Five reasons why secure collaboration will help your law firm merger

Last week Lawrence Graham and Wragge tied the knot to create a £170m firm Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co. Mergers are all the craze. Everyone’s doing it…! It’s been a tricky five years for most law firms with many going out of business including some big names like Cobbetts and Challinors. One way that law firms are fighting back is through mergers.
In fact, law firm mergers have been en vogue for a number of years, so much so that it’s most likely that many law firm management teams have already had meaningful discussions about or had actually completed a merger in the last two or three years, and many more are expected to happen. A 2013 survey by PWC found that 83% of the top 25 UK law firms believe a merger is very or fairly likely by 2016 read more.

How we’re making agile development work for us

Mondays are no longer crazy workdays for the development team at HighQ. Why, you ask? Well, now that the planning stage is over, we’ve started working on executing our vision and plans.
It has taken more than six months to get to where we are now. We have not yet reached our management goal but we are moving towards it. There is clarity in our technical goals and what we are trying to achieve. The technical team is becoming aligned with business plans and can now react to changing needs.

Changing our methodology

We undertook a major transformation of our development methodology and planning processes after our most recent major release took substantially more time than was originally expected. The delay was attributed to a few factors, but one of the key ones was the absence of an agreed development methodology.
We had been using wikis, emails, and meetings for gathering and documenting requirements, which meant that it took time and effort to translate these requirements from the business to the technical team.
Working in this way, we planned a major redevelopment of the interface for the release of Collaborate 3.0 with the intention of making it responsive. We achieved this goal, but bottlenecks in the process and a lack of coordination meant that we fell behind schedule.
Although we used various tools for requirement capture, there was no one application where everyone could work together. Subsequently, the development and management teams struggled to communicate changes and requirements with one another, which slowed the process down.
In January this year we decided to take some radical steps to transform the way development was being managed. Collaborate 3.0 had not yet been released and was still in active development, which gave us some time to organise and reform our development process for the next version of Collaborate.

Roadmap planning

We started by setting up a roadmap team, which specified the business goals. The roadmap team was made up of five people, each representing a business unit and jurisdiction, who met fortnightly. We used a workshop methodology to prioritise new requirements. This helped us to flesh out the key goals of the roadmap.
It was clear that there were too many small-to-medium features to discuss and agree on in these planning meetings, so a smaller team was created to discuss and prioritise small-to-medium features as a continuous ongoing effort.
We also tried giving each consultant a quota of features they wanted resolved in the upcoming development; however, this did not seem to be the best way to prioritise features, so we removed it from the process.
The backlog was discussed and agreed in a wiki to facilitate input from all stakeholders. Once the backlog items were clear, they were moved onto a Kanban board. The Kanban board had various stages to cover all of the prerequisites for a features development. Once all of the required prerequisites were complete, the feature was moved to a separate development board.

Finding the right tool for the job

Our development team comprises of around 65 developers working remotely in India. The project managers in India report to the development managers in our London office. This meant that it was even more important that we found a simple-to-use, agile management tool which could cover all aspects of project management and reporting.
We decided to find an industry-standard development methodology tool that would help us to manage the project consistently. This would require not just a change in tools, but also a change to our way of thinking.
After evaluating many options we decided to go with JIRA + Greenhopper as it gives us granular control and reporting, but at the same time allows us to manage the development on simple agile boards.

Development planning

Every Friday the London technical team conducts a Scrum planning meeting with the project managers in India. After some trial and error we have adopted a hybrid system in which new features are managed using Scrum, whereas urgent bugs and any immediate small-to-medium issues are pulled into the sprint.
At times, this does mean that the sprint goals will not be achieved due to change in the work in progress, but that is acceptable as long as the critical issues are being addressed and do not have to wait until the current two week sprint ends.
Prioritisation and estimation are the key issues impacting the planning process. Estimations on epics (large features) can take time, so we try our best to be lean and not spend excessive time on getting accurate estimates.
We believe that once the team matures in the estimation process, their estimates will take less time and become more accurate, further facilitating the planning process.
It is essential to prioritise requirements that need to be estimated, specified and designed, however prioritisation requires significant time by the stakeholders. Without prioritisation, however, the sprint planning process fails in making good use of the development capacity and delivering the most required features.

