Web-Style Audience Responses in Real-World Meetings

Traditional thinking tends to always favor in-person meetings and training over virtual Web-based replacements. Most people would say that while Web-based meetings and conferences have their place, especially when travel is difficult or too expensive, in most areas they fall behind a face-to-face meeting.

But anyone who has used Web-based conferencing extensively knows that there are certain advantages over real-world meetings and conferences that extend beyond the travel savings. And one of the biggest is the ability to instantly quiz and poll meeting and conference attendees to track their knowledge and grasp of the information being presented. This kind of real-time feedback can be invaluable when it comes to customizing and even changing presentations on the fly.

And it is also much harder to gather in person. In small meetings you can ask for a show of hands, but this doesn't work with complex questions and there's the reality that people will change their vote to match the rest of the group rather than be the only person without a hand up. And when it comes to auditorium-sized conferences and training, shows of hands are pretty much useless.

If you're lucky enough to work in a modern university environment, or have a business with advanced and dedicated training facilities, you may have access to audience response systems built into seats and desks. But these are very expensive to deploy and can't be taken to any conference room or meeting environment.

This problem is why I was interested in trying out Turning Technologies' ResponseCard AnyWhere, part of its TurningPoint Response System.

Video: The Future of Unified Communications

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Unified communications has become a very hot topic for enterprise IT operations. The ability to combine and easily manage all forms of voice and digital communications within a company clearly offers huge cost and time savings benefits.

The importance of this field can be seen by the number of major vendors jumping into the Unified Communications arena.

But unified communications has been slow to take off. In this eWEEK video interview, Ashley Daley talks to eWEEK's Chief Technology Analyst Jim Repoza about the future of Unified Communications.

Click here to see the video interview of a look at unified communications

Adobe Reader Gets Connected

REVIEW: Just about a week after Adobe released version 9 of Acrobat, the latest version of the tool that most people use to read PDF files was also released. For most users, Adobe Reader 9 won't seem like a major departure from the previous versions of the free PDF reading tool.

The interface has been streamlined a bit, making it simpler to view multiple page PDF files. And search can be easily done across multiple PDF files.

However, the majority of the new features for Adobe Reader 9 fit into two camps: increased integration with the Acrobat.com Web site and support for new features introduced in Acrobat 9 (click here to read my review of Acrobat 9).

Acrobat 9: The Web/Desktop Hybrid for Documents

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REVIEW: When it comes to document collaboration and sharing, there can be little argument that most of this activity is moving to the web. But there can also be little argument that the current slate of Web-based tools come up short in features and capabilities when compared to desktop tools.

Perhaps what is needed is a hybrid approach, something that combines the strong feature set of a desktop application with the easy collaboration of a web-based approach. If this is truly the case, then Adobe may be on the right track.

That's because the latest release of their flagship Acrobat document platform is definitely focused on combining Acrobat's strong document editing and creation features with broad web-based collaboration, sharing and conferencing tools.

To do this Acrobat 9, which was released in June, relies heavily on the recently released Acrobat.com to provide web-based collaboration and sharing tools, as well as leveraging other products from the Adobe portfolio to add conferencing and live document reviewing features. And while there are few completely new capabilities in the core Acrobat feature set, many of been overhauled and improved to such a degree that they feel like completely new features.

Browsers: The OS for SAAS

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Yours is a typical modern company.

You have sales and customer management systems, advanced project management tools, extensive network and system security infrastructures, collaboration tools, and a heavily customized enterprise content management system.

What's not so typical now--but will be in the near future--is that none of these applications is run in-house. All of these core applications are delivered over the Web in a SAAS (software-as-a-service) model. As such, the applications are accessed via a Web browser that is basically acting as the operating system. There's nothing wrong with that. Right? Right?!

The idea of the browser as the operating system has been around since the early days of the Web. In fact, it is generally accepted that Microsoft went after Netscape so hard because it feared that the Netscape browser would become more important than the operating system it ran on.

