NewsGator's enterprise social-networking product, Social Sites, now has a component for employees to submit, discuss and evaluate ideas for business projects.
In its version 2.7, announced Thursday, Social Sites has a new tab in its interface labeled "Ideas," which provides functionality for what NewsGator calls "innovation management."
There are stand-alone applications for automating these idea-generation tasks, but NewsGator believes the functionality is important enough that it should be a standard component of Social Sites.
"Companies have to innovate their way to a better position in this economy," said Brian Kellner, NewsGator's vice president of products.
Social Sites as a whole is designed as an enterprise social-networking complement to Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server 2007.
The product's idea management component lets users draft ideas not only in written form, but also with embedded images, tables, links and other elements.
Once the employee submits the idea, colleagues to whom this person is linked via contacts list or workgroup membership are notified and can append comments to the document and vote it up or down.
However, the feature isn't meant to manage the entire evolution of an idea into a finalized project. "We focus on the front-end of the process: capturing ideas easily. We stop at the point where the idea is considered worthwhile and moves into a stage involving funding, proof-of-concepts and so on," Kellner said.
Once supervisors promote ideas into a more formal initiative beyond the brainstorming and evaluation process, the discussion can be moved into a community or wiki page in Social Sites for further collaboration or into a separate, third-party project management application.
Ideas get aggregated in a central repository where the list of submissions can be sorted and filtered based on different parameters, such as date created, number of votes and number of comments. Ideas also get logged into the individual profiles of the employees who submitted them.
Other enhancements in Social Sites 2.7 include an option for employees to get a daily e-mail digest with activity notifications from colleagues and workgroups to which they belong. Version 2.7 also lets employees who create community sections for collaboration within Social Sites to add blogs, wikis and announcement modules to them.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
NewsGator's Enterprise Collaboration SW Adds Brainstorming
Facebook's Censorship of E-Mail Puts it in Free Speech Hot Seat
Facebook is actively filtering out Pirate Bay content from its Web site banning a Pirate Bay link-posting application that allows you to easily share torrent files from the Pirate Bay's site with Facebook members. Facebook is also censoring e-mail that contain Pirate Bay URLs from its e-mail system preventing users from cutting and pasting a Pirate Bay Web address in a Facebook e-mail message and sending it. While Facebook's evasive action may seem to be an effort to maintain its "family friendly" visage, there are now questions as to whether the social networking site is violating free speech.
In order to determine what constitutes "blocked content," Facebook must first read the e-mail message being sent. This may be an abuse of the federal wiretapping law. It's apparent from our tests that any URL originating from Pirate Bay's Web site is automatically filtered out of the system; if no other text is added to the outgoing message, the message arrives blank. Identifying what the contents of an e-mail is or "Sniffing" e-mails, as Wired calls it, is not an unknown practice -- Google does it to deliver ads -- but censoring e-mails based on content inches closer to an abuse of administrative power.
There certainly are ways around privately maintained e-mail systems such as Facebook's, ISP, and other bittorrent blockades. The Pirate Bay has a few tricks up its sleeve. For instance, if you find the "Download this Torrent" URL on Pirate Bay pages it uses the subdomain "http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/..." which is not blocked by Facebook - yet. Users may also check out Tiny URL to fool the filter.
Facebook is also behaving ignorantly. Bittorrents from other file-sharing sites are not blocked. Using Facebook to sent torrents found on the sites Mininova and Isohunt works fine. In fact, Isohunt has the same "Share on Facebook" feature that Pirate Bay has, isoHunt's works.
Facebook spoke to Wired and stated its right to censor e-mail based on links that may contain "spammy, illegal, threatening or harassing content." But Facebook is taking it too far. Bittorrents links themselves are not spammy, illegal, threatening or harassing. They are simply portals to a site where a user takes a personal risk downloading what may be copyrighted material or not. Facebook is creating its own set of rules here, and in the meantime, may be ignoring federally-established laws.
Australian Rockers 26 Take Apple's Logic Onstage
Many professional musicians, producers, and engineers use Apple's Logic digital audio workstation software to record and mix music, but one group of musicians is taking that practice a step further. Australian band 26 takes Logic on the road with them, allowing them to perfectly duplicate the sound of their recorded music onstage.
"For me you can't beat Logic," Nick O'Donnell, the band's lead vocalist and guitar player, told Macworld. "I have been a user since Logic 4 and it was the only Mac-based program that really incorporated the recording side with the MIDI sampling side of things. It is the best thing for integrating the two elements."
As an audience, we have become accustomed not to hear all of the same sounds from a live performance that we do from a band's recordings. Typically, there are percussion, strings, extra guitars, and other instruments on the album that most bands just can't recreate in a live setting. But that's not the case for 26.
O'Donnell said that it is Logic's ability to recreate the same sounds live as they have on their CDs that make for such a great show. The band's keyboard player, Drew Fellows, has a MIDI controller onstage to trigger the sounds during the live performances.
"We use Logic and the laptop live for our keyboard sounds, backing sounds like strings and percussion, changing my guitar effects, and to supply a click track," said O'Donnell. "We also have a MIDI track that wirelessly sends patch changes to our lighting and visual guy's PowerBook to trigger our visuals and some lighting cues. It all sounds pretty crazy but it makes the show really run smoothly and look really pro on our mini budget."
