Xobni’s Gadgets Bring Third-Party Collaboration Tools to Outlook: Online Collaboration«

Xobni, a popular productivity add-on for Outlook that automatically displays additional information about email contacts, has announced that it is making available“gadgets,” third-party additions to Xobni that will allow well-known collaboration tools as Yammer, Chatter, Dropbox, Evernote and Salesforce to become an integral part of the Outlook interface.

The first crop of gadgets includes tools for web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue reporting and monitoring, and note-taking, such as:

• An Evernote gadget that automatically displays notes containing the name or email address of a particular contact, and allows adding and editing.
• A Dropbox tool for finding files and sharing them by creating links that are entered into email messages. Drag-and-drop file sending is planned for the future.
• A JIRA bug tracker tool that allows programmers to update project status inline.
• A Google Translate tool that automatically translates entire conversations, both incoming and outgoing. Xobni says that the translations are good enough to be helpful for use in customer support.
• A WebEx tool to schedule meetings, and start them on the fly.

Other gadgets available today include:

• Productivity: GoldMail
• Collaboration: Huddle and Microsoft SharePoint
• Content: Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp
• CRM: Salesforce CRM

Xobni was one of the first companies to bring“social CRM” services to the inbox, but has more recently seen significant competition from the likes ofRapportive,GistandLiaise. By hooking into third-party services, the gadgets can offer offer additional capabilities not offered by Xobni’s competitors.

When I spoke with Xobni representatives recently, they said that the rationale for developing this platform was simple: research shows that in the enterprise, people spend 38 percent of their screen time in Outlook, so it makes sense to make Outlook as capable as possible.

Xobni says that its system relies on open APIs, and it is based onOpenSocial. Developers can create their own gadgets;they can be createdwith straightforward web development tools. The infrastructure can even be hosted on intranets to take advantage of corporate LDAP servers. Gadgets are not yet part ofXobni for Gmail beta, but they are on the way.

The new Xobni gadgets are available fromthe company’s website. Most of the Xobni Gadgets are free, but the JIRA and Saleforce gadgets are priced at $9.99 per user per year. Xobni handles billing and payment for developers.

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5 Tips for Better Performance Reviews: Online Collaboration«

During an annual performance review, it’s important to be able to document your accomplishments throughout the year, especially if you work remotely. It isn’t the time to be modest about what you’ve accomplished.

Here are a few ways to ensure you can demonstrate your value to the company, whether you’re a freelancer being evaluated or a full-time, web-working employee preparing for an annual performance review.

1. Keep good records. I spend a few minutes at the end of every day to document in awork diarythe top few things that I accomplished or worked on that day. I’ve been doing this for most of my career, and it’s a great excuse to reflect on my productivity for the day, in addition to providing me with a reminder of what I worked on in any given month or year. You could also do monthly status reports, internal blog posts or use some other form of documentation. The format isn’t as important as making sure you have some kind of ongoing record of your performance.
2. Demonstrate your expertise. Everyone is an expert in something, and demonstrating your expertise is one good way to stay top of mind, especially when you work remotely some or all of the time. In my current position, I’m focused on open-source online communities, and people I work with come to me with all kinds of questions on this topic. I try to document best practices to help people find the information they need to be successful, but I also make time to sit down with people to answer questions and provide suggestions for how they can work within the open source community. People come to me for help, not just because of my job title, but because I’m willing to explain and help them work through their difficulties in a way that makes all of us more productive.
3. Learn new skills. For most of us working online, technologies change every day, and while we don’t need to jump on every hot new thing, we do need to take the time to learn new skills and techniques. If we don’t learn about new technologies, we’ll find ourselves becoming obsolete and irrelevant. You can’t perform well if you don’t have the right skills. Whether you learn these new technologies by going to classes or just jumping in and learning on the job isn’t important, but you need to set aside some time for development.
4. Brag to your manager. Yes, I know your parents probably told you not to toot your own horn and that you shouldn’t brag about your accomplishments. But you spend at least 40 hours a week (probably more) working very hard on your job, and your manager probably sees only a couple of things you do every week, especially if you work remotely. It’s your job to make sure your manager knows about all the important things you do, and the only way to make sure she knows is by telling her. Make the time to meet with her or send her a quick email when you finish something that you are proud of accomplishing.
5. Emphasize the benefits of working remotely. When working remotely, it’s also important to talk about how working remotely impacts your performance and use it to your advantage. In my case, I drive to the office two or three days a week on the days that I have a lot of meetings, and I make sure that I use that time to track people down who aren’t responding to email, and I make the most of my time in the office for in-person collaboration. On the other hand, for my days working from home, I focus on activities that require quiet and concentration, like strategic thinking, data analysis or writing projects. I’m careful to schedule my time and structure my to-do list to take advantage of each location, but I also talk about why this works with my manager, employees and coworkers to give them some insight into why I work the way I do and why it works so well for me.

