The online collaboration market is crowded and includes established leaders like BaseCamp and Central Desktop. OnePlace a self-pronounced “chaos management system” is now in beta is looking to edge into the market.
Press Release
Riverock Technologies has announced a ground-breaking way to manage business chaos with the availability of its OnePlace on-demand project management and collaboration solution.
“The Chaos Theory tells us that chaotic systems are systems that look random, but aren’t,” said Steve Kickert, ceo, Riverock Technologies. “Business operations fundamentally prove this theory. The Chaos Theory suggests that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could cause a tornado in Texas (known as the Butterfly Effect). Likewise, in business, an individual’s actions can impact the performance of the entire business, both in good and bad ways.” Kickert theorizes a business can influence this impact by providing teams and individuals with tools enabling them to collaborate more and coordinate their efforts.
A group of five enterprise software companies announced the creation of the Enterprise Desktop Alliance (EDA) to facilitate the acceptance of the Mac in environments managed with Microsoft Windows.
The EDA will be hosting a series of events, including seminars and Webcasts, and will provide white papers, product information and other resources on the EDA web site.
“Interest in the Mac at large organizations is growing along with Apple’s market share,” said Bob O’Donnell, Vice President, IDC. “The challenge has been overcoming objections surrounding managing Macs within these corporate environments. Efforts that can make life easier for the IT professional and help the Mac become a more appealing and realistic alternative within the enterprise could help turn that interest into a stronger Mac presence.”
For IT Management
The EDA suite of solutions will enable IT departments to deploy, integrate
and manage Macs throughout the enterprise. They will use the same standard Windows-based management tools to support Macs as they do with Windows.
Small and mid-sized companies looking to implement ITIL and continuous improvement processes to streamline their IT operations and services have had few options for a single solution suite. Companies such as BMC, HP, IBM and CA offer integrated tools and services, but their price tag is often out of reach of these companies.
FrontRange Solutions, an IT service management company best known for their Heat service desk and Goldmine CRM products has acquired Centennial Software. This adds IT Asset Management, IT inventory and network security to the FrontRange portfolio of products and services.
FrontRange and Centennial products are traditionally aimed at small and mid-sized businesses looking to implement ITIL based service management. Combining their product lines FrontRange can now offer an integrated suite of ITSM tools.
Gartner listed unified communications (UC) as 2nd in their top ten technology areas of 2008. Driven by voice over IP (VoIP), call centers and phone services are leading the way, but other areas of IT such as storage networks, video from security cameras and sensors will soon follow.
Unified communications refers to a group of technologies, many of which are already used in the business world today. Instant messaging allows workers to chat with each other in real-time. This is a useful tool for team members that are separated by feet or miles and need to collaborate. Jabber offers a real-time communications solution with its Jabber XCP package.
Overwhelmed by trying to organize your email? Xobni offers a new way to organize and search your Outlook email. It creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments.
Xobni (inbox spelled backwards, pronounced zob-nee) is a free Outlook plug-in 
that adds some great features to the Outlook sidebar. Each Xobni profile contains:
- Relationship statistics such as the number of emails to and from the contact as well as their overall rank. A profile picture can also be included.
- Xobni extracts and displays phone numbers in the sidebar. You can also add a phone number if it can not be extracted. Also included are selections to schedule a meeting or email the contact.
- Related people between you and the contact. This allows you to easily remember the common contacts you have.
- A threaded chronological list of recent emails to/from the contact (USEFUL!)
- A chronological list of exchanged file attachments (VERY USEFUL!)
- Useful statistics such as rankings and graphs that display the time of time you get emails from the contact.
Here is a video preview of Xobni features.
Xobni is a valuable tool to not only manage your email, but will make you more productive in Outlook. Try it out for yourself. I don’t think you will be disappointed. To find out more about Xobni visit the Xobni web site.
Get Connected TV takes a less nerdy look at understanding technology for home and business. They offer in-depth reviews, tips and how-to segments on the newest technology products.
From their web site you can view the last 5 TV shows and listen to the Podcasts of their radio show. They also offer Podcasts and RSS feeds for both the TV and radio shows.
The last TV shows topic was Security and included:
- Maxtor/Sentry Safe - QA0004 Hard Drive: The world’s first and only fire resistant and waterproof hard drive that ensures your data is safe in almost any environment.
- Steganos Safe - Security Software: Encryption software to make sure your personal and work files are safe with full control over accessibility.
- Apriccorn Biometric Hard Drive: This super-secure portable Hard Drive will only work if you swipe your finger on a fingerprint sensitive touch pad.
Microsoft’s Hyper-V server virtualization technology could ship as early as June or July. This is shorter than the 180 days projected after the launch of Microsoft Server 2008 which launched in February.
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is a next generation hypervisor server virtualization technology. It allows you to consolidate multiple server roles as virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine.
It will add to the VM options already offered by VMware and Xen derivatives by Citrix (Citrix purchased XenSource in 2007), Red Hat and Oracle. With the desire by IT for lower TOC and a higher ROI, virtualization offer cost-effective and flexible solutions. This makes Hyper-V a timely release for Microsoft.
Touchpaper, a IT Business Management provider announced the launch of the Touchpaper Asset Management Process Pack, designed to extend the reach of Configuration Management into the asset management process.
“The Asset Management Process Pack is a total lifecycle approach to asset management that allows IT directors to keep track of an organization’s computing assets through the entire lifecycle; from procurement, ongoing management and change of IT assets, to their eventual disposal.”
SYS Technologies has released their latest free network management gadget, dVUE6 Lighthouse. dVUE 6 Lighthouse is a graphical syslog monitor that shows the availability and alarm status of the five most alarmed devices on your network.
dVUE 6 Lighthouse converts syslog security levels into color-coded alarm levels. It pings the devices every 15 seconds and changes the availability indicator from green to red if the device fails to respond, alerting you to a down device.
Looking for conversation that showcases important technology issues? CIO Talk Radio is an Internet radio talk show broadcast live every Wednesday at 9:00 AM Central time. Recent topics of interest:
- Green IT: The true ROI
- Social Networks: The Enterprise Adoption Challenge
- My CIO is an Alien! (great title)
- IT Initiative Failures: Saving a Sinking Ship
- Does Your IT Helpdesk Help?
