Thanks to smartphones, tablets, and the rise of cloud computing, employees in nearly every industry are constantly wired in and on-the-go, capable of working with ease during a commute or from a remote location. Mobile workers might do great things for your overhead costs and business possibilities, but how do you ensure that you’ll maintain efficiency, cohesiveness and a unified vision when your employees are scattered in remote locations?

Never fear, the tools are here. Technology is making the workforce more collaborative and social than ever before, offering the opportunity to keep in touch through various networks, apps, and mobile features. Here are five tips to make sure that going remote won’t result in someone pressing the pause button on your business:

1) Collaboration is Key

Working remotely is no excuse for losing connection. To make sure that mobile workers don’t feel isolated, put colleagues to work on projects together from separate locations. Next, set firm communication rules for the company. (For example: Communicate via Gchat/Skype/Yammer/Whatever during work hours and always remain logged on while at work.) Have an open conversation where the members of your team or company to set expectations of how these tools will be used, and what expectations we’ll all have for each other.

Regularly occurring meetings through GoToMeeting or Skype can be a great way to spark creativity and cohesion while making sure that all workers are aware of their role in the project and how they will help other members of their team. Once goals are clearly established, scheduling software and multifaceted collaboration tools such as WorkSimple ensure that your employees will have the chance to show off their A-games.

2) Mobility Requires Measurability

While measuring performance is necessary in any management setting, it’s particularly important when working with a remote staff. Set clear and consistent expectations and cultivate a culture of accountability; though workers don’t need to be in the door by 9 AM, they know that they’re expected to deliver measurable results.

That said, when expectations are met, mobile workers should feel appreciated and rewarded for their accomplishments. And if a bit of constructive criticism is in order, it’s even more important to have those conversations, address any issues, and find a path to success.

3) Recommend Coworking Communities to Your Employees

Like the increase of remote workers, the coworking movement has spread like wildfire. At the 2012 Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC) in Austin this past March, it was announced that the number of coworking spaces has increased by 400% globally in the past two years alone.

Coworking spaces offer communities for mobile workers and encourage collaboration, increase productivity, and give the remote worker an invigorating workspace away from the distractions and temptations at home. Plus, now I have a places to suggest to my remote workers for client or internal meetings, no matter where they are. They aren’t bound by local coffeeshops anymore.

Sites like Liquidspace provide active listings of coworking spaces and allow your remote employees to take meetings as needed in a professional environment.

After all, not many deals are made on recliners.

4) Establish Consistent, Planned, Communication and Chart Progress

Its vital to maintain collaborative schedules with my staff, especially when I call a last-minute update in the office. Mobile scheduling software like When I Work can be used to make sure that remote workers are on the same page. When I Work not only facilitates general day-to-day scheduling but also facilitates something even more important: Communication between boss and employee on a one-to-one level. This has saved us from meeting stragglers and no-shows on many occasions.

As a manager, checking-in to provide regular positive and constructive feedback is important, but it’s also important to establish a set schedule that keeps your communication planned and consistent. Mobile scheduling software also makes maintaining records of your conversations easy, which will allow you to chart progress and make sure that your employees’ skill sets and performance are improving over time.

5) Let the Cloud Help Your Imagination Run Wild

Managing a team of mobile worker content is done best through cloud sync storage of files, which allows for an easy way for your team to share their work and collaborate.

I’m partial to Alfresco Cloud, our document management and collaboration platform. Sign up for free and get started creating, sharing, collaborating from any device. It is private, secure, and enterprise-grade, but with the right amount of social integration and mobile access to do great work anywhere.

But if you’re looking for other options for cloud storage, they are seemingly endless: the recent launch of Google Drive, DropBox is well-known for its ease of use and myriad user-friendly features,others include Syncplicity, SugarSync, or Microsoft SkyDrive.

No matter which cloud-based service you choose, remember that remote workers don’t need to come into the office as long as they live in the cloud.

The tablet is often thought of as strictly a media consumption device—an easy way to browse, watch, or read. There are plenty of apps that aggregate information, connect users with content, and make sharing files over multiple platforms easy.

