You’re Invited: Social Intranet Summit Vancouver

Chris| August 17th, 2010 No Comments »

We’re stoked to announce the Social Intranet Summit on October 28th, 2010, here in beautiful Vancouver, Canada. We’ve booked the gorgeous Vancouver Convention Centre and arranged a stellar lineup of speakers. Come join us for a day of inspiring presentations, practical advice, and great networking!

Vancouver Convention Centre, venue for the Social Intranet Summit

Top 5 Reasons to Come to the Social Intranet Summit

#1. Top-notch mix of cross-disciplinary intranet experts. Dion Hinchcliffe (Enterprise 2.0 Analyst for CBS, ZDNet, ebizQ) for high-level strategy. Stewart Mader (author of Wikipatterns) for hands-on practical advice. Eric Karjaluoto (author of Speak Human) on the importance of design. More speakers will be announced soon!

#2. Learn how real companies are using social intranets to transform collaboration and knowledge sharing. Hear case studies presented by real organizations, like EA and Oxfam America.

#3. Learn more about SharePoint 2010. SharePoint is loved by some, hated by others. It can be a key part of your social intranet — if you know what you’re doing.

#4. Full-day pre-event workshop for ThoughtFarmer customers. Do you use the ThoughtFarmer solution for your social intranet? Attend a full-day pre-event workshop on Wednesday, October 27th for advanced, hands-on training specifically for ThoughtFarmer customers.

#5. It’s in Vancouver, and Vancouver is awesome. It’s got the highest concentration of coffee shops, sushi bars and graphic designers in the world. And where else can you go sailing, golfing and skiing — all in the same day?

Register now and save $450! Early bird registration ends September 3, 2010.

Enterprise 2.0 Case Study: Continuum, designers of Reebok Pump and Swiffer Sweeper

Chris| June 30th, 2010 1 Comment »

There seems to be a big appetite for case studies of how Enterprise 2.0 software is being used in the real world. I want to invite you to check out our case study of Continuum, the Boston-based design innovation firm responsible for brilliant ideas like the Reebok Pump and the Swiffer Sweeper.

This is the latest of our Intranet Case Studies.

Video: Desktop Connector Enables Roundtrip Editing; Reduces Email File Attachments

Chris| June 22nd, 2010 4 Comments »

Last week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston we unveiled our Desktop Connector. Read this post for the details of how it works and why it’s so significant.

For this post, I thought I’d show it visually with a 90-second demo. See below.

Enterprise 2.0 Vendors: Mutual Respect, Friendly Competition

Chris| June 17th, 2010 9 Comments »

One of my favourite parts of this week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston was the time I spent with other vendors in the space.

This segment of the technology industry attracts sharp minds who are intrigued by the same difficult problem: How can technology make workplace collaboration more effective? The answers require experts not just in technology, but in ethnography, human factors and psychology too.

Last night our VP Gordon Ross discussed the writings of Richard Sennett with Michael Idinopulos, a deep thinker from SocialText with whom I’ve engaged in lively online debate. We also talked about some of our common problems as vendors, such as figuring out the best way to explain comprehensive software suites in terms that the target customer appreciates. Are we enterprise collaboration, chaos management, Facebook for the enterprise or social intranet software? Is “social” even a good word to use?

Michael, Deb Schultz and Gord in deep discussion

Shortly before that, we were guests at an event hosted by Aaron Fulkerson and Isaac Garcia, CEOs of MindTouch and Central Desktop, respectively. Aaron introduced Darren to the noted Open Source developer Miguel de Icaza, creator of Gnome (Miguel is famous in geek circles). Aaron showed me his MindTouch tattoo (don’t worry, it’s on his calf), and we talked openly about a large bid that we’re competing against each other on. Isaac shared his advice on server farms as we move towards a hosted version of ThoughtFarmer.

I attended the Jive “New Way” briefing on Monday and enjoyed the free chocolates . Jive puts on a flashy show, and their new executives are seasoned presenters. I have to say, though, that there are too many men in suits at Jive for my liking. It was comforting to see their soon-to-be-very-wealthy co-founder and CTO, Matt Tucker, doing network configuration on the Macs at their booth. He’s still a geek.

Percentage of execs in suits apparently peaks around $100M in revenue

Lawrence Liu, now of Cisco and formerly of Telligent and before that, Microsoft, told me that all these software packages are overbuilt and 5 to 10 years ahead of where the customer base is at. We discussed ThoughtFarmer’s forthcoming SharePoint 2010 Connector, and he said there’s a lot of money to be made riding Microsoft’s coattails — if you don’t mind being their lackey.

Gord, Darren and Chris at the ThoughtFarmer booth. Photo by Jordan from Traction Software -- another friendly competitor. Thanks Jordan!

Rather than avoid or resent my competitors in this space, I like to embrace them. They’re great people with great ideas that I can learn from. And as Isaac said last night to the guests at his event, “This is a huge market. There’s going to be a lot of winners.”

Round-Trip File Editing with the ThoughtFarmer Desktop Connector: Unveiling at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston

Chris| June 9th, 2010 7 Comments »

Update: See the video demo of the ThoughtFarmer Desktop Connector.

Imagine this scenario, which plays out millions of times a day: A colleague emails you a Word doc. You double-click the attachment. It downloads and opens in Word. You make some changes and click “Save”. The “Save as…” dialog pops up, you choose a smart location for it, give it a filename, then save it. Next, you open your email program again, hit “Reply” on your colleague’s email, select “Attach file”, locate your file, and hit okay. Finally, you send it back.

Ugh.

Detaching, editing, saving, re-attaching and sending is a nightmare. And it’s a nightmare that almost all of us are forced to deal with daily.

At ThoughtFarmer, we’ve come up with a brilliant solution for this problem that we call round-trip file editing. It’s a knowledge worker’s dream, and we’re unveiling it next week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

Here’s how that same Word doc works with round-trip file editing: You go to a ThoughtFarmer page that contains the Word doc. You click “Edit”. It automatically downloads and opens in Word. You edit, and every time you hit “Save”, the file is automatically uploaded back to ThoughtFarmer, ready for your colleague.

Unlike SharePoint, which only does round-trip editing on Windows using Internet Explorer for certain types of files, ThoughtFarmer does round-trip editing with any browser, on Windows or Mac, and with any type of file — Office, PhotoShop, AutoCad, you name it. It works through the firewall — if your browser can see your intranet, you can do round-trip editing. You can even work on the file offline and it will automatically sync up when you reconnect.

All this is made possible via our new Desktop Connector:

The ThoughtFarmer Desktop Connector lets you open files from your ThoughtFarmer intranet and edit them directly in their native application. No detaching, no emailing around, no re-uploading.

For anyone who’s suffered through downloading and re-uploading of files while trying to collaborate with a colleague: we’ve been there, we’ve felt the pain, and now we’ve done something about it.

If you’re in Boston next week, come visit us at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference for a demo.