Archive for June, 2010

When we talk about enterprise collaboration people often think of email, intranets and wikis. But our experience tells us that these tools are not always welcomed with open hands. Old Intranet solutions were pushed down from management and did not cache up. Wiki’s were an attempt where companies tried to give “power” to employees directly, often failed because of usage complexity.

In personal lives, people are increasingly turning away from e-mail as their communication tool towards social networks. Facebook has proven that microblogging in form of status updates, private messages is much easier and attractive when used in our everyday lives.

As modern enterprises move towards decentralised work units with teleworking and employees on the go, it’s time to re-examine how we do business. E-mail is one of the most cited reasons for lost productivity, closely followed by meetings.

While some enterprises are trying to optimise their e-mail usage, others are learning from emerging technologies in consumer markets. Facebook has shown us that next generation of social interaction will come in a form of intelligent news stream of status updates. Receiving highly relevant information from social graphs with ability to comment, share and promote items present highly engaging and personalised experience, which in turn means more interaction and engagement from users. Businesses that embrace this in their DNA will be more agile and have better turn-around time than the competition, that is still using previous generation of tools and processes.

Since launching Flowr last month, we heard one clear request from many of you: integration with Google Calendar and Google Docs as they are important part of the way your work.

We are happy to announce that Flowr is now available for Google Apps users. There are two main aspects of integration:

Google Docs integration allows you to upload the files directly to companies Google Docs or attach documents from Google Docs to your messages.

Google Calendar integration allows you to Synchronize events from Flowr network to special calendar – Flowr events.

Single sing on integration means that your users don’t need a special password for Flowr anymore, but login through your Google Apps. They’ll also get access to Flowr through Universal Location bar on top of their Google applications.

To get access to this functionality, go to Flowr for Google Apps at the Google Apps Marketplace and Add it to your domain. Signup process will allow you to convert your existing network or create a new one.

If you enjoy using Flowr, write a review on the Marketplace, so others will know what to expect.

On 7 June 2010, Flowr has been presenting at Central Europe Venture Forum (CEVF) in Budapest (Hungary). CEVF allow the most promising life sciences, clean technology and information technology entrepreneurs from Central Europe to meet and present themselves to active international investors and corporations seeking investment and partnerships. The Forum play an active role in the Central European innovation scene.

From the 45 pre-selected companies international jury of investors and experts selected Flowr as one of the 10 most promising companies based on criteria of their business potential, team experience, product / technology merit, competitive position, investment interest and project presentation quality.

Few weeks ago I’ve read Morten’s post about lack of informational stream in a typical company as it strongly resonated with my experience from a small company where I’ve worked before. Basically no one outside development or sales team knew what’s really happening on a daily basis. We were a company with 20 employees so you can just imagine how it’s with even larger groups. Regular Monday meetings or monthly meetings didn’t enable day to day information flow and this lead me to think about how we can improve the flow of  information.

Just imagine, on Facebook, you know what your friends are doing (even when she is not a close friend). Why can’t we give our employees the same functionality to share their thoughts, problems or ideas and help them with your opinion, thoughts, experiences etc. Using that approach we will definitely improve our collaboration and information flow, improve efficiency and enable information sharing inside organization.

We are on the way to change an Industry that has been locked down by traditional legacy systems, because we can not imagine Facebook population will be satisfied with old legacy tools, since they know they can be much more productive and efficient when given opportunity to use the tools that they already know.