However, the secret weapon of the tablet user is content creation. Whether it’s putting together a presentation, updating a personal or business blog, jotting down notes, or writing an article, tablet users are increasingly getting off the sidelines and into the game with apps designed to engage and create, not just consume. Here’s a list of five apps that will turn your tablet into a tool for producing content on the go, allowing you to finally leave your laptop at home.

1. Quickoffice Pro

Quickoffice is a must-have app for anyone looking to create and edit Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations on their tablet. While Quickoffice allows for easy content creation and editing, Quickoffice Pro’s added features makes accessing and sharing files even easier.  The Pro version allows you to access DropBox, Evernote, Google Docs, Box, Huddle, SugarSync, Egnyte, and Catch files. You can also share your content using e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yammer, Slideshare, Scribd, and Docstoc.

If Microsoft Office is a big part of your life, Quickoffice Pro is an absolute must-have.

Quickoffice Pro for iPad
Quickoffice Pro for Android

2. SyncSpace

SyncSpace will turn your tablet into a collaborative drawing space to share your ideas with clients, coworkers, or customers. The app allows you to sketch ideas, add notes, and then send your drawings so that others can view and add to the drawing. When you’re finished, email the document as a PDF or post your sketches on Twitter or Facebook.  A great tool for brainstorming sessions, SyncSpace’s virtual drawing space outdoes the meeting-room whiteboard.

SyncSpace for iPad
SyncSpace for Android

3. BlogPress

BlogPress makes blogging simple by integrating access to all the major blogging platforms, including Tumblr and WordPress, into one app. Whichever blog site you use, you can easily upload videos, text, and pictures onto your blog from your tablet.

The ability to publish your content on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr and Picasa at the swipe of a finger makes it even more enticing. BlogPress has received high praise from TapCritic, BlogHerald, and Macworld.com, which claims, “In the battle of mobile blogging tools, BlogPress wins on several fronts.”

BlogPress for iPad

4. Audio Memos

If you’re not a fan of typing on your tablet, try Audio Memos, a voice recorder that saves your recordings and allows for easy sharing. The simple interface, coupled with the option to set your recordings to a consistent average volume, are some of the key features. With a handful of extensions sold as in-app purchases, you can tailor your app to fit your recording needs by adding the function to trim your recording, compress the audio file, or adjust the speed. When you’re all done, you can easily email the file and upload the recordings to Dropbox or Evernote.

Audio Memos for iPad

5. Taposé

Taposé is a multi-functionality content creation app– a collaborative journal that supports word processing, highlighting, sticky notes, and sketches. The elegantly designed layout splits the tablet screen into a side-by-side view and makes the app even more versatile.

Integration with contacts, Google Maps, and multimedia files on your device makes this much more useful than a traditional journal. The cloud-supported collaborative features also allow multiple users to team together and share their content from Taposé.

Taposé for iPad

Simply put, if you own a tablet and are looking to take your content creation to the next level, these apps should be in your toolbox. Happy creating!

In his recent post, Jeff Potts talked about the future of the Alfresco AVM.  There are several options for customers on the current AVM that Jeff alluded to.  Several are outlined here in this chart of how Alfresco becomes the content hub for your Web Content Services:

In this post, we’re featuring a conversation we had recently with Mike Vertal, President of Rivet Logic.  Rivet Logic, an Alfresco Platinum Partner, has a web experience management (WEM) solution built on Alfresco 4.  This provides them a great market opportunity to reach out to the current Alfresco AVM users and provide a path to a new repository.  For more information, check out the upcoming Crafter Roadshow:  click here.

This is a great example of the power and flexibility of our platform and the commitment of a partner to building open solutions. Crafter has been assembled from open source software and they have made their source code available. Hopefully, this will encourage stronger adoption and participation across the community.

Joe Tong, Alfresco:  I’m talking with Mike Vertal, President of Rivet Logic about their Crafter WEM solution.  Mike, can you give us an overview of Crafter and the market positioning.

Mike: As Jeff Potts has discussed in his blog post regarding web content management, the Alfresco AVM repository has been officially deprecated and is no longer offered to new customers.  Existing WCM customers will continue to be supported until AVM reaches end-of-life.  So with the recent release of Alfresco v4.0, now is a good time to start thinking about a future migration.

