Collaboration Remains Elusive Across Applications And Enterprises
Organizations seeking the benefits of collaboration and rapid knowledge sharing in Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) solutions face several key challenges in delivering a consistent enterprise solution:
- Consistent tool across multiple applications and environments. Organizations want one tool to collaborate regardless of the application they are using. Today, organizations often need a separate tool to collaborate for each suite of business applications, email system, and even browser. The result – a plethora of tools that enable collaboration in silos of information that hinder Enterprise 2.0 benefits..
- Intuitive and natural user experience. As a key element of next generation social enterprise apps, users expect pervasive and natural collaboration to occur in the context of applications. Today’s systems often have inconsistent approaches to sharing information making it difficult to share both structured and unstructured information in the same system. More importantly, organizations will need to move across multiple form factors such as mobile, iPads, kiosks, and other hand held devifes
SimplyBox Breaks Barriers In Collaboration
Campbell, CA, based SimplyBox started out in 2007 as a consumer play focused on organizing and sharing websites clippings in a visual manner for personal research and sharing. Over the past year, SimplyBox has successfully proven their core technology into the enterprise with partnerships at large enterprise apps vendors, leaving competitors such as Diigo, Sazell , and Safari’s Webclip to focus on the personal knowledge and research space. SimplyBox succeeds in enterprise scenarios because:
- Unstructured and structured content can be shared and categorized. Users grab and select the content they wish to share and place them into a “Box”. Each box includes content about a topic and related conversations. Users can share boxes about different topics with different groups. SimplyBox can then notify and alert others about content being placed into the box. The box serves as the medium to enable collaboration among internal and external teams.
- Collaboration can occur anywhere. Whether its in a portal for a web app or enterprise system report, users collaborate regardless of what system they are in. Content that’s been collected along the way by multiple users can be made available throughout different enterprise systems. SimplyBox even co-exists with solutions such as Microsoft Sharepoint which serve more as file/content repositories. This enables applications to gain tentacles across the enterprise apps landscape. More importantly, no programming or IT involvement is required.
Figure 1. SimplyBox Enables Natural Collaboration Within Any Environment