The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘productivity’

There’s no question that Google is setting its sights on taking some of Microsoft’s marketshare in the productivity suite space. Last year, Google announced a new plug-in that syncs Google’s enterprise versions of Apps, including Gmail, contacts, and calendar, with Microsoft’s Outlook. And Google just acquired Docverse, an application lets users collaborate directly on Microsoft Office documents. Today Google is taking another swipe at Microsoft with a new tool that makes it significantly easier to make the switch over to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange.

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange is a new server-side tool that migrates a company’s email, calendar and contact data from Microsoft Exchange, an email server software product from Microsoft, to Google Apps. Google promises ease with the tool, allowing IT administrators the ability to select the mail, calendar and contact data to move in phases and migrate hundreds of users at the same time. Plus, employees can use Exchange during the migration without any interruption. The tool works with Exchange 2033 and 2007 for both on-premise and hosted applications and is available to the enterprise and education versions of Google Apps.

This is clearly a play at showing businesses how simple it is to move from from Microsoft products, such as Exchange, that may not be hosted in the cloud to the cloud-based Google Apps product. Google product Manager Matt Glotzbach told me that the search giant wants to make it as simple as possible for potential customers to make the switch to Google Apps, and many potential Google Apps’ clients are using Microsoft Exchange to host and power email, calendar, and contacts. Google also launched Google Apps Migrator for Lotus Notes and a Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Google Apps has steadily been growing; already 25 million people are using the Apps product. And that also includes over 2 million businesses ranging from startups, to small businesses, to Fortune 500 companies. And Google is developing a compelling ecosystem around Google Apps, recently launching the Google Apps Marketplace, which is an an app store for enterprise apps in the cloud.

Google’s recently announced $25 million acquisition of DocVerse represented one saga of an ongoing war between Google and Microsoft over dominance in the productivity suite place. Today, Israeli enterprise software company Mainsoft is launching a Docverse-like plug-in that may up the ante in the battle. Harmony is launching free plug-ins that bring Google Docs documents and Microsoft SharePoint document libraries directly to Microsoft Outlook.

Once downloaded, Harmony for Google Docs will open in a sidebar pane within Outlook. The new Harmony sidebar enables people to share a single, centralized copy of the document, eliminating the many intermediary steps associated with sending e-mail attachments back and forth. The plug-in allows users to locate, share, and work on Google documents directly from their email client.

Once logged in to your Google account, you’ll be able to drag any files (ie Microsoft Word files, PDFs) directly from an email to the Harmony sidebar to upload and convert them to Google documents. You can drag a Google document from the sidebar to create links in your e-mail messages and meeting requests to other users and viewers. Harmony automatically shares the document with the recipients. You can decide to give recipients read or write access. Recipients simply click the link in the message to open the document in their browser and don’t need to have Harmony installed to view the document.

Harmony also allows you to search document contents on Google Docs from the Harmony search box and locate documents using the View Bar, which allows you to switch between common views, such as spreadsheets, starred items, items owned by or shared with you, and more. One of the major features of Harmony is the ability to actually open and edit Google documents from directly in Outlook. All your changes are saved online and are available to your colleagues. You can organize and create folders to store Google Docs and also save Google documents in Office format. Harmony can export Google documents to Office, Open Office, PDF, RTF, HTML, TXT, and image formats.

The SharePoint plug-in isn’t nearly as sexy as as the Google Docs app but still offers a useful set of tools for enterprise users. The plug-in aims to transform Microsoft Outlook into a collaboration console, with access to documents stored on SharePoint. Similar to the Google Docs plug-in, you can drag e-mail attachments or entire e-mail messages to publish them on SharePoint. You can search the contents of documents in your current SharePoint site or library and share documents via e-mail message, calendar appointment, or task. You can edit a document from within Outlook, view document history and more.