Alfresco is a platform that provides services and capabilities to support WCM use cases on which vertical solutions can be built. Rivet Logic, in particular, provides a WCM/WEM solution on top of Alfresco called Crafter Rivet that now runs on v4.0.  It’s the only 100% Alfresco-based solution for WCM/WEM that provides a full featured, end-to-end web content management solution.

Joe:  Thanks Mike, that’s a great overview of Crafter. What capabilities does it provide?

Mike:  Crafter Rivet covers all of the basic WCM functionality
* Content editing with rich forms and in-context editing capabilities
* Library services for locking and versioning and metadata management
* Live in-context preview with on page editing tools
* Strong authoring search to help you find and create content
* Content workflow with submission, approval and rejection provided out of the box
* Deployment and scheduled deployment
* Dashboards that allow authors to understand how content is flowing through the authoring process
* Website blueprinting that allows authors to create entire new sites based on website templates
* Rich, dynamic content delivery
* Tools for migrating your XML based AVM site to the DM repository

For managing content and site visitor experiences across multiple online channels, Crafter Rivet also provides key WEM functionality including
* Multi-channel authoring, preview and publishing
* Mobile device support and preview
* Analytics integration and reporting
* Social Media publishing
* Runtime detection inbound device that allows your site to serve the appropriate template for the device.

Joe: Does Crafter take advantage of any of the latest Alfresco 4 features?

Mike: Yes it does!  As an overview, we leverage:  Workflow, Search, and Publishing.  Workflow leverages Activiti, which is our new and much improved, standards based workflow engine.  Activiti provides a capacity for both simple and highly complex workflow definitions as well as a great user experience for creating and managing workflows.  Crafter Rivet repository search is based on Alfresco’s search services, meaning it now leverages the work we have done to integrate Apache Solr. For content publishing, Crafter Rivet leverages our new Publishing Channels API  to enable authors to immediately publish or schedule deployments to one or more online channels or sites.

Joe:  Who should consider using Crafter and where is there more information?

Mike:  If you’re an existing Alfresco customer running on the AVM, Crafter Rivet is a solution you should consider as part of your migration to the v4.0 platform.  Rivet Logic has started to migrate some of their customers from Alfresco v2/v3 to v4, and they have built some migration tools to help make it as painless as possible.  If you’re a new customer considering what Alfresco can do for you in the WCM/WEM space, you should also check out Crafter Rivet — it’s a strong solution and a great example of how Alfresco v4.0 provides the services and capabilities needed to meet your web content management needs.  For more information, check out our recent joint webinar on Crafter – the replay is here. Also, sign up for our Roadshow coming to a city near you.

The Telegraph ran a thought provoking news article last year “Staff to be banned from sending emails”. It is interesting how Thierry Breton is approaching the issue of growing email volumes. This is one approach that is going to affect the usage of email within business. But I think a bigger threat to email is going to come from a whole new generation entering the workplace.

The other day I was chasing my daughter, she hadn’t responded to an email that I had sent her. The reason, it transpires, is that she hardly ever checks email! My daughter, Samantha, is 19 and studying at university. And I think she is typical of her generation. They have been using computers all of their lives, and are use to technology, using it to communicate and share information – the “Facebook Generation”.

My generation has grown up with email, and it is often seen as the preferred means of communication. I need an answer, send an email. I need to share a presentation, send an email. I need to make you aware of a change of plan, send an email. Other tools are used, web conferencing, instant message etc. But most collaboration is done via email.

My daughters’ generation is different, they have grown up without the need to rely on email and see little value in sending and receiving emails…

Why use email when I can share photographs online via Flickr, Facebook or Picasa
Why use email when I can get an instant response via Skype or MSN
Why use email when I can share documents via Dropbox, Scribed, or Google docs
Why use email when I can share an idea or concept with more people using Twitter
Why use email when I can organize my social life via Facebook
Why use email when I can post to a Wiki or Blog
Why use email when I can discuss online via a forum
Why use email when I can text
Why use email when I can be kept up to date via RSS feeds

The reason for this change Is many fold:

• Ubiquitous – All of my daughters friends have access to the same tools
• Simple – The user does not need to install anything, no complex setup, just register and off you go (who has read a manual for Facebook?)
• Free – These are free services. My daughter even has unlimited text as part of her mobile/cell phone contract
• Access – Always available via PC, Tablet or Smart Phone

Now it is going to be interesting when this generation enter the workplace. They are going to think today’s business tools antiquated and demand a smarter way of working. Will this be the generation that rebel and put an end to email? Only time will tell – but I think that there is a huge opportunity for Alfresco to provide systems that meets this generations collaboration needs.

