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.