That fear may have been unfounded at the time, but we are much closer now to being able to access everything--from e-mail to office applications to image editing to essential enterprise business applications--from the confines of the humble Web browser.

This means that businesses should start to take a much closer look at the Web browsers on which they standardize, especially in the areas of compatibility, adaptability and security.

The 6 Phases of a Technology Flop

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Get a group of people together to talk about technology and inevitably the conversation will turn to classic technology flops. Whether it was a technology that disappointed, failed to deliver or was just out-and-out hated, people like to talk about technologies that failed as much, or maybe even more, than technologies that succeeded.

But the interesting thing about technology flops is that none of them started out as failures. In fact, it is quite the opposite: In nearly all cases, classic technology flops started out as very promising and highly touted innovations.

So how does a promising technology go from burgeoning star to tossed-aside has-been? In most cases they follow a clear path on their journey to the technology garbage heap.

I call this path the Six Phases of a Technology Flop. In this list I detail the six phases and as an example I've used one of the most classic cases of a promising technology that became a major flop, Push technology.

So read my list and let me know what you think.

Zoho CRM Goes Enterprise

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The recent release of Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition is a step toward making the software-as-a-service application a good choice for handling sales and customers for a business.

A few of the key features added in this release include SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) security, the ability to manage access and security based on customized user roles, and integration with the Zoho Sheet spreadsheet application.

I was able to take a quick first look at the Enterprise Edition of Zoho CRM and came away impressed with its usability and core feature set. While it may not compete with Salesforce.com and other applications in high-end requirements or the ability to run very large companies, Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition looks to be a valid option for many small and midsize businesses.

RIA War Is Brewing

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There's a war brewing on the Web today--a war to decide how Web applications and content will be developed and how users will consume the content of the future Web.

But this isn't the latest round in the browser wars. No, the war I'm talking about is over the RIA (rich Internet application), a type of Web application that can run independently of browsers, can run on any operating system and, in many ways, works like a traditional desktop application.

Of course, RIAs aren't new. They can be traced back to earlier efforts such as Macromedia's Shockwave, Java applets and the ubiquitous Flash format.

But recent developments--including the growth of powerful Web development technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and improved standards support in the latest Web browsers--have boosted RIAs' potential reach and capabilities.

Lunarr Turns a New Page for Task Collaboration

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Have you ever walked into a meeting or presentation and been given a printed handout? And during the meeting, did you flip the handout over and start taking notes on the back of the document, maybe even passing it to a co-worker who added notes of his or her own?

In the most basic sense, this is the idea behind Lunarr. Lunarr adds a Web-based back page to any content submitted into the system, whether it's a Microsoft Word document, PDF, Lunarr-created document, or any Web page or application.

Of course, Lunarr's back page holds quite a bit more than notes and doodles. It contains every e-mail sent or received pertaining to that document, information on every version and revision of the document, links to every external document or Web site related to that document, and a list of every person who has collaborated on that document.

This might seem like a simple concept, but it's pretty much the exact opposite of the way most document-based collaboration and task management takes place. In the classic (and most common) e-mail-based collaboration, there is limited or no control over the versioning and integrity of the core document being collaborated on, and users can find it difficult to track all the e-mails and discussions related to that document.

LiquidPlanner Helps Manage Project Uncertainty

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"Bob, when can your team deliver the prototype of the new product?"

"March 22," says Bob.

Bob's response to this question is based on lots of hard information, from his knowledge of the task at hand to his experience with his team to performance on similar projects in the past. But it's still just a guess. And every milestone, deliverable and sub-task scheduled for that project will also be a guess.

But that's the way project management works. Everything has a due date, and, when a team doesn't meet that date, members feel like they failed, which can lead to poor morale and even more missed deadlines.

The funny thing is, almost nothing else in the world works that way. For the most part, uncertainty is a key aspect of scheduling. For example, the cable installer doesn't tell you he'll be at your house at exactly 11:45 a.m. He says he'll be there sometime between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

However, while uncertainty may be a fact of life, project management traditionally has not tolerated it at all.