Arts and Letters

"Social Media for Business" Wall Chart

Thanks to the guys over at The Steel Method who produced this great chart!

Email Usage Drops 28% in Past 12 Months!

By Matt Forcey

A recent study by Nielsen that focused on how Americans spend their time online, unexpectedly found that email usage has dropped by 28% over the last year.  Since we’re certainly not communicating any less, what are people doing as an alternative?  Not surprisingly, the data show that social networking use increased by 43% over the same time period.  A separate analysis determined that Mobile Internet use has also increased dramatically. 

 
The research seems to focus more on Americans' personal online usage, and not how they are using the Internet at work.  But what can we infer from this information as it relates to our business communications?  With mobile technologies like smart phones blurring the lines between work and home, it’s not long before our personal habits influence our work M.O.  As these changes take hold, they will certainly have an effect on our content management strategies.  Tracking and archiving email for future discovery is a substantial portion of a content management systems workload.  If these privileged communications are now moving outside of the corporate sphere of control, into disparate social networking and instant messaging tools, an organizations ability to manage their intellectual capital is greatly attenuated.

Ask yourself… how do you communicate with your coworkers?  Do your information systems support a 9-5 workforce, or is there an expectation from employees of having access to information anywhere at anytime?  Is your workforce centralized or is it becoming more distributed? 

Fortunately, many organizations are beginning to understand the opportunities these new communication channels provide to their business and their employees.  Realizing that communication, like water, is going to take the path of least resistance, astute companies are providing their employees with social media tools (internal corporate social networks, a common instant messenger) that are integrated with the organization’s information management system.  The information workers get the communication tools that support the way they work, while at the same time the company is able to track and archive appropriate communications much in the same way they do with email.  Additional gains in employee productivity from the implementation of an integrated communication and content management system should not be overlooked.

Read the full report from Nielsen: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/what-americans-do-online-social-media-and-games-dominate-activity/

For more on how new communication paradigms are impacting corporations, take a look at our previous posting on the impact of Millennials in the workplace: http://contentmanagement.typepad.com/content-manegement/2010/07/are-you-part-of-the-problem-or-part-of-the-solution.html

What is an Electronic Document Workflow? And Why Should You Care?

By Matt Forcey

Electronic document workflows enable information workers (this means you) to work together on documents and to manage project tasks by applying business processes to documents and items managed within an enterprise content management system.  Exciting huh?  Now think about it in terms of your bottom line.  Workflows can help your organization enforce coherent business processes, as well as improve organizational effectiveness and productivity by managing the tasks and steps involved in these business processes. This allows the people responsible for these tasks to focus on performing the work rather than spending time administering the workflow processes.  Interested yet?  If not, it doesn't get any more thrilling than this.  I'd recommend that you just take a look at the funny cartoon and move on to our recent video posting on tablet computers.  Good day.

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Now, for those still with me, "workflow" is typically described as a series of tasks that produce an outcome.  In the context of enterprise content management, workflow is defined more succinctly as the automated movement of documents or items through a sequence of actions or tasks that are related to a business process.

Workflows can be employed to consistently manage common business processes within a company by enabling the organization to affix business logic to documents or items in a content management system’s lists or libraries. Business logic is essentially a set of instructions that specify and control the actions that happen to a document or item.  By managing and tracking the human tasks involved with these processes, workflows can streamline the cost and time necessary to coordinate common business processes, such as project approval or document review.  For example, within your content management framework, users can add a workflow to a document library that routes a document to a group of co-workers for review and approval.

When a document author initiates a workflow on a document within the chosen document library, the workflow creates document review and approval tasks, delegates these tasks to the appropriate workflow participants, and then sends e-mail alerts to the participants with task instructions and a link to the document to be reviewed.  While the workflow is in progress, the workflow process owner (in this case, the document author) can check a “workflow status” dashboard to see which participants have completed their workflow tasks.  When the workflow participants finish their assigned tasks, the workflow ends, and the workflow owner is automatically alerted that the workflow has completed.

In addition to supporting human work processes, electronic document workflows also broaden the ways in which people can collaborate and work with available documents, lists, and libraries. Content management system users can be empowered to create and participate in workflows by using customizable forms that are made available at the document, list, and/or library level. 

Other advanced forms of workflow allow multiple users to view and modify (or markup) a document at the same time in a collaborative online session.  The resulting document would be viewable in its final shape, while also storing the markups done by each individual user during the collaborative workflow session.

Now you have a basic understanding of workflow and how it might benefit your organization.  Is your company using a content management system with workflow capabilities? Is your current system closely integrated with the business productivity tools commonly used to create and view electronic documents (word processing, spreadsheets, email, etc)? 

If you answered "no" to either of these questions, and would like to get headed in the right direction, click over to www.midlandcorp.com/ProductsServices/CMS/ for some further information.

Battle in Seattle?!! Windows Slate vs. iPad

Watch the Windows 7 Slate from Hanvon go head-to-head with Apple's iPad.  This Slate is one of many Microsoft plans on having in the marketplace by year's end. It’s exciting to see the Windows Slate keep up with the iPad in pretty much all of the use cases, as well as make available a few peripherals not found on the iPad, such as a USB port, a camera, a track pad, and an SD card slot.  With a number of hardware manufacturers developing new machines, the increased competition is certain to drive further innovation of both platforms.

This new dais for content delivery is a hot item for the media and entertainment industry, and is certainly on the minds of any company conducting business or distributing information online. 

90% Migrate to SharePoint 2010

By Matt Forcey

90% of current Microsoft SharePoint users plan on migrating to the new SharePoint 2010, shows a survey recently completed by Metalogix, a provider of solutions for Microsoft SharePoint migration.  

The survey, the results of which were announced this week, indicates that among those making the switch, 41% will begin this process almost immediately, with the remaining 59% planning to begin their migration projects sometime between now and the end of 2011.

Rasool Rayani, Co-Founder and Director of Metalogix expressed, “With the release of SharePoint 2010, there has been growing interest in the major new features for social computing, PowerShell support, ribbon UI, etc. Many SharePoint professionals are eager to provide these capabilities to their users and organizations”.   

Currently, Microsoft and its partners are supporting 100 million SharePoint users in over !7,000 companies. 

 

Qualitative research by Microsoft of current SharePoint customers, during the second half of 2007, generated the following feedback:

• "Make adoption easier with a first-class user experience across PC, browser, and phone"
• "Invest in even more application functionality and out-of-the-box integration"
• "Greater extensibility and interoperability through familiar tools and integration with line-of-business data"
• "Continue investing in IT and Developer manageability and application lifecycle management"

To see how Microsoft has responded to SharePoint users' recommendations, check out this new deck from Microsoft's SharePoint Team:

Download What's New in SharePoint 2010