As a footnote: I have solved the communication issue with my daughter. I now email her and then poke her on Facebook to tell her to check her inbox!

The mantra of our Account Management team has always been “customer first!”

Part of our responsibility is to serve our Enterprise client base along with helping expand the company’s footprint within these accounts. In fact, we are always looking for new ways to improve the Alfresco customer experience!

There are 5 specific ways we strive to enhance the Enterprise customer experience here at Alfresco:

1) Successful Transitions

As an Enterprise prospect, your first interaction with Alfresco will be with our sales team. Once the subscription is signed, we will transition your team to work hand-in-hand with our Account Managers. To ensure a stream of continuity as you roll-out the next phase of your implementation, we will coordinate a call with all parties involved, understand your goals and objectives, and action out a series of next steps.

2) Small To Large, You Matter

The reality is that there are large clients and small clients. There are customers who have large deployments and others who have an isolated, departmental use-case that has not been rolled out company wide. Regardless of the customer size, our Account Management team values your business. All customers are important, cornerstones of the business that help contribute to the success of an open-sourced software company. We want to be familiar with your account (goals, objectives, etc) from top to bottom and establish the precedent that “you matter”.

3) Quarterly Conference Calls

As part of our ongoing effort to provide continuity and build relationships, we aim to sync-up once a quarter to review your business objectives. Along with giving an ‘Alfresco State of the Union’, we want to hear about your use-case and how your instance is progressing. During these calls we can connect other parties (consulting, support, management, etc) to ensure continued success with your project.

4) Support Escalations

One of the benefits of being an Enterprise customer is the access to our support organization. Along with your subscription and access to the Enterprise code comes access to the Alfresco Support Portal where our Support Engineers reply to your technical queries. Here you’ll be able to submit a ticket and receive best practices and advice from our global team. The support organization is composed of engineers all over the world working to ensure that when you raise a technical support issue that it is resolved as soon as possible. As Account Managers, we know there will be times when your technical question needs to be escalated. If that happens, send us a note or give us a call and we’ll work with dedicated diligence to get an answer to you!

5) Customer Connections

Further strengthening the relationship between Alfresco and our Enterprise client-base, we have started having Customer Connection events in major markets across the country. During these exclusive, Enterprise-only customer events, we’ll have an Alfresco executive present a ‘State of the Union’, an engineer will deliver a Roadmap/technical track, and 2-3 local customers will share their Alfresco use-case. Along with this valuable information, customers are given the chance to network and share stories with other local-area Alfresco customers.

In the end, we want you to know that you have a single point-of-contact to reach out to who knows and cares about your business. While we recognize that every deployment is unique in varying degrees, our mission is to promote consistent success to all of our customers.

We are excited to be welcoming Kathleen Reidy to Alfresco as our new Director of Market Strategy! Kathleen joins us after almost 6 years at The 451 Group.  Here, in her own words, is why Kathleen decided to make the jump to Alfresco:

After working as an analyst for a number of years covering content management and collaboration markets, I’ve recently joined Alfresco in a marketing strategy role. I’ll be helping to define and articulate Alfresco’s market positioning and keeping an eye on what is happening in this rapidly shifting market.

So why did I choose to join Alfresco, and why now?

I’ve always been kind of a geek about information management (which led me, once upon a time, to a degree in library science) and so I never considered going very  far afield from content-oriented technologies.  But this is also a wonderfully fascinating time to be involved in content management, as the very definition of what it means to ‘manage’ content is changing.

We can all agree that mobile devices, and tablets most specifically, are having a huge impact on how content (and I am mostly interested in enterprise or business-oriented content) is accessed, used, shared, stored and retained.  Tablets can make content more usable and more accessible wherever you are –  but also are just plain fun to use.  If engineered right, tablet-based apps can actually help get more corporate content under management – and thus make it more useful and more valuable to the organization.