Looking forward

Changes to the development process have helped us to release Collaborate 3.1.1 within good time. Although not yet perfect, we are certain that we are on the right track and continue to improve as we move forward. Some of the things we are focusing on are:

• Improving the reporting process to give better management updates
• Striking a good balance between epic stories, small-to-medium tasks, and bug fixing for each release
• Changing the estimation process to a point-based system, which allows us to simplify the process by breaking them down into large, medium and small efforts

We would love to hear your views and suggestions. Stay tuned and we will share our experiences of the release of Collaborate 3.2, scheduled to be released early in the new year.
Source: http://highq.com/making-agile-development-work-us/

Enterprise collaboration news: November 2013 round-up

Now that we’re careering rapidly towards the end of the year, the internet is awash with predictions for the year ahead. We’ve had a look at three such reports that we found most interesting, and condensed them into bitesized chunks. We have also drilled down to a couple of concepts that have been at the front of our minds this month: social business and the Internet of Things.

Looking ahead to 2014

Forrester published a report this month which pointed out the top ten technology trends to watch from 2014-2016. Peter High of Metis Strategy gave a detailed run-down of the report for Forbes. Forrester’s trends touch on the expansion of concepts that have been cropping up in the second half of this year, such as APIs, BYOD and the Internet of Things (more on that later). Peter outlined that the report highlights the tightening technological link between the consumer world with the business world, and suggests that customers build their impressions on a company (thus a company builds its reputation) on the digital experience and engagement they have with that business. Consequently, organisations need to make the move towards more sophisticated applications that work seamlessly with cloud and mobile, so that infrastructure becomes an enabler of engagement as opposed to a barrier to progress. This rings true with us at HighQ, as our products are designed to make engagement, productivity and collaboration come naturally.
In this article for Gigaom Research, David Linthicum highlighted three emerging cloud computing trends for 2014. He suggests that PaaS and application migration are the most important trends for the year ahead as more businesses prepare to move to cloud-based platforms. He explains that cloud data integration and cloud management and governance will come to the fore next year too, with reference to the need to reconcile private and public cloud as enterprises begin to transfer data between them, and managing the different types of cloud within one ‘ultimate’ cloud management platform. This is particularly important when we consider the latest predictions about cloud traffic, which according to a report by Cisco Systems is set to quadruple by 2017.
Another article on Forbes by Mark Fidelman gave IBM’s opinions on the forthcoming trends in social business over the next year. Social listening was high on the list, as businesses begin to tap in to social behavioural data from customers. This data can be used for targeted marketing as well as adapting products and services to perceived needs. Similarly, social data gathered from employees could be valuable to HR through recruitment and increase employee engagement and satisfaction. Next year, the article explained, social business will be about more than collaboration; instead, knowledge sharing and social learning will be key to building a smarter enterprise, something we’ve been talking about for a while. SoMoClo will get an overhaul next year too as it merges with Big Data to become SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud).

Turning to social business

As social becomes a key part of business, it is vital to encourage everyone within a firm to engage in their enterprise social network. An interesting Twitter chat took place this month which discussed this issue, and why company leaders must make sure they participate in their ESNs too. Jason Quesada (@jqsmooth) explained that enterprise social networks ”should break the hierarchy model to give everyone in the company a voice”, and Jakkii Musgrave (@slybeer) agreed, stating that the ”great power of ESNs with execs is cutting through that hierarchy & allowing them to be human. Encourage them to embrace it.” Cara Marzilli (@CaraMarz), pointed out that ”Execs who view ESN as “just a technology” (not a business driver) have a narrow view & need more data in order to see value”, which is clearly a view that needs changing if executives want to keep up with the latest social business trends for next year.