Harmony was built using SharePoint Web Services interfaces and Google Docs open APIs and in the process has transformed Microsoft Outlook into a more collaborative application. Most importantly, the Google Docs plug-in makes the transition between web-based documents and the desktop email client seamless. It gives Microsoft users the best of both worlds, much like Docverse did with Microsoft Word documents and web-based files. If you use Microsoft Outlook and Google Docs, the plug-in seems like a no brainer to download. Plus its conveniently free. Considering the fate of Docverse, it may only be a matter of time before Microsoft and Google come sniffing around Harmony.

If you were to ask an employee of any company for a list of their biggest gripes, there’s a good chance “Meetings” would be near the top of the list. There are plenty of reasons why people don’t like meetings, but there’s usually one overarching theme: they’re inefficient. From longwinded tangents to ill-prepared presenters, many meetings could probably be held in a fraction of the time if everyone just got their act together. Cue MeetingMix, a new site launching today that hopes to help streamline meetings, helping you ensure that everyone involved is more prepared, time conscious, and on topic.

MeetingMix’s core functionality is to help you create and distribute an agenda for your meeting. First, you name a meeting and add a few bullet points outlining which topics you’d like to cover. Then you send your meeting outline to your coworkers, inviting them to tack on any topics they think need to be covered. The logic behind this is simple: everyone knows ahead of time what you’re going to talk about, so there’s less of a chance of off-topic tangents. You can also assign each meeting point to an employee, so everyone should know going in what they’re going to be responsible for.

MeetingMix also has a set of features you can use during and after the meeting. During the meeting, you can use a tool that helps you transcribe notes about each item on the agenda, which are later compiled into the meeting’s minutes and can be sent to all the attendees. You can project an agenda page in front of everyone, so your co-workers know exactly what topic you’re currently supposed to be talking about. This mode also includes a timer at the top of the screen that helps you keep track of how long you’ve spent on a given topic so that you don’t run over time.

MeetingMix charges meeting creators $4.95 a month, which allows you to make as many meetings as you’d like, each of which can have an unlimited number of attendees. Co-founder Shawn Gupta likens the model to 37Signals’ products, explaining that it’s a straightforward tool that anyone in a company can start using without any involvement from management or IT. To help build the product, he says that company consulted former SalesForce VP Todd McKinnon (who has played a part in plenty of meetings) and now serves as a MeetingMix advisor.

MeetingMix is intuitive and should be easy to pick up for just about anyone. But as with many services that offer simplicity as a core feature, I wonder if the product might be a little too basic. Given that the service revolves around collaboration, it would be nice if there was a way to collaboratively build a PowerPoint presentation to be shown during the meeting. I’d also like to see an easy way to make an audio recording of a meeting that’s synced up with the meeting minutes as you typed them.

MeetingMix was built by the founders behind IDidWork, a service for helping employees track their productivity. The Y Combinator-funded company is maintaining IDidWork, but they’ve switched to working full time on MeetingMix.

Earlier this week we saw the launch of the Google Nexus One, the second very high profile Android launch in as many months. And, as should be expected, the phone is drawing numerous comparisons to the iPhone — it seems you can’t find a related review, blog post, or tweet that isn’t gauging the device based on how it compares to Apple’s juggernaut. That’s as it should be. But for anyone considering making the jump to Android, you need to keep one thing in mind: many of these early adopters have been using their iPhones non-stop for years. And it takes days, if not weeks, to unlearn your iPhone habits and judge Android on its own merits.

Imagine if you took a longtime Windows user and sat them in front of a Mac for a couple days. They’d probably complain about superficial things like the change in mouse acceleration and the “unintuitive” button placement (the Close button is on the opposite side of the window). It’s not until a week or two after you start using a Mac as your primary computer that you overcome these issues and begin to fully grasp some of the benefits it offers. No, it may not be for you, but there’s really no way you can tell for sure without taking the plunge and using one as your primary computer. It’s the same way with Android.

I know, because I had the same experience when I made the leap from the iPhone to Android a few months ago. When I got my Droid, I was initially very pleased with it: the screen is amazing and the device flies. But as the luster wore off, I began to have my doubts. I couldn’t figure out how to access options that should have been readily visible. Menus weren’t where they should have been. All in all, Android made me feel stupid, because much of what I had learned about using the iPhone — habits that had become nearly instinct — no longer applied.