The bottom line is that you manage your own performance, and you need to make sure that you are getting credit for your hard work, especially if you are working remotely.

PhotocourtesyofFlickr user Roman Pinzon-Soto

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VoxOx Brings Its All-in-One Communications App to iOS Devices: Online Collaboration«

VoxOx, an all-in-one phone, fax, instant-messaging, text-messaging, and file-sending application for desktops, is now offering an app for iOS. While the mobile app doesn’t have all the features that the desktop application has, it could be useful for those who juggle lots of communication channels.

Like its desktop cousin, the new iOS app, named VoxOx Call, attempts to bring together the features of many other products. At first glance, it looks most like Google Voice. New users can select a free U.S. number, or purchase a low-cost number in Canada (something Google Voice doesn’t offer); number porting is coming.

Surprisingly, VoxOx Call doesn’t make calls using VoIP. Instead, it’s a callback service that connects both parties using standard lines. The provider explains its decision this way:

“Most VoIP calling apps rely heavily on a user’s bandwidth, which can quickly deplete a mobile data plan or result in unreliable call quality. The VoxOx Call app utilizes the traditional telephone network to initiate a call, but does so at VoxOx’s cheap worldwide calling rates, ensuring low cost and reliability. A user simply dials a contact’s phone number, and then waits for their phone to ring with that person on the line. Instead of the call being routed as an outbound call for which a mobile carrier may charge toll fees, VoxOx turns it into an inbound call, which in most countries is toll free. This allows a mobile user to pay only pennies per minute for long-distance and international calls via VoxOx rates instead of dollars per minute through their mobile carrier.”

Whether this system makes sense for you will depend on what kind of phone and data plans you have. An interesting side-effect of this procedure, though, is that the app can be used even on iPod touches and iPads, since you can set the app to call you on any number, including non-iPhone cell phones and landlines in your vicinity.

Like Google Voice, VoxOx offers transcriptions of voice messages, and these can be viewed in the iOS app. I haven’t tested it enough to evaluate how accurate the transcriptions are; Kevin Hertz, CTO at Telcentris (the company behind VoxOx), claims 80-90 percent accuracy.

In addition to international calling, VoxOx offers worldwide SMS. VoxOx has aimed to make text conversations as seamless as possible. If the person you’re conversing with leaves their office during a chat, it’s possible to switch between, say, their IM account and SMS on their cell phone. The app also has a simple way of emailing chat transcripts.

The iOS app offers several advanced features, including the ability to record calls, transfer between devices in the middle of a conversation, and arrange conferences of up to 20 people. Users can set up call forwarding to multiple phone numbers. VoxOx Call users can also receive, view and forward incoming faxes, change outgoing caller ID on the fly. It offers push notifications, too.

VoxOx Call doesn’t have quite as many features as the desktop version, though, and while it’s possible to sign up for a VoxOx account from the mobile app, VoxOx Call is intended to work in concert with the desktop software. There are a number of functions that can’t be accessed from the iOS app; even simple things such as adding an IM account aren’t available. Also, Skype integration seems to be missing, apparently because Skype requires its own software to be running in order for other programs to access it.

On the other hand, the iOS app has something the desktop application doesn’t: integration with the device’s address book.

During my conversation with Kevin Hertz, I asked him about some of the issues thatcaused me to be skepticalabout the Mac version of the desktop app when I looked at it a few months ago. I’d been disappointed by its“un-Mac-like” appearance and poor font rendering, which made it unappealing to use. I had been surprised by its lack of connections to the Mac address book, or even a system for importing contacts. I was unhappy with its inconsistent support for such standards as oAuth and Facebook Connect. And I had also been annoyed by the tendency of VoxOx to default to an“invite your friends to use this” setting. Hertz assures me that all these issues will be addressed in updates to the desktop application.

VoxOx remains a promising, but flawed, product. The initial release of VoxOx Call for iOS will definitely appeal to those who do a lot of international calling and texting; its limited features and reliance on callbacks will make it less compelling for the rest of us.

VoxOx offers a number ofcallingandtextingplans. You may alsopay as you go. The VoxOx Call app is free (iTunes link).