The band is using an old PowerBook and a Power Mac G5 tower for their recordings and live performances. In fact, they do much of the songwriting on the PowerBook, although they are purchasing some new gear soon, including a MacBook Pro.
O'Donnell said there are a lot of benefits to using Logic in a live performance, beyond having the ability to play back so many instruments in their songs.
"I think other than having to lug a grand piano, Fender Rhodes, a full Hammond Organ, an orchestra, and a choir with you everywhere you go, it is the best option," said O'Donnell. "I used to have to take so much gear out on the road and now I don't even have to take a guitar amp, if I don't want to. And, I think the sound quality is great."
After recording a session in the studio, O'Donnell and Fellows will often take their projects home to work on them. They will record vocal tracks or polish up some of the guitars and not have to be in the studio to it.
This brings up another small problem--with only the two of them, sometimes there is nobody left to push the buttons in Logic, but they figured a way around that using the iPhone. O'Donnell said they use the iPhone to change the keyboard sounds wirelessly, adjust the mix, and arm and record tracks.
The band is currently looking into using Apple's MainStage, which was designed specifically for live performances. They are testing the capabilities of the application to make sure it matches with everything they currently do with Logic.
The band makes use of a lot of other Apple technologies as well.
"Our lives revolve around Logic and Adobe's design suite, but we also use iLife a lot as well," said Fellows. "We have used iMovie to create the occasional video, GarageBand to create podcasts, and iDVD to create promo DVDs. I even prefer to use TextEdit over Microsoft Word."
Kindle DX: First Impressions of the Large Doc Reader
NEW YORK CITY -- At today's launch event here, Amazon unveiled the details of its Kindle DX. The rumors about the device proved true: It has a larger screen than the Kindle 2, and is aimed squarely at maximizing the newspaper and textbook market. However, that's not the only angle that Amazon head Jeff Bezos took today. By focusing on professional documents, too, Bezos positions Kindle DX as a business productivity tool, too.
The shift to a larger-screen Kindle makes sense. (See related: First Official Images of Kindle DX)
"The reason we still print so much is that traditional computer displays are a worse display device than paper. Kindle's paper-like display solves that problem. But most of the documents we print and read are 8.5-by-11-inch," Bezos notes. "The information on those documents is structured to be read [in that form]."
The larger Kindle DX, with its 9.7-inch E Ink display, has an integrated native PDF reader, something that has been missing from previous versions of the Kindle. And with that PDF reader, Amazon is suddenly able to target the professional market, too. Consider for a moment how prevalent PDF documents are in the business world: Financial documents, reports, marketing flyers, even PowerPoint presentations are published as PDFs. While one can view PDFs on a laptop, imagine reading documents in a more relaxed and flexible manner than a laptop can provide.
Of course, Kindle DX also opens wide educational opportunities for textbooks -- and, indeed, any highly-formatted book (such as a cookbook or a book with illustrations). And newspaper and magazine publishers have an opportunity to deliver more targeted and custom content that specifically takes advantage of this platform (instead of solely porting their existing print products to digital).
At $489, Kindle DX straddles a precarious position. It is an expensive proposition that will make consumers think hard about buying one (especially when highly functional mini-notebooks can be had for far less). But it is also a highly targeted device that can benefit from this broadening of its scope. The more multipurpose Kindle can become without detracting or minimizing its primary mission as an electronic reader, the better-positioned Kindle will be going forward.
Microsoft tweaks antipiracy tech for Windows 7
With Windows 7, Microsoft is making some subtle changes to the ways it tries to thwart piracy.
As has been the case for some time, Microsoft's strategy hinges on requiring a user to electronically verify their copy of the software, a process known as activation, and then the software also periodically validates that a copy of Windows is genuine.
In Windows Vista, if a user does not activate their software immediately, they get a warning that they still need to do so. The dialog box offers two options, to activate immediately or to do so later. However, the activate later box cannot be checked for 15 seconds.
Microsoft decided this was a bit too annoying. With Windows 7, users can click activate later immediately, but then get a dialog box touting the benefits of activation.
It's the latest effort by Microsoft to scale back the intrusiveness of its technology while still aiming to deter piracy. With the first service pack to Vista, Microsoft made the software significantly more usable to those whose versions of Windows are determined not to be genuine. Before that, Vista systems entered a nearly unusable "reduced functionality mode" once they were deemed to be non-genuine.
"We think we've gotten it to a pretty good place where it strikes an effective balance," said Alex Kochis, director of product management for Microsoft's Genuine Windows unit. "We're committed to the program for the long term because it works."
Microsoft said in December 2007 that it was seeing Windows Vista pirated at only half the rate of Windows XP. Kochis said that general trend has continued.
With Windows 7, Microsoft is also changing the name of its antipiracy technology, from Windows Genuine Advantage to Windows Activation Technologies. The Windows Genuine name took some beatings in the Windows XP time frame, so probably a good move from a PR standpoint.
The software maker is also adding technology designed to make it easier for businesses to activate multiple machines as well as manage activation for virtual machines.