A week or so later, it clicked. When I want an option that isn’t already visible, I hit the dedicated ‘Menu’ button just beneath the screen. Need to jump to a previous screen in an app or the web browser? Hit the dedicated ‘Back’ button. In some ways, these are actually better than the soft buttons located in iPhone apps, because they’re always in the same place. It also saves some screen real estate. Using them has become totally second nature to me. But they aren’t the reason why I’ve decided I prefer Android over the iPhone.

Which brings me to the things that have turned me into a full-time Android user. Gmail on Android kicks the pants off of the iPhone’s Email client — something that I’m not the only person to notice. As someone who does a lot of Emailing, that makes a huge difference to me. Google Voice integration is fantastic. The ability to run multiple applications at the same time is a breath of fresh air. Those three things were enough to seal the deal.

Had I only used an Android device for a few days, these aforementioned pros may have been overshadowed by the fact that the phone felt so unfamiliar. Or I may have been turned off by one of the things Android gets wrong, like that there’s no way to update multiple applications at the same time and the default music player is remarkably ugly. But when it comes to using the phone in real life on a day-to-day basis, those problems aren’t enough to outweigh the productivity benefits Android offers me.

And, really, that’s my point. Many of these iPhone users who are testing out Android for the first time tend to get hung up on things that feel unfamiliar, or are griping about issues that will only affect them once in a blue moon. No, Android isn’t as pretty as the iPhone, and there are plenty of things it doesn’t do as well as it could. But until you’ve taken the plunge to see what lies beneath its less-polished exterior, you haven’t really seen what it has to offer.

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Zoho is undoubtedly the lesser known name and an underdog in the productivity suite race with Google and Microsoft. But the startup has a compelling strategy: Zoho continuously launches integrations with its competitors and also iterates on it product to offer new and innovative products. Previously, Zoho has launched various integrations with Google sign-ins and with Google Apps. Today, Zoho is launching a full integration between Google Docs and Zoho’s Apps.

Google Docs users can now attach files from Google Docs to Zoho’s CRM within Leads, Accounts, and Cases of Zoho CRM. When users try to attach a document from Google Docs, they will be prompted to authenticate using Google credentials. Google Docs will be listed within Zoho once users sign-in.

And while composing emails in Zoho Mail, users can attach files directly from Google Docs and Zoho Docs. Zoho users also have an option to upload files directly from Google Docs to Zoho Docs.
Zoho currently has a limit for users to to upload only 5 files at a time and plans to offer increased flexibility in the future. Lastly, files from Google Docs can now be attached directly in Zoho’s project management app Zoho Projects.

This latest and more robust integration with Google Docs represents Zoho’s compelling strategy to continue to innovate by launching new products and add-ons to its existing offerings. Most recently, the startup launched Zoho Discussions, a online forum tool for businesses; and Zoho Recruit. Over the past two years, Zoho has added support for Sharepoint, mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing.

Zoho knows that it will have to fight an uphill battle to keep users from flocking to Google Apps and soon Microsoft’s Web-based version of Microsoft 2010. Although Zoho ’s the underdog, the startup’s strategy may be paying off—the startup has reached 2 million users in just 4 years.

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Collaboration applications are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise space. Startup Huddle.net has been steadily accumulating innovative features to its business-friendly collaboration platform and quickly adding big name companies, including Samsung and Panasonic, as clients. Huddle is a network of secure online workspaces where you can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organize virtual meetings. Today, Huddle is adding several more useful features to its platform—web conferencing, integration with Microsoft Office, and a much-awaited iPhone app.

Huddle’s web conferencing feature, which is similar to web-ex, lets users set up meetings, schedule recurring events, and share their desktop and content with other members of their workspace. Huddle has also sent up a partnership with InterCall, one of the world’s largest conference call providers, to handle phone conferencing. Huddle’s web conferencing tool is integrated with Outlook or Google calendar and users receive free conferencing minutes as a part of their monthly package and can also access low-cost international service plans.