The Internet of Things

This month we attended the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Barcelona. You can read our review of the keynote speeches on our blog. One of the topics covered in the keynote speech was the Internet of Things, which has been popping up frequently this month. If you’re not familiar with what the Internet of Things is, this post by our friend Ryan McClead (who wrote a great guest post for us this month, by the way) will fill you in excellently. The short explanation is that the Internet of Things is a concept whereby more and more devices and objects are becoming connected to the internet (rising to an estimated 30 billion by 2020). An increasing number of these objects will start communicating with one another via the internet, automating processes and ultimately changing the way we live. This post by Esmeralda Swartz of MetraTech for the Cloud Computing Journal takes the concept a step further by talking about how the Internet of Things will evolve into the Internet of Agents. By this, she refers to the services that these Things provide, arguing that there is more value in what something can do for us, than the Thing itself. An interesting concept, and we’re definitely excited to see where it takes us in the year ahead!

Source:  http://highq.com/enterprise-collaboration-news-november-2013-round/

Discover the benefits of one seamless file sharing and social collaboration platform

File sharing solutions have evolved from simple network drives and FTP servers to sophisticated, cloud-based file sharing platforms with advanced features for consumers and enterprises alike. File sharing technology has been commoditised and many of the traditional complexities have been simplified to make them easy to use and, as a result, adoption of consumer tools such as Dropbox has skyrocketed in recent years.
Separately, the concept of social networking and collaboration has become popularised by consumer tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These tools and the benefits they afford to users have become so prevalent in everyday life that secure, enterprise alternatives have entered the business mainstream.
There is a clear trend towards the integration of these two technology strands as demand for both secure file sharing and social collaboration tools for business grows. Finding a solution for both is increasingly seen as strategically important for CIOs to facilitate new ways of working within their organisations. Separate tools made by separate vendors are beginning to converge around core functions, attempting to bring these two strands together to meet the demands of businesses and users.
This trend was clearly demonstrated by Microsoft and their acquisition of Yammer for $1.2bn in order to integrate their social capabilities with SharePoint’s traditional file and collaboration offering. Like SharePoint, most enterprise vendors don’t offer both of these aspects together and, as a result, platforms have begun integrating with one another in order to provide both sides of the equation and to stay relevant.
But the requirement and expectation from business users is clear: a true enterprise collaboration platform needs to have file sharing capabilities as well as other collaborative tools such as microblogging, wikis, blogs, tasks and events deeply ingrained and integrated into one ”secure”, “social” platform.
At HighQ we have been working on this for a number of years and our objective has been to build a platform that delivers all of this functionality in one deeply integrated platform, built from the ground-up to be secure and social. Our social tools are not a bolt-on to our file sharing capabilities, instead they are deeply integrated into the core of the application. The combination of these features in one platform adds up to far more than the sum of the parts and provides users with a holistic, seamless and easy to use system that helps them get their work done, reduces cost and eases the administrative burden.
We’re hosting a webinar on 3rd December to show you our solution and why it makes sense to use one integrated system. Sign up now to discover the benefits of one seamless file sharing and social collaboration platform.
Source: http://highq.com/discover-benefits-one-seamless-file-sharing-and-social-collaboration-platform/

How to quit email – cold turkey

We talk about email all the time on the HighQ blog. We predicted that the activity stream is going to replace email in the future. We gave you ten reasons to blog, instead of email, your mass communications.  We showed you how social businesses can cut down on email by up to 90%.  And we told you that email causes overload, and gave you the tools to manage the flow of information without it.
Do you still need convincing to quit email? Perhaps you are worried about the transition from email to collaboration tools. Perhaps your company doesn’t like change and your colleagues are slow adopters. How can you ever quit email? How would your company communicate or get any work done while you’re transitioning to your collaboration platform? The thing is, you’re most likely already familiar with many of the tools that are found in enterprise social collaboration platforms. They are purposely designed to be intuitive to use, incorporating the best ideas from consumer social networks so that they work just as you expect them to and take no time to get used to read more.

Dreamforce ’13: What exactly is Salesforce1?

