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.