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Collaboration

Collaboration Made Simple, Reliable, and Results Oriented

The key problem associated with collaboration is knowing/finding the individual/group who can most likely answer the question(s).  Obviously if everyone broadcasts every question s/he has to everyone in the company, nothing will be accomplished.  At a minimum the communication channels will be clogged and at worst no one gets his/her own work done due to answering a never-ending stream of questions.

It is not enough to simply install some mechanism, software or otherwise, to facilitate collaboration.  You must ensure that the questions are directed to the individuals most qualified to answer them, that they are delivered in a timely manner, that they are metered to avoid overwhelming the recipient, and that the entire process is dynamically monitored to ensure constant adaptation to the change in the organization and the nature of the questions.

NewPush has developed proprietary technologies that work with the outstanding IBM collaboration and social media suite.  Using that suite as the bedrock and framework upon which to build, NewPush has created tools to address the issues above and to present the results in easy to comprehend visual representation.

Email is still a major part of collaboration.  Whether they use Domino or Exchange, businesses turn to us to outsource their growing email infrastructure so that the headaches of planning for storage, backups, and disaster recovery are removed from their plates.

Collaboration powered by IBM

We selected IBM to power our hosted collaboration and social media suite, because IBM basically used the Aikido approach on Social Media: the IBM researchers discovered what was about social media that made people collaborate so effectively, and grow vibrant communities so fast. IBM then made the best tools available as a complete package for corporations, to use internally. In other words IBM researchers used the momentum of social media tools to better the enterprise. Hence the analogy with Aikido, the principle of using the opponents momentum in your own advantage.

Collaboration for the sake of collaboration is basically self defeating. On a spectrum that goes from workers that can produce great things in isolation (such as the wizkids, or the heroes) to the constant collaborators (the guys spending all their time at the water cooler, but not necessarily getting much done), a company must find the right balance for their knowledge workers. As such, deploying a collaboration suite of tools is not enough to give an edge to an organization. The data collected using these tools needs to be fed to advanced analytical systems, that allow both better self guidance to the individual, as well as better coaching by the managers. When managers have more accurate and objective data on their team members abilities, interests, affinities, and goals, they can build better teams, and foster better career paths for all.

Today's organizations often delay addressing the need for these new technologies, because their IT departments are already spread thin, and adding new projects challenges their ability to keep delivering high quality of service on existing commitments. As a result, hosting your collaboration applications with our team at NewPush is the right move. We can get a 10,000 user pilot project up and running in a matter of days, and scale up to hundreds of thousands of users in a matter of weeks.

Here is some of our Collaboration product lineup.

IBM Lotus Connections Hosted: per user starting at $6/mo.

IBM Connections is social software for business that lets you access everyone in your professional network, including your colleagues, customers, and partners.

The latest capabilities in IBM Connections, such as Moderation, Ideation Blogs, and the Media Gallery, enable you to embrace networks of people who are engaged and to work in transparent and nimble ways to create business value.

  • Faster task execution through quick access to information from an expanded professional network
  • Increased efficiency and effectiveness of business processes using existing skills discovered through your professional network
  • Confident decision making, knowing decisions were vetted by experts across the organization and reflect past experience
  • Innovative products and services developed using the experiences and knowledge of communities of employees, partners, and customers
  • Sustainable competitive advantage created by leveraging innovation from across your value chain and building stronger relationships
  • Access to your social data while on the go.
  • Access to people and information in your existing IBM solutions, including IBM Sametime®, IBM Lotus Notes®, IBM Lotus Quickr®, IBM Rational Team Concert™, IBM FileNet® Content Manager, and IBM Content Manager.

Benefits:

By empowering people to easily connect with employees, partners, and customers, IBM Connections can help businesses, government agencies, educational institutions, and others realize the following benefits:

  • Task execution is faster through quick access to information from an expanded professional network
  • Increased efficiency and effectiveness of business processes by using existing skills discovered through your professional network
  • Decisions can be made with confidence knowing they were vetted by experts across the organization and reflect past experience
  • Innovative products and services can be developed using the experiences and knowledge of communities of employees, partners, and customers
  • Sustainable competitive advantage can be created by leveraging innovation from across your value chain and building stronger relationships
  • Exchange ideas with, and benefit from the expertise of other people using Forums and Blogs
  • Expand your professional network through social analytics based recommendations for people to connect with, and communities to join
  • Build vibrant communities that encourage participation with sub-communities focused on key topics of interest to the members
  • Access profile information, search for expertise, and view status quickly
  • Stay informed of the latest updates from across your social network
  • Access your social data while on the go via the micro-browser or the device specific application
  • Extend your social business solution by accessing people and information in several of your existing IBM solutions such as IBM Lotus Sametime, IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Quickr, and IBM enterprise content management (ECM) systems - IBM FileNet® Content Manager and IBM Content Manager.
  • Extend data protection by integrating Connections with IBM® Lotus® Protector for Mail Security. IBM Lotus Protector for Mail Security now provides virus protection for files uploaded to Connections files, communities, wikis, and activities.
  • Add security and real time policy management controls with Vantage for IBM Connections. Vantage for IBM Connections helps social business organizations remain compliant with key regulatory and corporate requirements by delivering additional security and compliance benefits beyond native IBM Connections implementations.

 

IBM Lotus Notes Hosted: per user starting at $5/mo.

IBM Lotus Notes keeps you working in context, so you don't have to move across disjointed applications and web pages.