The cloud is an enabler in the world of mobile file sharing and mobile content management but it shouldn’t be an either-or situation.  All the work I have done over the years as an analyst and a practitioner tells me that not all corporate content is going to the cloud.  Putting some content and apps in the cloud can make some things that have always been hard much easier and that is a good thing for enterprises.  But all the other complexities in business processes, compliance requirements and data protection concerns don’t go away.

So back to my original question – why Alfresco and why now?  I’ve followed Alfresco since 2006 – I started as an analyst at The 451 Group at about the same time Alfresco first shipped a product.   I have watched the company disrupt the ECM market with its open-source model and it has been hard for even a cynical analyst to argue with what Alfresco has done technically with its platform.   Alfresco’s support for open standards and extensibility are even more critical in the enterprise market than the open-source model, in my opinion.

But it was Alfresco’s approach to mobile and the cloud that convinced me – Alfresco has embraced both, and in a very real way, with a business-oriented cloud service for file sharing and content management.  This is not just Alfresco saying that you can deploy its software in “private clouds”, or that a 3rd party service provider can put up a multi-tenant offering for customers (though both of those are also possible with Alfresco).  No, Alfresco is now truly a file-sharing and document-management app in the cloud, with slick mobile apps – and mobile apps that are open source, so IT or third-party developers can make them what they want them to be.

But like I said, not all content is going to go to the cloud  - so the clincher for me was the upcoming sync between Alfresco on-prem and Alfresco Cloud environments (coming early Summer 2012).    Enterprises are going to be hybrid (they already are).  How will content management support that?  How can you make content available to users on all of their devices?  How can you share it with external parties?  How do you secure that sharing and ensure shared files get pulled back in for long-term retention?  How do you get content in the cloud as needed for particular use cases, but keep what you want on-prem?  And keep the two in sync? How do you make sure content enables corporate business processes and is retained according to internal and external regulations?  Alfresco is unique in being able to answer all these questions for enterprises regardless of where they want their content and or their ECM platform to live.

It also probably goes without saying (though here I am saying it) that Alfresco as a company is a great place to be.  The management team is experienced and knows how to build a business, and they are already doing it.  The pivot to the cloud is an aggressive but dead-on expansion of the company’s overall market opportunity – not a shift away from any of Alfresco’s existing principles or customers.

So here I am. I’ll still be thinking like an analyst and blogging and tweeting about the market and about Alfresco.  Wish me luck and stay tuned!

“The weekly review is a psychic spring cleaning.” – David Allen

Buddhist practitioner Pema Chodron has it exactly right when she talks about how we shoot ourselves in the foot. The thing that is almost guaranteed, Chodron says, is that when things get especially difficult, we will experience a powerful urge to stop doing the very things that help us cope well with difficulty.

Think about that in the context of organizing your work – specifically with regards to all the different pieces of content that you are collaborating on with various teams at your company.

If you are overwhelmed by loads of content flying all over the place, your inner self-destruct sequence will start running a sub-routine that goes like this: Organize all this content? No way! I am way too stressed and busy right now to deal with that! Stress and information overload leads to abandonment of positive behavior, which leads to more stress, handled even less well.

Software to the Rescue?

Content management and collaboration applications were developed to help minimize this overload, to help you stay on track and maintain a clear view of where all this content stood.  But even the best software can’t eliminate the needs for healthy work habits.  Humans still need to have the skills and discipline to leverage the system successfully.

The typical response to a content-overload problem in a large organization is to throw technology at it.  But what if you simply implemented a weekly content review with your project teams, just like David Allen’s GTD Weekly Review – either on a personal or team-wide level.

If you’re using Alfresco Team or a similar product, everyone could log into the team site, and walk through progress, deadlines and action items – all while marking up the content in real-time.  At the end of the day, it’s great that everything is in the system, but the explicit review of all the content helps the team collectively prioritize action items, identify failures, and create a shared understanding of where a project stands based on the most critical artifacts of any project – content.

The weekly content review will help you make more progress, more quickly, and with more peace of mind.  Ultimately – the content is going to be in the CMS, and it’s going to have all sorts of metadata and comments. But no matter how well organized your content is, mentally your team needs to have a clear sense of where your content stands today, and where it is heading.