This week I attended Dreamforce ’13, Salesforce’s annual user and developer conference in San Francisco. The 11th-annual Salesforce event posted record numbers with more than 130,000 attendees, including nearly 5,000 C-suite executives. Attendees came from 82 different countries and there were about 1,200 sessions over the four days. Dreamforce is considered to be the world’s largest enterprise cloud computing event, and Salesforce refers to it as the “Vegas for cloud, mobile and social nerds”. The show was a great opportunity for Salesforce users, partners and developers to exchange ideas and information on the latest and greatest in CRM, sales, marketing and technology.
The biggest announcement at Dreamforce this year was Salesforce1: a wrapper around all existing Salesforce platforms which aims at replacing the older Salesforce CRM. The Salesforce1 platform is being marketed as a CRM for developers and adds new social, mobile and cloud customer capabilities. Salesforce1 is a unifying, mobile-friendly, API-rich wrapper around everything Salesforce.com offers. According to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, the exciting development in Salesforce1 is its mobile-optimisation: Salesforce services, customizations, reports, dashboards and other parts of the ecosystem will now be available on mobile read more at Highq.com

Six Great Ways to Use Blogs for Project Management

When it comes to project management, it makes sense to embrace tools that can help keep you organised and make your project run as smoothly as possible. With the advent of team collaboration software like HighQ Collaborate, project managers have a wealth of resources available to them which will help keep track of projects, from tasks and comments to wikis and blogs.
Blogs allow you to publish news, updates and ideas with team members, as well as posting information, links and attachments, generate discussions and search for information, making them the perfect tool for project management. You can create blogs for numerous purposes associated with project management. Here are six ideas to start you off:

1. Blog for discussion

Use blog posts as a forum for discussion surrounding the project. Write blog posts announcing project news or updates, and your team can respond in the comments below. Or post a question or a topic to stimulate discussions or ideas about the project in the comments read more.

Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2013: Will digitalisation change the world?

Last week I attended the Gartner Symposium in glorious Barcelona for four days. It’s the biggest annual IT conference in Europe, with over 6,000 attendees; most of them are CIOs of the world’s leading enterprises. I must say I was very impressed at the level of attendance, co-ordination and genuine insight the conference provided. There were hundreds of different workshops and sessions spanning the entire spectrum of technology across industries and enterprises. In this blog post, I summarise what I found interesting from the Keynote speech.

Keynote: Digitalisation, The Internet of Things & 3D Printing

The keynote was all about the digitalisation of the world and what Gartner calls the “Digital Industrial Economy”. Gartner is convinced the digitalisation process is literally going to change the world we live in.
Other areas that were intriguing to me were what Gartner refers to as the “Internet of Things” and the “Internet of Everything”. This is the concept that in the very near future almost all products will have sensors and smart chips embedded in them which are connected to the internet read more.

Quick review: SRA report ‘Cloud computing, law firms and risk’

Earlier this month, the Solicitors Regulation Authority released an interesting whitepaper discussing the risks law firms should consider when choosing to move to cloud technologies. The whitepaper details the compliance and legal issues that firms must take into account when adopting a cloud computing system, in order to keep in line with SRA guidelines. The paper outlines what law firms can gain from using cloud computing, but also the vital things to consider when choosing a cloud provider. For example, the paper explains that cloud computing can improve data security within a firm, but firms must be careful that the cloud provider they choose is accredited with the security standard ISO 27001.
The SRA’s paper also briefly explains the reasons why law firms use cloud technologies, and what benefits they gain from doing so, such as lower cost provisions, mobile access and ease of maintenance. We wrote about this back in May 2010, when cloud computing was just starting to become mainstream in businesses read more at Highq.com

Leveraging the cloud to go paperless

Will we live to see a completely paperless world? Unlikely. Are we moving in the direction of a world with less paper? Sure enough. Will the internet, online media, eBooks, cloud collaboration and virtualization technologies outcast paper completely? Appears so. Will the next generation see only pictures of printed newspapers in old archive libraries or on the internet? Very likely. A decade ago all these changes seemed to be in the distant future. But now, the future is closer than we thought.

A world with less paper is here

Online media and tablets have resulted in a decline in printed newspapers and eBooks are only gaining in popularity read more.