Do you use VoxOx? How do you manage your mobile communications?

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SocialBridge: A Collaboration App Built for Creative Agencies: Online Collaboration«

As with most collaboration apps,Central Desktopis a general-purpose tool, trying to pack in all the features that every organization needs. But what if it could be focused on a specific industry or niche?

Central Desktop, But for Creatives

SocialBridgeis, essentially, the Central Desktop app if it had been built only for use by creative and marketing agencies. Central Desktop Inc. was working with a large broadcast firm that had started out with the usual Central Desktop setup. The company worked with its client closely to meet the special needs of an organization whose collaboration involved large media files and other needs that went beyond the app’s original capabilities. This focus led the Central Desktop team to consult with its other existing customers, conducting surveys and customer interviews to get a better picture of the internal processes and client interactions that were key to helping this particular niche.

The result is SocialBridge. It’s an app that eliminates the need to juggle multiple communication methods and can handle the big files that typically would otherwise require the use of FTP.

The Features Creatives Need

SocialBridge focuses on those needs peculiar to creative agencies: on top of its lightweight project management tools, users have  access to an intranet that syndicates social updates, and easy-to-use tools that allow clients to check in on the status of their projects or submit tickets for new projects. The file management features are particularly robust, offering cloud storage of the large media files (videos, images andso on) that go along with creative projects, as well as tools for reviewing and approving project materials. But it also includes the more humdrum features common to other collaboration apps, like the ability to communicate with teams and track time.

Twoplansare available; pricing isn’t disclosed on the website.

Central Desktop isn’t the only app that’s been customized or built for the creative industry, of course. We’ve previously reviewedProofHQ, an app that’s designed tohelp the design signoff process, andCreationFlow, an app that canhandle project and task management, client review, version control and task history, for example. As the collaboration web app market matures, it’s likely that we’ll see many more apps tailored to specific industries or niches.

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How the Lifestyle Business Trend Can Benefit Employers: Online Collaboration«

Lifestyle businessesare becoming more popular. The idea is that an individual can create a business that allows for their choice of lifestyle, as well as funds it. Whether the founder’s priority is to travel, have flexible hours or pursue some other passion on the side, lifestyle businesses can be incredibly attractive.

The growing lifestyle business movement has an impact on more than just those people ready to take the leap into entrepreneurship. It can also present a staff retention issue for businesses: For every employee wanting to start a lifestyle business, an employer risks losing a valuable team member. However, by taking some of the elements that make lifestyle businesses so attractive, such as freedom and flexibility, and offering them to their employees, employers can mitigate that risk.

Why Not“Lifestyle Employment?”

Some organizations, particularly those that rely on employees who might be likely to pursue a lifestyle business, could profit by offering“lifestyle employment.” It would need to offer the same sort of benefits as a lifestyle business, such as flexibility, and perhaps consist of telecommuting and flexible work arrangements. But, crucially, lifestyle employment can guarantee a stable income— something a fledgling lifestyle business cannot.

Employers should be considering this staff retention issue. There’s a good chance that the best employees — those who take the initiative, work creatively and get things done — have already at least considered what it would take to strike out on their own.

Opportunities

Providing lifestyle employment-style benefits is not just a question of keeping your employees happy and productive— although that’s certainly a major consideration. Look at the reasons employees might leave to start a lifestyle business; those reasons can present opportunities for an employer if used creatively in a lifestyle employment arrangement. For example, perhaps a particular employee’s passion is travel. Making sure that individual has the opportunity to trot the globe as he pleases could mean he’ll bring you new ideas, new clients and new opportunities you’ve never heard of.

Thinking in terms of lifestyle employment may be a stretch for many organizations. But done right— giving your employees some of the freedom they’re looking for along with a little information on how they can use that freedom to your advantage — it may make a world of difference in your business.

PhotocourtesyFlickr userPaull Young

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Scrubly Wants to Help Clean Up Your Address Book: Online Collaboration«

If you’re anything like me, you probably have several email address books, each with a daunting number of duplicate, conflicting and junk entries.Scrublyis a web app that can help to clean them up. It’s compatible with Gmail and Google Apps, Outlook and Apple Mail address books, and can scan contact folders and groups for duplicate contact entries, flagging them for review. You can remove duplicates with a click, or choose to selectively review and delete flagged entries individually.