  • IBM® Lotus® Notes® software brings together email, collaboration tools, and business applications within a rich, integrated desktop experience, helping you discover, transform, and share content across geographically disbursed teams. You can be productive both online and offline, and seamlessly leverage people and resources throughout the enterprise and across the Internet.
  • Provides a robust and productive user experience with a single point of access to email, calendars, contacts, activities, instant messaging, feeds, office documents, collaboration tools and business applications.
  • Helps users manage their ever-growing inboxes effectively, with full-text search, delegation, mail filtering and sorting, conversation views and flags.
  • Helps increase user productivity with customizable widgets that can recognize specific patterns of text in Lotus Notes documents; recognized text can be clicked to perform the appropriate business action associated with that widget, such as retrieving information from a flight number in an e-mail.
  • Helps users instantly locate and connect with resources via presence awareness, business cards and instant messaging incorporated in context within the inbox and calendar.
  • Helps minimize or eliminate the impact of computer viruses through robust security features.
  • Helps drive business value through composite application technology that allows you to integrate and present line-of-business solutions and data from multiple systems into a single view for end-users.
  • Helps users to be productive even when disconnected from the network with advanced replication technology.
  • Many other capabilities can be added, such as portals, content manager, forms, and custom Lotus applications.

IBM Lotus Sametime Hosted: per user starting at $3/mo

Why Sametime software for your unified communications and collaboration software?

People need an immediate and cost-effective way to take action across their organization and with business partners and customers.

IBM Sametime® software provides users a unified user experience across a broad range of integrated real-time communications services—voice, data and video. Designed to help a social business be more nimble, Sametime software provides an immediate and cost effective way to take action across your organization and with business partners and customers.. It also provides a unified communications and collaboration platform, with built-in integration with many productivity and collaborative applications and with open-standards-based tools to help developers provide Sametime services into business processes.

Features and Benefits

Quick text chats can answer simple questions outright or can be escalated to multi-way voice or video chats or an online meeting. Switch communication methods as your conversation evolves:

  • Manage your contact list with recent and frequent contact views, plus search your corporate directory.
  • Transfer files, share screen captures and get instant screen sharing.
  • Track your chat history with time and date stamps, search (by person or date), and view sent files and links
  • Use the integrated high-quality audio and video and click to call from a name or number in a chat or chat history.
  • Chat from a browser or a client.

Rich presence-awareness information lets you know whether now is a good time to initiate a real-time conversation via instant messaging or a phone/conference call. Sametime software can integrate multiple presence elements to provide a comprehensive view of someone's availability:

  • Online presence status and icons (online, available, away, in a meeting or do not disturb).
  • Custom status messages via a free text field.
  • Alerts to signal when people become available.
  • Telephony status and automated geographic location awareness.

Collaborate with online meetings that enable high-quality document-, application- and screen sharing.

  • Invite people to meetings by dragging and dropping from the contact list. Accept meetings with a single click.
  • Get a consolidated view of your calendar and with one click, access meetings in the Meetings panel, which integrates into the Sametime Connect client.
  • Access online meetings from a browser or a client.

Extend many of the desktop Sametime client to a range of mobile devices

  • Deliver rich presence awareness, including online status, availability, geographic location and custom status messages.
  • Use instant messaging, including one-on-one and group messaging, manage multiple active chat sessions and see chat history.
  • Participate in Sametime online meetings on your Research in Motion® BlackBerry® smartphone.

Integrate telephony and provide telephony features.

  • Integrate existing infrastructure through plug-ins provided by your telephony vendor.
  • As an entry into unified communications, turn your Sametime Connect client into a standards-based Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) phone.
  • Integrate multiple PBX back-ends and provide a simple, rich unified communications experience on the desktop client, with phone presence, intelligent call management and more.

Provide high-quality integrated desktop voice and video—ours or yours—to help cut telephony costs:

  • A dual audio/video interface delivers both built-in and partner media capabilities in voice and video chats or in Sametime online meetings.
  • Use VoIP and voice chats with multiple participants. Audio/video is now based on the industry standard SIP, improving interoperability with third-party audio/video conferencing systems.
  • Use Sametime Bandwidth Manager to maintain network quality of service for rich media collaboration for mission-critical applications.

Community collaboration tools help people find, reach and collaborate with communities of users who may not be in their contact list:

  • Broadcast community channel tools, including skill tap (a real-time request for information to a defined set of experts), instant polls, and broadcast announcements.
  • Persistent group chat to keep a continuous chat discussion running on a specific topic.
  • Federate presence information and share text messages with community members outside the organization via federation with other Sametime communities, other enterprise IM systems or with public IM services such as AOL Instant Messenger and GoogleTalk, and other systems based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

Deliver a consistent user experience with a flexible, security-rich, and standards-based unified communications and collaboration platform.

  • Support a wide variety of environments with built-in support for major server and client operating systems, including mobile device support, and directories.
  • Take advantage of built-in integration with IBM WebSphere® Portal, IBM Lotus Notes®, IBM Lotus Quickr™, IBM Connections, Microsoft® Office, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint software to use unified communications in context of your work.
  • Use a robust software developer kit (SDK) featuring Eclipse-based rich-client and Web 2.0 APIs to communications enable business processes.
  • Connect to multiple telephone systems with the optional standards-based middleware layer.

If you would like to find out more about how we can help you boost your collaboration capabilities, please contact us.