Connect with colleagues using mentions and hashtags

Social is literally at the centre of enterprise social collaboration. Platforms like HighQ Collaborate have built in the most useful features from popular consumer social networks to make communication and sharing as easy as possible, including mentions and hashtags.
These simple tools are the key to enabling people to connect across companies via their collaboration platform and share and collate information, news and ideas more easily.

What are mentions and hashtags?

Mentions are a way to get someone’s attention. They allow you to bring someone into a conversation or alert them to something without having to directly contact them. When you mention someone, they will instantly receive a notification and a link directing them to the message in which they were mentioned read more.

Watch a recording of our webinar on Gartner’s “Nexus of Forces” and the future of collaboration

Watch a recording of our recent webinar where HighQ’s COO, Stuart Barr, talks about how Gartner’s “Nexus of Forces” – social, mobile and cloud – are coming together to raise people’s expectations and force a change to the way people work.
The webinar also includes a demo of HighQ Collaborate 3, with its new mobile-optimised design and secure file sharing, enterprise social collaboration, productivity and knowledge sharing features more at Highq.com

Unleash the benefits of social business

Should your business be social?

To many of us the answer to this question is obvious and this post may seem like it’s teaching you to suck eggs, but let’s not forget that we are still in the minority. Many people remain stifled by organisational red tape, aren’t engaged or just have their head in the sand and are blissfully unaware of the benefits of social business.
Let’s begin by touching on the most important element of social business (the clue is in the title). It’s not about the technology, nor a process, but about the human network that exists in your organization read more.

PwC Survey: Technology essential to UK legal sector recovery

This week, PwC published their 2013 Annual Law Firms’ Survey. The survey showed some mixed results for the UK’s legal sector, revealing that the Top 10 UK firms are finally starting to recover from the financial crisis, reporting consistently improved financial KPIs through 2013. However, mid- and lower-tier firms are struggling; not only have financial KPIs not improved on 2012, but in fact they have reduced on average.
These results indicate an urgent need for firms to innovate and find new offerings to draw clients in, while streamlining their operations and services. Investing in technology is key to this, whether that’s invest in their existing technology or new technology. Understandably, cash-strapped firms have been holding back on investing in infrastructure projects, particularly IT. Many firms are beginning to understand the need to invest in technology in order to grow, and are recognising the direct impacts of technology on financial performance read more.

JDKM 2013: Legal Technology Innovations – No longer anti-social

I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at the 6th annual Janders Dean knowledge management conference in Sydney last month. You can find a overview of the event by me here and by Stephen Sander here.
My talk was entitled “Legal Technology Innovations : No Longer Anti-Social”. Innovation was a hot topic during the conference and almost all the speakers mentioned innovation in one way or another. It was really refreshing to hear so much positivity about how organisations can address many of the problems faced by businesses today, especially by law firms. I have worked in and around legal for over 10 years and during this time I have worked for CMS Cameron McKenna LLP, legal services outsourcer Integreon and HighQ, so I have experience from the main three angles you can approach legal services from and how they are provided read more.

Enterprise collaboration news: October 2013 round-up

The Monday after the storm that shook England at the end of October, HighQ’s London office was practically deserted as public transport all but fell apart under the strain of fallen trees and collapsed cranes. Luckily, we were able to carry out a (nearly) normal day thanks to Collaborate, the enterprise social collaboration platform we build, sell and use, which allowed the majority of us to work from home as if we were in the office. This is just one example of when cloud collaboration software is vital to keeping enterprises running. This article in the Business Communications Revolution blog points out that as the business world becomes increasingly spread out, the workforce is globally distributed, and the role of enterprise collaboration platforms is all the more vital to the smooth running of companies read more.

How to guide: Real estate portfolio management made easy

A major use case of our enterprise collaboration product, HighQ Collaborate, is to use our unique “iSheets” module to build solutions designed to help manage real estate portfolios and the associated debt/equity utilised to finance asset acquisitions.
In a previous life I used to work as a property banker and I’ve also worked for a real estate fund. I can safely say that if we had this tool we would have been be far more organised and structured in our portfolio management capabilities (we used various MS Excel spreadsheets to manage a portfolio worth £25 billion!) read more.