Scrubly provides similar“de-duping” functionality to thePersonal Assistant toolprovided by unified online address book service Plaxo that Iwrote about earlier this year, but it’s considerably cheaper and provides a few features the Plaxo tool doesn’t:

• Address books are automatically backed up before cleaning them, so original files can be retrieved and restored at any time (reassuring if you’re concerned the de-duplication process may accidentally remove some entries you don’t intend it to).
• It can automatically update Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail address books after cleaning them up (Plaxo can also do this, but only if you pay for its Premium Sync service)
• Scrubly groups compatible duplicate contacts together, merging them into one complete entry.

It’s easy to use: Just sign up, then either authorize the Scrubly app to connect to your Gmail/Google Apps accounts and/or download the clients for Outlook or Apple Mail. You can set up multiple address books in your Scrubly account; each one is scrubbed and backed up separately. When you hit the“scrub” button on an address book, Scrubly scans it, looking for duplicates, junk entries (those that contain very limited information, such as only a name) and“loose match” duplicates (entries that Scrubly thinks are probably duplicates but they aren’t exact matches; you need to review these individually). Once you’re happy with the results, you can re-import the scrubbed address book (or books) back into your email app (or apps).

If you have fewer than 250 contacts to clean up, Scrubly is free. More than that, and you can either opt for a one-time cleaning of address books with an unlimited number of contacts for $9.95 or buy an annual subscription, which costs $24.95. It worked pretty well in my testing, successfully de-duping both Gmail and Outlook address books. However, note that Scrubly only has de-duping tools; it doesn’t attempt to automatically keep your address books up-to-date like Plaxo’s Personal Assistant does, and it can’t connect with the variety of services Plaxo can, either. If you have a mass of contacts spread across various different email and social media accounts, and want to de-duplicate entries across all of them, Plaxo’s pricier service (which costs $79.95 per year) may be more useful. But if you’re simply looking for a way to clean duplicates from a particularly messy address book, Scrubly offers a simple and cost-effective solution, particularly as you can opt to pay for a one-time cleaning.

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Digital Ownership: The Last Great Hurdle for Distributed Workforces?: Online Collaboration«

Working at a small consulting firm a few years back, I was amazed to find that no one at the company was permitted to bring work home. You could stay as long as you wanted at the office, but no working on company material at home on the weekend— ever. This was also a firm that still depended primarily on paper-based communications, and forbade the use of flash drives. These stipulations were in place to try to preserve the company’s intellectual property, which, the prevailing thought was, would be put seriously at risk by going digital.

These kinds of precautions aren’t uncommon, and it’s easy to see why firms put them in place. A recent studyfound 52 percent of workers surveyed would access company networks insecurely while working remotely, even though 90 percent of those polled said they were aware that doing so was unwise and represented a security risk. However, companies that have these kind of barriers to distributed and remote work in order to try to“lock down” and protect their IP risk being left behind in a changing world.

The commonly accepted definition of what can and can’t be“owned” when it comes to digital information is rapidly evolving, and it will only continue to do so in our lifetime. This change in the way people perceive digital ownership may have originally been spurred on by the consumer sector (people now tend to pay for access to digital media, for example, instead of buying physical goods, like CDs), but just asconsumer hardware and software is flooding the enterprise, a looser definition of digital and intellectual property is also in the process of catching on with employees and certain companies.

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s statement inThe Social Networkthat if the Winklevoss twins could’ve created Facebook, they would have. It’s an attitude I hear a lot from startup founders, which basically amounts to a belief that ideas are only worthwhile if acted upon, and that any claims to“ownership” not backed up by action are of little consequence, and it’s an attitude that seems to be gaining traction.

Distributed work is haunted by the idea that once information leaves the physical office, it becomes incredibly vulnerable to theft by an enemy perceived to be constantly at the gates. However, in most cases, people just aren’t that interested in a company’s information to begin with (companies tend to overestimate the value of their IP), and as the core concept of what can and can’t be owned in the digital world is inexorably changing, companies that try to resist the shift and lock down their IP will get overtaken by others that are enthusiastically embracing distributed work.

Of course, information has value, and the idea of digital ownership isn’t without its practical uses. But even though it may seem difficult to imagine now, most industries will eventually end up using technologies that may at one time have been considered“risky,” including ones that foster remote work and the use of distributed teams. Fifteen years ago, the idea of an employee accessing a workplace network from home and moving files back and forth using their own laptop, phone or tablet would’ve seemed inconceivable, but we got here. As we continue to negotiate the tricky waters of digital ownership, the safe bet to make is that policies surrounding company IP will relax,  and to plan accordingly.

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