Your business can be more productive if your people can work better together. But enabling teams to collaborate more effectively has its difficulties – in particular getting users involved.

Business users are traditionally reluctant to use unfamiliar applications. While new web tools are making collaboration easier than before, wikis and blogs are often used as standalone applications, making them difficult to integrate into everyday business processes

Team collaboration changes all that. The Web 2.0 technologies that support it are a part of everyday life for the new generation of employees. Corporate collaborative networking tools are a natural extension of the social networking applications that users know. They make it easy for users to collaborate – whether it’s easily shared content, team workspaces, enterprise search, wikis, blogs or business templates.

Through our wide experience of implementing business technologies, we are expert in implementing collaboration tools from the major vendors, including IBM Lotus and Microsoft. Smart collaboration presents unlimited opportunities. For example, the company intranet was once simply a listing of company policies. With the new Web 2.0 technologies it’s possible to not only book time off for your holiday but organise the holiday itself, order your company car and much more. The technologies involved include:

• IBM Lotus Quickr – which has at its heart connectors, mini–applications that integrate Quickr’s collaborative capabilities with other everyday applications
• IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced – integrating instant messaging–based collaboration into enterprise applications
• IBM Lotus Connections – social software for business which creates dynamic networks of co–workers, partners and customers
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) – an integrated suite designed to help improve organisational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerate shared business processes and facilitate information–sharing across boundaries
• Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 – which can manage all real–time communications, including instant messaging, VoIP, audio and video conferencing, as well as Presence so you can see at–a–glance if someone is available and contact them
• Ring2 Conference Controller – which enables you to take control of team audio conferences from your BlackBerry

 

“At all times LAN2LAN have shown their ability to quickly identify the appropriate technical solution to meet the business need and to offer ideas and solutions that fit in with our culture and infrastructure.”

IT Director,
Porter Novelli