Getting work done by assigning tasks

We’re all busy at work and sometimes this means that it is hard to keep track of what we’re supposed to be doing and when. Working collaboratively can ease some of the pressure, but it requires asking colleagues to add to their burgeoning to-do lists as well. The trick is finding the best way to get your task to the top of their list.
When emails, post-its and polite nudges just won’t do, the best way to prompt someone to do something is to assign them a task in your company’s enterprise social collaboration site read more.

Like, for when a comment is just too much…

We’re all used to liking statuses on Facebook – in fact it’s so embedded in our culture that people name their kids after likes and rappers get tattoos of the like button.
Enterprise social collaboration software companies like HighQ have noticed the popularity of the like button on social media, and many have embraced this one-click mode of communication in their platforms. But why are likes so popular? And why do people use them?
Aside from being time-savers, this post looks at the instances in which people use likes and what you can use them for too read more.

Buy vs build: The pros and cons of cloud software

Stuart Barr analyses the growing trend for organisations to select cloud-based off-the-shelf systems instead of building their own in-house solutions.
In these tricky economic times with downward pressure on internal budgets, alternative fee-arrangements and an expectation from clients to deliver ever more value, there are difficult decisions to be made about the best way to provide new client facing services. This inevitably involves technology and needs to be put in place quickly and efficiently.
Until fairly recently, the installation of new systems has required an army of developers, system administrators, additional data centres, a long lead time and large budgets to build and run applications in-house. Now off the shelf cloud-based software offers a real alternative that has some potentially massive advantages read more.

Health services must collaborate and communicate

Digital communications across the health services have to be radically improved in order to enable health professionals to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on patient-centric activities. For example, in relation to enabling such communication amongst professionals, while email is useful, care must be taken not to try to use it for purposes for which it was never intended, especially these days with the maturation and cost-effectiveness of cloud and enterprise social collaboration technologies that can substantially improve communication and cooperation between professionals at low cost read more.

Bring Your Own Device: the facts

Lots of people have been talking about the emerging “bring your own device” (“BYOD”) trend over the past few months, unsurprisingly so as smartphone and tablet sales go through the roof (Gartner says 225 million smartphones were sold this year, up 46.5% from last year). In this article, I talk about what this trend is, and reflect on what this means for both employees and organizations.

What is the BYOD trend?

As we all know, today’s organisation is global, its workforce highly mobile and increasingly tech-savvy read more at Highq.com.

Does home working stifle collaboration?

Earlier this year Yahoo!’s Chief Exec, Marissa Mayer, announced that she was axing the company’s working from home policy and ordered all remote workers back into their nearest Yahoo! office by June this year, or they faced losing their jobs. She cited one of her reasons as being the need for better collaboration, and that this is done best when people are in the same office.
Is this the harsh truth or outdated mentality? The latter if you ask me.
To suggest employees working from home limit an organisation’s ability to collaborate implies that that same organisation can’t collaborate with regional or overseas offices, external partners or clients properly. Whilst this may be the bleak reality for businesses whose technology systems are out of date, forward looking companies which have adopted cutting-edge enterprise social collaboration tools shouldn’t have these insecurities read more.

How can collaboration software create a knowledge sharing culture?

In today's economy, innovation is extremely important. That is why knowledge sharing is creeping higher and higher up the priority list of companies eager to become forward-thinkers and leaders in their industries. Historically, corporate culture has revolved around knowledge hoarding, where employees feel that they are safe in their jobs only as long as they are the only person with the knowledge to do it. This is not conducive to innovation, however. In order to nurture an innovative business, companies should instead adopt a knowledge sharing culture. First of all, it's helpful to identify exactly what a knowledge sharing culture is. Knowledge sharing means providing information and know-how to help others solve problems, develop ideas and implement or improve procedures. Knowledge can be shared through all modes of communication, and a knowledge sharing culture encourages as much communication as possible.

