Business

Yesterday the big news was the UK economy grew a WHOLE 0.1% last quarter! This means the official end of the worst recession in peace time history, although there are many warnings that we're not completely out of the woods yet.

So does that mean we'll be returning to business as usual? Of course not! Recessions bring change, and while businesses will hopefully start to grow again, some long term trends have been accelerated by the recession and will start to become very obvious from 2010 onwards:

• Remote working - Offices have become increasingly mobile over the past decade, but with businesses looking to save operating costs on office space during the recession, even more businesses are starting to encourage home working for their staff. Forrester predicts that in the next 5 years, 43% of staff will be telecommuting regularly.
• Knowledge Management - With the number of layoffs we've had during this recession, a lot of businesses are starting to really appreciate the impact of lost knowledge after the staff walks out the door. You may be missing documents they created during their work, lost forever in their email inboxes or private folders/computers, or actual procedures and instructions that could have easily been captured in a wiki. Businesses will increasingly appreciate the value of the information and knowledge their staff have and look for tools and procedures to ensure they manage and retain this knowledge in the organisation.
• Doing more with less - Some companies have been hit hard by redundancies, and the remaining staff have found they have more work on their plate, which will only grow again as the economy recovers. Companies have needed to drive through productivity tools to enable a smaller workforce to do more. As the workload increases again, companies will look first to productivity improvements before hiring a large workforce again.
• Cutting back operating costs - One of the biggest winners during the recession was cloud computing. For those of you unfamiliar with cloud computing, essentially the software vendor provides the software over the internet for a monthly subscription. No more upfront capital costs to buy licenses and servers to run it, no need to hire specialist IT guys to keep the system running and backed up. The huge cost savings this allows have allowed some businesses to cut down their IT costs dramatically over the past year, and this is one of those trends where once you start, you don't go back! Expect more and more businesses to take advantage of cloud computing from now on.

We're entering a brave new world. Businesses will tread carefully towards recovery, but with a new appreciation of some of the trends that have appeared this decade. They will increasingly start to see how these trends can really help them save operating costs and help their workforce become more flexible and agile to respond to future opportunities and threats. Expect to see cloud computing vendors like SambaStream become more pervasive in the enterprise and enterprise collaboration tools like SambaJAM become a standard way of working and helping businesses manage their core asset - knowledge. We feel very confident as we enter the new economy, I hope you do too!

If you'd like to learn more about how SambaJAM can address the trends discussed in this blog for your business, please contact us here.

With the cold weather thawing now, the first few weeks of this month saw the UK snowed under for several days with up to 20% of the work force staying at home during the "snow days". The Centre for Economics and Business Research (cebr) predicted that this cost the British Economy approximately £900 million for each snow day we suffered.

The lost productivity from snow days leads to problems for both you and your staff:

• Drop in revenue - If you can't work or deliver services to your customers on snow days, you could stand to see your revenue drop significantly on those days
• Delayed payments - If your customers are also suffering from snow days, you could find payments from customers disrupted, and the interruption in your cash flow hitting your business
• Missed deadlines and targets - If your business is working to tight deadlines and targets, you could find snow days have a dramatic impact on your staff's productivity, meaning you have to adjust your original deadlines and targets further in the future. If you have service level agreements with customers, you could also find yourself hit with penalties if there is a significant slip in deadlines and targets.
• Increase in work backlog - With people ramping up to full speed after the Christmas holidays, we noticed that "business as usual" didn't start properly until this week of the (18th January onwards), a full 2 weeks after the new year! This was mainly due to the disruption of snow and now means staff and businesses find themselves with a much bigger backlog of work to catch-up after the Christmas holidays.

Unfortunately businesses can't control the weather, but what they can control is ensuring their staff has access to the information and tools they need to get on with their work regardless of where they're located.

With collaboration software like SambaJAM, staff can stay connected virtually over the web, without any loss of access to the key information and tools they use everyday in the office. For example:

• If you currently keep all your documents on your office desktops or shared network drives, most likely your staff will lose access to those outside the office. With web based collaboration software, not only can you ensure your staff still have access to the documents, you can also ensure they can search and edit documents easily. All they need is a web browser, and with online editing tools like Zoho, they don’t even need expensive Microsoft Office installed on their home PC or laptop to continue working.
• By using task management, you can still action and assign tasks to your team, even if you’re all sitting in different locations. This helps you keep things on track during the disruption.
• If you have all your information inside the collaboration platform, you can still search for the information and documents you need to complete your work without any disruption
• If you need your colleagues contact details, the profile pages can act as a replacement for your internal corporate directory, so staff can still get in touch with everyone from home
• You can use the social networking tools to keep your team connected and talking even if they’re sitting miles apart. They can post questions, ideas, issues as though its business as usual. Like a virtual office conversation on the web.

For your staff, the great thing about collaboration tools like SambaJAM, is if they use them day to day in the office, moving to another location will be seamless. All their information, documents and tools will still be there in the same place they left them, and as long as they have a browser to access them, you can ensure they don’t let the backlog of work after Christmas build up on snow days, making for a more relaxed return to work for both them and you.