As the David Allen quote suggests – the weekly content review is like a “psychic spring cleaning” – one where you can clear your mind of information and content overload, reduce confusion and stress, and move forward as a team with a shared, clear sense of goals, progress and next steps.

It doesn’t have to be a great weekly review; it just has to be a weekly review that is, you know, weekly. You’ll get leverage. Within a few weeks of reinstating this habit you’re going to find your team getting out of the weeds more regularly, and seeing the forest for the trees.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ osuarchives/

A great debate has arisen (if you aren’t already aware) between those that believe in structure, taxonomies, ontologies and organization with those that believe that search technology is good enough for us to toss everything into one big bag and let the search engines sort it out.

Elaine Svenonius and her book Intellectual Foundations of Information Organization (core reading for library science students) advise us to do the hard work of creating and maintaining organizing systems so that filing and retrieval is easy. David Weinberger in Everything is Miscellaneous argues that even the most well conceived organizing systems break down in today’s digital and messy world.

Think of the difference between early Yahoo, and Google’s search engine breakthrough. Yahoo began as the Web’s directory. A highly organized system that categorized and listed the web’s content. Google arose as the premier engine to find content because its search was better and faster than browsing a directory.

So which approach do we take in our enterprise? Do we go with the large Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system or implement a search system?

What happens when we introduce the social layer into our enterprise systems? Will ECM or search alone do a good enough job finding important conversations that are happening within your organization?

Keep reading Guident’s post “Which is more important: Search or ECM systems?” to find out more.

Using Alfresco Share 3.4 and above? Formtek announced last week the release of 5 new extensions that’ll help you get the most out of Alfresco. If you didn’t already know, Formtek has been an Alfresco Gold System Integration Partner since 2007, and has been providing ECM solutions for even longer.

These extensions increase flexibility, security, ease-of-use and retrieval of your documents. Learn more about each one on our solutions page:

1) Peer Association: establish associations between documents

2) File Linking: allow a single document to be accessible from multiple folders without duplicating the document

3) Auditing: complete audit log for all files and folders

4) Security: more flexible security capabilities by allowing access control (per-file, per-folder, per-user, per-group)

5) Version Browser: display all previous versions of a document

As usual, Formtek will provide full support for these extensions. Interested in hearing more? Join Formtek for a presentation and live demo of the extensions.

Webinar

• March 27, 2012
• Online at 10am PT, 1pm ET, 6pm UK
• Register here

Read the official release

When I think of the New York Philharmonic, I think of Leonard Bernstein.  Now with the Philharmonic’s Digital Archives, I can also think of Alfresco.  When it comes to scalability, there is no better example of Alfresco’s value.

By the end of next year, the Philharmonic hopes to complete the first phase of its Digital Archive project which will make over 1.3 million pages of material from The International Era, 1943 to 1970, available online to anyone with access to a browser.  Using Alfresco as the content platform for the project, the repository will hold 10 million nodes comprising 5 TB of data, including 3,200 programs, 8,000 folders of business records, 4,200 glass lantern slides, 8,500 photographs and 72 scrapbooks of fragile press clippings.

Over the next 10 years, the Philharmonic plans to digitize its entire collection of 8 million pages of documents and 7,000 hours of audio visual material. When finished, the repository is expected to contain more than 2 petabytes of data and 160 years of archival information available for instant retrieval.

Digitizing millions of archival documents is no easy task and takes planning, organization and the right technology.  Open source technology offers the flexibility, scalability and affordability required for projects of this size and scope.  With the help of Alfresco partner, Technology Services Group (TSG), the Philharmonic has implemented a number of open source technologies to help streamline the digitization of documents while ensuring speedy delivery of content to the public site and for internal content proofing.

The sheer size of this Digital Archive demonstrates Alfresco’s ability to scale to meet any size project. There are few content platforms that can scale to this magnitude and offer a modern architecture that can be customized to meet an organization’s specific needs into the future.

Now when you think of the New York Philharmonic, you can think of Alfresco & TSG helping to preserve over 160 years of musical and cultural heritage for generations to come.  Check out the Digital Archive today at http://archives.nyphil.org.

Read the full case study about the New York Philharmonic project.