Knowledge sharing in this way has been shown to increase and speed up productivity, enhance team performance and morale, increase sales growth and revenue, and above all foster innovation. Obviously, these are all things that any good company wants to achieve. Enterprise data collaboration platforms, like HighQ Collaborate, have been designed to make knowledge sharing easy by embedding it into the way people and companies work read more.

The no hype guide to secure file sharing

Most people are familiar with commercial file sharing services like Dropbox and You Send It. These are great solutions to the problem of file-size limits on emails. If you need to send a 400mb video file to a friend, short of posting a flash drive to them you'll most likely want to use Dropbox. However, these commercial file sharing services are not secure. Dropbox has been hacked in the past, exposing users' files. This is distressing enough for consumers whose files are personal, but means that they are risky for businesses who often handle confidential documents. Instead, many companies are choosing dedicated secure file sharing platforms as their preferred method of transferring large or confidential documents.

Secure file sharing platforms provide and safe and reliable method of uploading and sharing documents without having to use email or commercial file sharing tools. This method is the approach adopted by many large organisations who have confidential documents such as business pitches and sensitive information which they need to share, either internally with colleagues or externally with clients. Users can grant access to the system only through usernames and passwords, different to shared drives where everyone who has access can see every document saved in the system read more.

What is a Secure Virtual Data Room?

Many businesses require the ability to share files between one another and with clients. In most cases, these files are confidential and require high levels of security to ensure that they don't get lost or fall into the wrong hands. Before the digital age, businesses shared hard-copy documents by hand, which was risky as it required a level of trust that the file wouldn't be misplaced, read or copied by unscrupulous employees or postal service workers. What's more, the cost and time of transporting files was troublesome, and though faxing made this easier this was far from the most secure option. Paper files take up room and require time to organise and locate when access is required. When the digital age first emerged, hard drives, floppy disks, CDs and flash drives were handled the same way as hard-copy files, with the added security potential of using password protection on files and the benefit of not taking up room in filing cabinets. However, the risk of loss and duplication, as well as the time and cost of transportation remained read more.

The Evolution of Legal Document Management

The earliest form of document management began thousands of years ago when ancient civilisations organised their libraries of scrolls by topics. This formed the basis for all of the legal document management that followed well into the digital age, when files on early word processors were stored on floppy disks sorted alphabetically by client (more often than not accompanied by a hard paper copy.
When folders, hard drives and servers began to replace floppy disks, the need for paper documents began to decline. Different digital file types are now suitable in the legal industry, not just document and spreadsheets, but also PDFs, images, audio and video. With increasing complexity and quantity of files, there is a growing demand for legal project management software that can help firms to organise, store and find documents with ease read more.

Working in the open: benefits of socialising team collaboration

From school-age we are trained to keep our work private until we’re happy that it is finished and the best that it can be. Our work is our own until we are ready to take a breath and send it out into the harsh, critical world.
Today, more and more companies are embracing team collaboration software, which means that employees have to adapt to a new working style that goes against what we’ve all been taught. Instead, they must work in a way that is open, transparent and collaborative read more.

8 Reasons Enterprise Social Collaboration is here to stay

Digital has changed the way we live and work forever. In handing us the entire distribution channel it has made the world smaller, cheaper to navigate and also more social. Initially such change left businesses defensive. Challenged by the way employees could 

communicate freely many organisations feared it would create inefficiencies and distraction read more.

Benefits of Social and Collaborative E-Learning Solutions for Professional Organizations

The demand for e-learning solutions is constantly rising in the corporate sector for employee education, since it provides companies with the best medium of honing the skills of the personnel in the most effective and efficient manner. However, monotonous content, plaid delivery channels and resistance from the learners themselves create barriers for the success of this solution. Social and collaborative learning are two of the most sought after remote learning tools in the corporate sector as they allow users to create an interactive environment for them to learn and fine tune their respective skill sets read more.

The history of social collaboration with the help of infographic

Over here at HighQ, we have a deep interest in the evolution of social technologies and how they have impacted our everyday lives, from “Twitter Revolutions” affecting regional politic landscapes to how these initially consumer led platforms have shaped enterprise collaboration software. It’s been a long story in the making but the past decade has seen the way people socialise more.