We all fill out paper forms at some time, when opening a bank account, filling-out a job application, or completing a survey. From a data-processing perspective the downside of paper forms is that the extraction and collation of the data gathered via paper forms is costly, time-consuming, and error-prone. Electronic forms solutions address these issues, and enable organizations to do things differently while improving business efficiency as they do so. The business benefits from these often specialized s…
Technology Audits - published 23/07/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Richard Edwards
Organizations that require a scalable enterprise search platform but cannot afford to (or don’t want to) pay the licensing fees of proprietary vendors can deploy the open-source Lucene/Solr to deliver search capabilities. However, because it is a platform with a relatively basic user interface (UI), a level of services and development will be required to make it applicable for specific organizations and to meet functional requirements. A range of specialist implementation companies and systems integrator…
Technology Audits - published 09/07/2010 - Mike Davis
CloudView is a next-generation search and information-access platform for enterprise, web, and OEM use. Its scalable service-oriented architecture provides advanced data-extraction, indexation, and text-analytics features, and is suited to a wide range of usage scenarios, from traditional web and enterprise search to search-based applications.
Technology Audits - published 08/07/2010 - Mike Davis, Richard Edwards
The Google Search Appliance (GSA) can natively crawl and index documents in popular content-management systems including EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, Microsoft SharePoint, and Open Text Livelink. Furthermore, the GSA has an open content connector framework that enables organizations to connect the appliance to virtually any other content-management system. It integrates well with existing security and access-control systems, and offers end users many of the same benefits they have come to expect from Goo…
Technology Audits - published 28/06/2010 - Mike Davis, Richard Edwards
Most of the collaboration solutions on the market today were designed primarily to meet internal collaboration requirements. Traditional on-premise enterprise collaboration solutions were not designed with collaboration with external partners in mind, and many of the early hosted collaboration tools did not offer enterprise-class functionality. Huddle is seeking to bridge this gap.
Technology Audits - published 27/05/2010 - Richard Edwards, Sandeep Mishra
With increasing volumes of information both internally and on websites, organizations, their employees, and customers require search technologies to retrieve the most relevant information. Funnelback Enterprise and Funnelback SaaS are comprehensive enterprise search and retrieval (ESR) solutions that can be used to search multiple heterogeneous sources, including intranets, enterprise applications, and websites, to provide highly relevant results. The design includes the ability to tune the search functi…
Technology Audits - published 20/05/2010 - Balachandar Ganesh, Mike Davis
ISYS 2009 Enterprise Access Suite is an enterprise search software solution that has been designed to provide a cost-effective search, navigation, and discovery solution that works across a wide range of formats, languages, and platforms. The main solutions are ISYS Enterprise Server, ISYS Integration Kit, and ISYS Anywhere. The product has several features relevant to its target market, such as multiple querying mechanisms, e-discovery capabilities, multilingual support, results navigation, and post-que…
Technology Audits - published 19/03/2010 - Sue Clarke
Mindbreeze, a business unit of Fabasoft, offers an enterprise search solution that provides search services across file systems (Windows, Linux, and Novell), e-mail platforms (Exchange, Notes/Domino, and Novell GroupWise), Microsoft SharePoint, and Fabasoft’s own applications and Intranet/Internet sites. Mindbreeze also provides an SDK to help integrate with other repositories of structured and unstructured information (such as document management systems and address information repositories), enables IS…
Technology Audits - published 03/02/2010 - Richard Edwards, Somak Roy
CloudView from French company Exalead is a next-generation search and information access platform designed for enterprise, Web, and OEM use. The offering’s scalable service-oriented architecture provides advanced data-extraction, indexation, and text-analytics features, and it is suited to a wide range of usage scenarios, from traditional Web and enterprise search to search-based applications. By supporting security at the data layer, application layer, and network layer, CloudView provides full complian…
Technology Audits - published 20/01/2010 - Richard Edwards
Information workers must carry out their tasks and duties in a complex and increasingly regulated world, and so business leaders, and CIOs in particular, must find new ways to empower the beleaguered workforce without transferring that burden to an already overstretched IT department. In most circumstances this means delivering more with less, and with the ‘credit-crunch’ affecting almost every business sector, now rather than later. With over 80% of salary costs now associated with ‘information work’, t…
White Papers - published 04/01/2010 - Richard Edwards
This week sees the formal unveiling of Microsoft Office 2010, with beta versions available to customers, partners, and third-party developers. When Microsoft Office for Windows was launched back in October 1989 there were already competing offerings on the market, and today is no different. However, today’s knowledge worker wants to use the Web as well as the desktop for office productivity applications.
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/11/2009 - Richard Edwards
Next week’s SharePoint conference in Las Vegas will be the first public event to focus on SharePoint 2010 – Microsoft’s next-generation business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the Web. Although Microsoft’s SharePoint products and technologies have found favour within many organisations in recent years, the offerings themselves have started to look somewhat dated when compared to the competition, and so Microsoft executives will be keeping a close eye on this event as the company’s flagship…
OpinionWire Articles - published 15/10/2009 - Richard Edwards
Mindjet, a company best known for its visual mind mapping software, has just launched Mindjet Catalyst; a product the company describes as a visual collaboration platform. Utilising the Adobe Flash platform to deliver a rich collaboration environment, Mindjet Catalyst provides knowledge workers with a new way to work together on complex issues in real time.
