Every Friday I’m going to attempt to summarize any relevant news in the future of work/collaboration space. I’ll provide the name of the vendor, a short summary of what the announcement or piece of news is with a link to the original, and finally a short POV. I can’t cover every single thing that comes out but I will do my best to provide as much relevant content as I can. If you have something you think I should include then please send it over and I will decide if it’s something I can add. Again, keep in mind this is weekly roundup so the news or announcements need to be from that week. Here is the roundup for this week:
Mango Apps 8.1 release
I actually meant to cover this when it was first announced and forgot so I’m adding it here. The new version of the platform adds things such as a native Windows desktop client, HTML 5 document viewer, screen capture, Google Analytics integration, and much more. They also launched a product called TinyTake which is a free screen capture and annotation tool that anyone can use..
My POV
I’m a big fan of MangoApps and believe they have a terrific product. They are a privately held company and so their marketing budget is small but their product is powerful which is why you may not have heard about them. I’ve talked to executive team around their roadmap and they have exciting things coming up in the near future. They focus more on mid-size organizations but also have some enterprise size customers. Their product rivals what many of the more known vendors are offering.
Disclosure: We use a review (no cost) instance of MangoApps and have been for a while now
Yammer adds browser extension
Yammer has added an effective way for employees to share external information internally with their new browser extension. This allows employees to push a button to share an article or web-page internally with their teams and also allows them to see if any conversations around that page are already happening.
My POV
A great addition to what is becoming a powerful Yammer arsenal. While the extension might not be a critical component it is certainly a nice to have feature for employees who are looking to start conversations around a particular topic. I’m sure community managers using Yammer are collectively saying “thank you.”
Salesforce Chatter updates mobile functionality
The goal of the new mobile update is to support pretty much any action that an employee needs to take on the platform. Traditionally most mobile apps that enterprise collaboration vendors have are either view only or provide limited functionality. However, the new mobile version of Chatter will allow employees to take actions such as editing customer records or marketing campaigns. The app will also for custom actions such as one click access to submit a help request or travel reimbursement (or anything else that the company can think of). Finally, the app will provided updated analytics dashboards in real time.
My POV
The entire point of this update is to empower the mobile employee. As mentioned above most mobile versions of platforms typically provide limited functionality which means that employees on the go can’t be as effective or productive as they are when in front of a computer. This new update is bring the idea of the completely mobile employee one step closer to reality. The fact the analytics dashboards are also updated in real time based on actions that employees make on their mobile devices also allows for employees to make critical business decisions while on the go. Great move from Salesforce.
Clarizen announces record number of customers
Clarizen just announced they broke the 2,000 customer mark spanning organizations across 75 countries.
My POV
Clarizen is one of those platforms that is sneaking up from behind on many of the “known” enterprise collaboration vendors. They have a superb project management platform and are working on adding additional collaboration capabilities in the near future. Their company is actually larger than most people think and it’s growing fast. Definitely a vendor to watch going forward. They have made some other announcements as well which you can read in the link below.
Disclosure: Clarizen is a client