Huddle is also letting Microsoft office users seamlessly move between the productivity suite and the collaboration platform by launching a Microsoft Office plug-in that lets you save desktop files to Huddle save their desktop files directly into Huddle’s cloud-based storage, view and edit files, add new versions, request approvals and send notifications without opening a browser window. You’ll be able to access any edited Word documents that you’ve tweaked in the desktop app directly from Huddle. And this feature is enhanced by Huddle’s previous ability to use a Zoho-powered editor to work on Word and Excel files together directly in the browser. As a Microsoft BizSpark partner (we just announced Yammer’s BizSpark news a few weeks ago), Huddle is going to be developing a plug-in for SharePoint and and other Microsoft products in the near future. Currently, the MS Office plug-in works for the 2007 version but will be retrofitted to work with Microsoft Office 2010 next year.

There was some speculation earlier this month about the fact that Huddle doesn’t have a mobile presence. But Huddle’s new iPhone app lets users have full access to document sharing, project tasks, discussions and whiteboards, as well as a complete view of the user’s personalized dashboard. Huddle can be also accessed on other cell phones by using third party applications such as Clustr.

Huddle has also developed partnerships and integrations with LinkedIn and Ning to be included as apps on both social network. And the startup has a similar deal with Facebook, which allows you full access to all of Huddle’s tools within the social network.

And Huddle is affordable—there’s a free, ad-supported version available from the Huddle web site (which includes 1 workspace and 1GB of storage); three premium levels (which have increased workspace and storage) and an enterprise version with multiple managers, customization, advanced security, training, and increased support services. And Huddle allows for unlimited numbers of users for each account.

Andy McLoughlin, Huddle’s co-founder and director of strategic development, tells methat while 55 percent of Huddle’s users (McLoughlin says total users amount in the “Hundreds of thousands”) are based in the U.S., Huddle is making a big play for the U.S. in the coming year, opening up offices in San Francisco and other areas. Considering that many of Huddle’s big-name clients are based in the U.S. such as Edelman and Disney, this is a smart move. Because of the startup’s multiple services, Huddle faces competition from a variety of startups and tech giants including, Lotus, Box.net, and WebEx. And of course, Huddle faces competition from Google Apps and the launch of Google Wave. But despite the competition in the “Enterprise 2.0″ space, Huddle has been steadily gaining traction and should be able to give even Google a run for its money.

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Web-based productivity suite Zoho is launching a brand new product today called Zoho Discussions. Zoho lets any business, individual or organization create public or private support forums where employees or customers can share comments around a particular discussion topic. We have a special offer for TechCrunch readers; the first 25 readers (who are paid Zoho users) to email techcrunch@zohodiscussions.com will be able to use the product for free for up to 6 months.

I had the opportunity to test out Zoho Discussions and it’s both remarkably easy for anyone to set up and filled with useful features. With the new product you can create a platform for discussion forums, similar to Google Groups. The differentiating factor is that your forums can be customized and branded to adopt the look and feel of your site. Zoho even lets you pick out a domain name that coincides with your site. Plus, Zoho Discussions can be integrated with many of Zoho’s other productivity applications.

Similar to any forum, Zoho Discussion lets users create threads based on a particular topic. In terms of features, Zoho has focused in creating plenty of social tools to make the discussions more interactive and engaging. For example, users can vote on comments within a forum, indicating whether they “Like” a particular comment or forum. Aside from posting in the forums, users can interact in real-time through the built-in chat feature. Within the forum, users can create a profile, follow other users, bookmark particular threads and send private messages to administrators and users.

On the administrator side, you can make announcements, make particular threads more “sticky,” assign different users as moderators, remove inappropriate content and more. Plus, users and moderators can embed images and most types of files into threads as well. Like all of Zoho’s products, Zoho Discussion has a freemium model, with additional features like more storage, number of forums, number of moderators priced at $25 and $75 per month.

Zoho’s Evangelist, Raju Vegesna, told me that Zoho Discussions is designed to fulfill two kinds of purposes. The first is to serve as way for businesses to host a discussion forum to communicate with customers. The second purpose of the product is to be an internal platform for discussion within a business, in which case the product will be private.