If your business suffered as a result of the recent weather and you’d like to see how collaboration tools like SambaJAM can support remote working, please contact us here.

For years, we've been working in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space delivering large document management systems and collaboration portals for banks, global companies and NGOs. All of them used huge and complex systems such as FileNet, Documentum and (less huge but still complex) Microsoft SharePoint. And for years we never understood why it was so hard to manage documents using their clunky web interfaces.

For example, in SharePoint, a great product in manay regards which is why its become Microsoft's fastest growing product ever and used by loads of companies around the world for collaboration and document management, you get something that looks like this to manage your documents:

Its essentially a list of documents on a web page, if you click the arrow next to each document, you get a list of options you can do on that document, clicking one of the options opens a new window with a clunky form to edit or fill in. And SharePoint is one of the easier ones to deal with!

If you look at many of the start-ups in this space you’d think all of them would be taking advantage of the latest in web2.0/AJAX technology to improve on this web-page list concept, but you’d be mistaken. Just take a look, while the lists look nicer, they all still provide the same thing, a list of documents on a web-page which clicking on takes you to another page with all the document properties and forms to edit them, not really much of an improvement.

So when we came to design the document library for SambaJAM we looked for inspiration from what is undeniably the best tool to manage your documents - your desktop! By using the latest in web2.0/AJAX technology we set out to create a very intuitive, familiar experience for our end users to manage documents in their web browser. Some of the key features that were important to us during the design:

• Thumbnailing: Just like your desktop, isn't it much nicer to actually see visually the files your looking at. You may not remember the file name, but you may remember the front page had a bright orange logo. We've ensured all our documents are thumbnailed so you can easily browse through documents. However, if you do just want to go back to a list of documents (detailed view) you can simply switch views and do that too!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Drag and drop Documents: With many users and document controllers spending a lot of their time simply organising the documents everyone else has uploaded into the correct folders so they're properly organised and easy to find, we decided the easiest way to move documents around was simply to select the ones you wanted to move, and drag them to the folder you wanted to move them too. Not only that, but like Windows, you can also drag documents and files into the folder tree on the left hand menu.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Context Menus: Like your desktop, you can get access to all the actions you're allowed to perform on a document simply by clicking your right mouse button. All of the actions will bring up a popup form instead of re-directing you to another page so you can quickly do what you need to do and return back to the folder you're working on.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Tagging: Sometimes, documents don’t also make sense organised into specific folders. That’s where tagging comes in, you can tag different types of documents like ‘proposals’ or ‘reports’ with specific tags and using the tag tree menu on the left hand menu, easily show all the ‘proposals’ or ‘reports’ in the document library regardless of which folder they’re in.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Filters: Sometimes you just want to see the latest modified documents, the documents other people are currently working on or just the ones you're currently working on. By using the filter menu you can quickly filter all the documents to what you want to see.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Online Previews: Sometimes you just want to read a document, or quickly open it to see if its what you're looking for before you download it. Sometimes you can’t download it because the document was written in Microsoft Office 2007 and you only have Office 2003. That’s where online previews come in. By double clicking a document, you can open another tab in your space to view the document (so you can still easily flick back to your folders if needed) and read the document online. If you upload rich media such as audio (and in future Video) you can also listen/watch those online as well!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Versioning: The only way to ensure you're all working off the same version, and that no one's changes are lost is version control. We allow you to easily check-in and check-out documents to make your changes so every time you save a new copy, the previous versions are still accessible and can be rolled back to at anytime if someone made a mistake.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Commenting: Easily write comments against your documents instead of emailing your comments back and forth!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Uploading: Nearly every system I've ever seen requires you to go to a separate page to upload your files, and generally its one file at a time, during which you can't get on with anything else. We've decided that if you're uploading loads of files, especially large files which take time to upload, you should be able to simply queue them up, and then minimise the window to the footer so you can continue with your work and get notified when the uploads are finished. When I first used SambaJAM I uploaded several hundred files, and it had absolutely no impact on the rest of my work, I simply minimised it and got on with other things on SambaJAM!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Online Editing: We've integrated with Zoho so you can create and edit your word documents, spreadsheets and presentations online without leaving your web browser! Not only does this save you having to download the file and re-upload just to make a quick change, in the future you'll be able to collaboratively edit the document with your colleagues in real time!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Workflows: Workflows allow you to send documents for review or assign quick tasks like 'Update the logo on the front page' to other users without using email. By initiating a workflow for your document, you not only generate tasks for the people you want involved to see in their Tasks inbox on their Dashboard, you can also see the progress of how far along the review process the document is.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Microsoft Windows, Office and Email Integration: I'm getting ahead of myself here but we don't believe you should actually have to log into SambaJAM to create and edit documents stored there. Wouldn't it be great if you could edit your documents in Microsoft Office and using its built in functionality, save it back to SambaJAM directly? Or map SambaJAM as a network drive to manage your documents in Windows explorer? Or map SambaJAM as an email account in Outlook so you can simply drag email attachments into SambaJAM? Or simply email a document into SambaJAM without logging in? That’s a few of the things that will be coming in later on so watch this space!

