration with SharePoint. Last week Thomas Vander Wal trashed SharePoint as an enterprise social computing platform in a blog post entitled SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools . He ultimately concluded that SharePoint failed

This is obvious and is something which IBM absolutely must execute on prior to Microsoft's O14 release. In fact, during Lotusphere 2008, I laid out such a scenario as part of the ongoing battle between IBM and Microsoft: IBM can use Connections to compete with Microsoft by changing the focus to social computing rather than collaboration and content. One of the items I was hoping to hear at Lotusphere 2009 was outlined in a recent post by Guy Creese, Research Director of our Collaboration And Content Strategies group here at Burton. In his post, " Lotusphere 2009: What

Already you can see vendors on the market (blog, wikis, feed syndication platforms, social bookmark systems, etc) all coming out with their own profile component. In parallel - vendors in the unified communications space also have their own versions of rich profiles. It's understandable - people want to have a richer understanding of their fellow employees and vendors want to differentiate their products from Connectbeam is one of those first-movers in the market that often gets overlooked but they continue to do some creative things (see below). While initially identified

Communities are a powerful way for businesses to grow Used correctly, communities can impact the top and bottom line of company’s financials: from brands encouraging customers to self-support each other (reducing costs), to spreading word of mouth to each other (efficient marketing and increased sales) to crowd sourcing innovation (streamlining R&D) communities matter more than ever –especially during a recession. What you must do before you select a vendor Many of our clients follow the POST methdology , which is a framework for them to first understand the People they’re