This product seems to be representative of Zoho’s strategy to continue to innovate and iterate by launching new products and add-ons to its existing offerings. It’s almost reminiscent of Salesforce.com’s strategy. Over the past two years, Zohos has added support for Sharepoint, mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing. Perhaps Zoho knows that it will have to fight a battle to keep users from flocking to Google Apps and soon Microsoft’s Web-based version of Microsoft 2010. But Zoho’s strategy may be sound—the startup has reached 2 million users in just 4 years.

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There’s no denying it any longer: research has finally proven that new technologies like laptop computers and mobile phones have increased our productivity significantly.

Furthermore, mobile communications have resulted in us working longer hours, too. That means modern technology is likely to be thanked for the wonderful state of the global eco … never mind.

Anyway, the shocking findings come from staffing firm Kelly Services’ “Global Workforce Index” (via eMarketer), which shows that no less than 78% of workers in the US and Canada - across all generations - believed that gadgets such as laptop computers and mobile phones have effectively increased their productivity. Over half of the respondents even said they felt ‘much more’ productive, and only 2% said it made them worse workers (I’d love to meet them someday).

Other key findings: more than seven in 10 workers from all countries considered the ability to work outside of the office a ‘positive’ development, and 87% felt an office telecommuting policy would be attractive to them as employees.

In addition, 30% in North America, 33% in Europe and 41% in the Asia-Pacific region agreed that they were working longer hours because of mobile communications.

Never one to accept study findings without checking and then double-checking the facts, we’ll conduct a little research of our own:

Which effect did the uptake of modern technology (laptops, mobile phones etc.) have on your productivity?(surveys)

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This guest post is written by Auren Hoffman, the CEO of Rapleaf and an active angel investor. Auren argues that productivity gains among software engineers far outstrips pay increases. His advice? Stock up on engineers, it’s a competitive advantage. His advice reminds me of Joe Kraus‘ famous 2005 post that compared the cost of launching a startup in the nineties ($3 million) to one this decade ($100,000).

Productivity gains in software engineering are powering innovation. Everyone is more productive these days. This has been a consistent trend for at least the past decade, where productivity gains have been particularly strong within the business sector. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, today’s business industry workers are on average 30% more productive than their 1998 counterparts (productivity growth of roughly 2.6% per year).

Within the technology industry, productivity has increased more. Thanks to smartphones, improved search engines, better CRM software, and ever-increasing bandwidth, salesmen and marketers can find, receive and process information faster than ever.

(Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

The most dramatic gains, however, have occurred within software development.

Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!

The advent of open source software makes engineers particularly efficient. One VP Engineering that I talked to gave me an anecdote about one module where they used open source files with about 500,000 lines of code and then wrote 7,000 lines of code to stitch it all together. Open source software is also free. In the company I was running in 1999, “software” was a huge budget line item – we had to buy databases, testing suites, libraries, and more. Today all that stuff is free … a start-up might spend more money on sodas for the office than it does on software.

We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law – that the power of computers doubles every 18 months. In my 15 years of software development, I’ve seen 5x-10x productivity gains in engineers. Which could mean that the productivity of a well-trained engineer doubles every five years. (note that this Law is much harder to prove than Moore’s Law – but potentially just as profound). That would mean that the productivity of an engineer is growing at roughly 14.9% per year! That’s fast … really fast … much faster than the 2.6% yearly gains than the population as a whole is making.

This means that today’s companies are able to do more software engineering and build more stuff with fewer people. But should they do more with less? It could be much more prudent for a company, especially for a small company, to do the opposite … and to double-down on engineering. You can use the productivity gains in software development as a strategic advantage and invest aggressively in engineers. First, doing so contributes the most to progress and also increases the chance for breakthroughs in innovation. Second, engineers – as opposed to salesmen and marketers – can often hit the ground running (assuming you have a good on-boarding system) and have a positive impact within a few weeks.

Alternatively, many large traditional companies might be able to get by with FEWER but DIFFERENT engineers. These companies might need to change their approach to engineering to take advantage of the new tools. The companies that can benefit from fewer engineers are likely ones that haven’t changed their technology platforms radically in the last ten years.