And not only ALL of the above, but all your documents are stored on an Enterprise Content Management system used by Fortune 500 companies around the world so you get enterprise class security, scalability, customisation and all the other features you'd expect from a system of this type!

Pretty awesome eh? In-fact something I heard the other day that made me laugh, but I should put as a disclaimer:

IF YOU'RE ALLERGIC TO AWESOMENESS - PLEASE DO NOT USE SAMBAJAM!!!

You have been warned... ;)

In an effort to provide more value to our customers, we will be publishing a series of white papers to share the years of experiance we have accumulated around Document Management, Online Collaboration and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

The first white paper - An Introduction to Document Management, is a nice introduction for those who have little or no knowledge in this area on what it is, and how it helps organisations.

To view this paper, and all the others we will be publishing - just click on the 'White Papers' link above or go here.

If you have any suggestions for white papers you would like to see, please leave a comment below and we'll try our best to provide a useful white paper that addresses core topics and issues people have in the above areas.

According to Alfresco, even though 95% of Fortune 1000 companies have some form of Enterprise Content Management (ECM)/collaboration, less than 10% of the user's in those organisations actually use these technologies on a daily basis.

After having spent the last 4 years delivering these type of systems for clients, I think the main reason this statistic is justified is for the following 3 reasons:

• Cost: Lets face it, ECM/Collaboration doesn't come cheap for large organisations. With most systems charging a CAL (per seat) license, it becomes prohibitively expensive in some cases to roll these systems out to the entire enterprise. So while 95% of Fortune 1000 companies may have some form of ECM/collaboration system, only 10% of users have licenses to use it!
• Complexity: Most enterprise software is complex, not just in terms of what it does, but how it looks and is experienced. The worst offender in my books is IBM, they design software that not only looks ugly, but is way too complicated for most end users to simply start using. When you give user's this type of software, users will always fall back to the lowest common denominator, in most cases - email.
• Change Management: For a lot of projects I've been on, change management is an after thought, not a priority. Organisations spend so much money to develop and roll out the system, but considerably less time communicating with end users and training them to use and understand the benefits the new system.

So how can vendors like ours increase adoption of our products and systems in large organisations to increase ROIs and the success of the end product? For each of these problems I've listed our take on the solution:

• Cost: Most of the current solutions are on-premise systems. This requires a lot of up-front capital expenditure to setup and install all the parts needed to run the new system, and most likely an army of expensive consultants to help with the task. After a 6-12 month period, the system is finally ready for go-live, during this time very few people have actually used or even seen the system. We believe off-premise, or Software-as-a-Service, is the solution to this problem. With no up-front capital expenditure and no waiting period, end users can start using the system in hours or days, not months, and the cost of maintaining and supporting the system long term is reduced.
• Complexity: Most enterprise software vendors are years behind the type of web 2.0 interfaces and features that user's can get for free outside work. Another advantage of Software-as-a-Service is with its quick release cycles, the product is constantly being updated with the latest ideas and features for users so that their system isn't out of date and can constantly improve its usability to end users. Smaller start-ups also have an advantage here, we don't need to lock in requirements and technology 2-3 years ahead of release to ensure a massive team of developers can work together effectively, we can respond and adapt our technology as the landscape changes. All in all, by using the latest "web 2.0" technology, we can make very usable and "enjoyable" software for end users.
• Change Management: Vendors need to do more to help in this area instead of relying solely on the customer or a consultancy to do this. Whether its offering a package with expert change management support for your product, or simply having all the pre-prepared materials/methodology for customers to easily understand and perform this important task, there is a lot more that could be done in this area. While we haven't decided which route we will be taking, we definitely will offer some type of support to ensure effective change management - and more importantly - high adoption of our product!

If 90% of your organisation isn't using the new collaboration system you've bought effectively, not only is that a waste of money, that is also a major barrier to getting effective collaboration across your enterprise. This is just a few of our ideas on addressing the adoption issue. If you have any more please leave them below.

It is with great pleasure today we finally get our site up online! Small steps towards something much bigger! For my first blog, I'd simply like to introduce you to our team and what we do. We hope to use this blog to keep everyone updated on our progress but also to tell our story of how we all left a global IT consultancy and started SambaStream. Hopefully along the way we'll learn some good lessons that we can share with you as we come across them!

Our story so far:

The three of us have all worked for one of the world's largest IT consultancies, helping large enterprises, NGOs, and governments around the world develop portals and content management systems. Through this experience we've had in-depth exposure to a lot of the issues that people come across when trying to use content management systems (which most people understand as online document management and collaboration) and most importantly, noticed that the backbone of the economy, small and medium size businesses, can't afford access to these critical technologies to help them collaborate and share knowledge effectively themselves!

Out of this need, and also from our desire to start our own business and have a positive impact on our field of expertise, we have left (or are in the process of leaving) the large IT consultancy to get started developing online applications for small and medium enterprises that are affordable, intuitive to use, and address the core needs of these businesses.