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/10/2009 - Richard Edwards
If enquiries from our subscribers are anything to go by, then organisations are clearly re-thinking their Enterprise Collaboration strategies as the momentum from consumer-oriented Web 2.0 collaboration services builds. The question on everyone’s minds seems to revolve around what Microsoft will do next, and will this be any different from what has gone before?
OpinionWire Articles - published 02/10/2009 - Richard Edwards
Over the years, the notion of collaboration has been responsible for some of the most utopian and naïve visions of what IT can deliver in terms of enterprise IT, and yet organisations continue to seek new means by which that most expensive of all human corporate resources – i.e. the information worker – can become more efficient, effective, and productive.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/09/2009 - Richard Edwards
Microsoft FAST ESP is a three-dimensional (volume of data, number of users, and freshness of data), highly-scalable, search solution that is targeted at the enterprise community. FAST ESP can be found powering mission-critical search for both internal, employee-facing and external, online consumer-facing applications. The product forms a fundamental part of Microsoft’s platform strategy for the delivery of search solutions that are capable of supporting the information-management and service-delivery nee…
Technology Audits - published 24/09/2009 - Andy Kellett
Jive Social Business Software (Jive SBS) 3.0 is a Web 2.0-based enterprise social collaboration platform that can be deployed as an internal-facing employee collaboration tool or as an external, customer-facing social media solution. A differentiator for Jive SBS is a bridging module that combines the ability to bridge internal employee collaboration with external partner and customer communities and deliver them as a single application suite, thereby enabling Jive Software to position SBS as a solution …
Technology Audits - published 14/09/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Sue Clarke
When it comes to Enterprise Collaboration, many organisations remain 'land-locked'; restricted by the architectures, deployment models, and functionality of solutions that were conceived in another age - an age when there was no Web 2.0, no mobile Internet, no impending pandemic, and no economic crisis. Of those organisations that are trying to move ahead in the 'new world of work', many IT departments are struggling to keep pace with the rapidly-changing world of information worker solutions and with th…
Technology Evaluation and Comparison Reports - published 09/09/2009 - Angela Eager, Balachandar Ganesh, Chandranshu Singh, Mark Blowers, Richard Edwards, Rob Hailstone, Sarah Burnett, Sue Clarke
Atlassian’s Confluence is an enterprise Wiki solution aimed primarily at promoting internal communication and collaboration. The collaboration platform is built around workspaces and pages, and workspaces can be managed independently. The solution combines Wikis, blogs, search, personal profiles, tags, tag clouds, the ability to link documents to pages, enable document version control, micro-blogging, and discussion threads, with features relevant to enterprise deployments, such as access control, Lightw…
Technology Audits - published 11/08/2009 - Angela Eager, Karthik Balakrishnan, Somak Roy
Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) is an integrated set of online applications that enable users to communicate and collaborate. The primary components of this offering are e-mail, calendaring, chat, document authoring, and sharing. As a hosted service, GAPE offers a cost-effective service with straightforward per-user/per-year licensing, and contrasts markedly with traditional products and solutions where IT departments have to procure server hardware and manage a range of software patches and upgrades....
Technology Audits - published 11/08/2009 - Richard Edwards
Open Text Collaboration and Community Management comprises two approaches: Extended Collaboration and Social Media. Extended Collaboration is a content- and process-centric collaboration tool that provides virtual environments in which employees can share their knowledge and work together in the context of business processes. By contrast, Open Text Social Media has a people-centric focus using collaborative tools that are associated more with social networking than business collaboration. These two appro…
Technology Audits - published 10/08/2009 - Sue Clarke
Cisco’s collaboration portfolio can be delivered on-premise, on-demand, managed, or hosted, and comprises unified communications, TelePresence, and WebEx solutions. All of the aforementioned are supported by a service-aware architectural foundation, presence capabilities, and infrastructure management solutions. In addition, Cisco provides a development environment that helps client organisations and a network of partners to build specific enterprise applications with collaboration integration and video …
Technology Audits - published 10/08/2009 - Mark Blowers
Microsoft has a wide range of offerings that could be deemed collaborative in nature, but the primary components are Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007, Windows® SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft® Office Groove 2007, and Microsoft® Office Communicator 2007 with Microsoft® Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007. Exchange Server, in conjunction with Outlook, provides organisations with a robust and reliable platform for e-mail, calendaring, scheduling, task man…
Technology Audits - published 10/08/2009 - Sarah Burnett
Organisations have an increasing range of viable alternatives to traditional Enterprise Collaboration solutions, as Adobe, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and others back cloud-based Enterprise Collaboration services. But are these offerings any match for those consumer-oriented products and services that so many of us increasingly rely on to do our jobs?
OpinionWire Articles - published 10/08/2009 - Richard Edwards
EMC CenterStage is a collaboration tool that allows users throughout the enterprise to share information whilst ensuring that effective controls are maintained. Many organisations are restricting the use of collaboration tools as it is proving difficult to manage information and ensure that it is not being misused by collaborators. As part of the Documentum Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suite, CenterStage is able to bring collaborative information under the management of Documentum, applying Record…
Technology Audits - published 10/08/2009 - Sue Clarke
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