Although engineers contribute more to an organization than ever before, their pay – relative to other functions in a company – hasn’t followed suit. I’ve polled a few dozen companies and have found that over the last ten years, an engineer’s pay has held the same relative salary to marketing and sales. This is odd behavior … usually when something outputs more, its cost goes up. So why have engineers’ wages in the U.S. stayed constant relative to salespeople and marketers? Here are two contributing factors that lower demand:

1. Off-shoring. Because of new technology and higher bandwidth, more companies are off-shoring their software development. But this does not fully explain the flat salary phenomenon since firms are also off-shoring sales and marketing (though to a lesser degree).
2. Need for software engineers has decreased. Because software engineers are so much more productive then they were ten years ago, many firms are opting to hire fewer of them. If a company is not doing hard-core engineering, it actually needs fewer engineers as a portion of its total workforce than it did ten years ago. (I personally think this could be a big mistake … but I will get to that later).

Both the off-shoring and the decreased need for engineers has led to a lowering of the demand which has likely put a check on wages.

One problem, of course, is that measuring “output” of an engineer is a really hard thing to do (as opposed to the output of a salesperson) … so it is really hard to quantify the productivity gains. And even if you can measure output in engineering, it is sometimes hard to tie that to an increase in profitability.

And, like sales, the quality of engineers varies wildly. A great engineer is potentially 2-4 times more productive than a good engineer. Ben Ling from Google pointed out to me that some great engineers are massively compensated – because they tend to be the early hires at a company and get lots of stock (most of Google’s first 50 employees were engineers).

Let’s recap: The productivity of a software engineer has increased 2-3 times that of a marketing person in the last ten years. Yet their relative compensation has remained about the same. That means if you are a savvy company, you should stock up on engineers. In fact, you would want as many great engineers as you can get a hold of.

This engineering productivity boom will only increase and continue to create dislocation and creative destruction. While the extent of growth and industry makeover are hard to gauge, what is certain is that corporations relying on technology and engineering paradigms from the 1990s or before will find themselves hard-pressed to compete with the new and nimble movers.

(special thanks to Jonathan Hoffman, Michael Hsu, Ben Ling, Jeremy Lizt, Naghi Prasad, and Dave Selinger for their feedback and edits).

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Kyte has just released its new Mobile Producer app into the App Store [iTunes link]. While it doesn’t require you have an iPhone 3GS, if you want to take advantage of its best feature, video, then you must have one. And if you do, I think you’ll be pretty pleased with how well it works.

The app, which is $4.99, is very simple. You boot it up, log in (or create a new account), and you’re taken to a screen where you put in a title for your “show” (what you’re about to broadcast). Below that are links to add video, a photo, and/or a link. If you choose to add a video you can easily take a new video, or use one you’ve already shot with your iPhone 3GS. The video capture functionality is fast and works just as well as the iPhone’s own video capturing app.

But the real killer features of the Kyte app are its upload speed and even more so, the quality of its videos. While I’ve already gone in depth about why I think video is the killer feature for the iPhone 3GS, based mainly on how well the videos shot on the device look, and how easily they are uploaded to YouTube. But in testing this app out today, I’d say that Kyte’s offering is at least as compelling from an ease-of-use perspective. The video upload was about as speedy as it was to YouTube, but it didn’t feature the annoying rendering time of the YouTube videos I’ve uploaded. And the video quality is noticeably better on Kyte than on YouTube when uploaded from the iPhone 3GS (see below).

One downside to recording the videos in the Kyte app is that they don’t save to your video library on the phone. The other downside is the price: As I mentioned, $4.99. But that’s to make it clear that Kyte is intending this app for its commercial publishers, we’re told. But any Kyte users is able to use it and really, $4.99 isn’t a bad price for a video app that works this well.

This offering is the latest in Kyte’s mobile strategy with regards to the iPhone. Last month, it rolled out a series of branded iPhone apps. Of course, as a live-streaming service, Kyte would love to be able to live-stream from the iPhone 3GS, but that’s still not allowed yet. Hopefully that will change one day.

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