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Collaboration Remains Elusive Across Applications And Enterprises

Organizations seeking the benefits of collaboration and rapid knowledge sharing in Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) solutions face several key challenges in delivering a consistent enterprise solution:

• Consistent tool across multiple applications and environments. Organizations want one tool to collaborate regardless of the application they are using.  Today, organizations often need a separate tool to collaborate for each suite of business applications, email system, and even browser.  The result – a plethora of tools that enable collaboration in silos of information that hinder Enterprise 2.0 benefits..
• Intuitive and natural user experience. As a key element of next generation social enterprise apps ^[4], users expect pervasive and natural collaboration to occur in the context of applications.  Today’s systems often have inconsistent approaches to sharing information making it difficult to share both structured and unstructured information in the same system.  More importantly, organizations will need to move across multiple form factors such as mobile, iPads, kiosks, and other hand held devifes
  

SimplyBox Breaks Barriers In Collaboration

Campbell, CA, based SimplyBox started out in 2007 as a consumer play focused on organizing and sharing websites clippings in a visual manner for personal research and sharing. Over the past year, SimplyBox has successfully proven their core technology into the enterprise with partnerships at large enterprise apps vendors, leaving competitors such as Diigo ^[5], Sazell ^[6] , and Safari’s Webclip ^[7] to focus on the personal knowledge and research space.  SimplyBox succeeds in enterprise scenarios because:

• Unstructured and structured content can be shared and categorized. Users grab and select the content they wish to share and place them into a “Box”.  Each box includes content about a topic and related conversations.  Users can share boxes about different topics with different groups.  SimplyBox can then notify and alert others about content being placed into the box.  The box serves as the medium to enable collaboration among internal and external teams.

• Collaboration can occur anywhere. Whether its in a portal for a web app or enterprise system report, users collaborate regardless of what system they are in.  Content that’s been collected along the way by multiple users can be made available throughout different enterprise systems.  SimplyBox even co-exists with solutions such as Microsoft Sharepoint which serve more as file/content repositories.  This enables applications to gain tentacles across the enterprise apps landscape.  More importantly, no programming or IT involvement is required.

Figure 1. SimplyBox Enables Natural Collaboration Within Any Environment


Source: SimplyBox

Founders Bring Enterprise Software Credibility To A Web 2.0 Approach

The company was founded by Rodney Goodger and Mario R. Cavagnari.  Mario was formerly the Vice President of Sales at PowerSchool, a division of Apple.  He brings 20 years of enterprise sales experience.  Rodney came from CDC Software where he was a Director of Product Management.  Michael Galloway joined the team in late 2007 as the CTO bringing in Web 2.0 experience as a Sr. Developer at Yahoo’s Widget Group.

The Bottom Line For Users – Put SimplyBox To Use In E2.0 Scenarios Without Having To Rip and Replace

SimplyBox provides users with a quick and easy approach to structured and unstructured collaboration.  Unlike email based solutions, SimplyBox keeps context in conversation and allows collaborators to easily share information.  Unlike many enterprise collaboration solutions, SimplyBox doesn’t force users to work only inside one application or one collaboration platform. Most importantly SimplyBox works with applications in their natural state.  With several enterprise partnerships in place, expect to see SimplyBox transforming experiences in staid ERP, CRM, and SCM systems.

Your POV

What are your business goals in collaboration and Enterprise 2.0?  Have you succeeded at the corporate level or are you still at the departmental level.  Are you challenged trying to manage your collaboration strategy?  Have you tried SimplyBox ?  As a prospect or customer, what limitations do you see?   Add your comments to the discussion or send on to rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwaresinsider dot org and we’ll keep your anonymity.

Please let us know if you need help with your overall apps strategy. Here’s how we can help:

• Assessing SaaS and cloud
• Evaluating Cloud integration strategies
• Assisting with legacy ERP migration
• Planning upgrades and migration
• Performing vendor selection
• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support

Related resources and links

YouTube Video Demos Of Simply Box In Enterprise Scenarios Such as SAP CRM and For Education Scenarios ^[8]

Submit Your Solution For Consideration
To submit your Thursday’s Disruptive Tech Showcase for consideration, check out the guidelines in the Policy section. ^[9]

Copyright © 2010 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.