Missive is social email with tasks fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

I have been using a new app for the past week or so, called Missive (missiveapp.com). When I first looked at the tool it was just a social email client, by which I mean a client for email that also support social communications extrinsic to email, but possibly about email. However, at that time I found that I could use a Google exention to integrate it with Todoist (see Missive looks like a MVP ‘Social Email’ tool). But now, they’ve released their own task implementation.

Here’s a screenshot to reprise the basics of Missive:

Above, on the left you see an email being edited — a reply to an email from Carlos Kelly — but on the right is a chat among Rafael and others working at a company called Conference Badge. They can share docs — like the PDF quote — and talk about the email thread. The email becomes shared, as are the chat comments and attachments.

Missive also supports group chats not explicitly linked to specific emails, as shown above.

But what is most exciting — and what I have been waiting for — is the addition of tasks to Missive. These have been implemented as a special version of the basic comment feature in chats, except the user selects the task option:

Above you see a comment being created, and as you see they can be assigned to one of various users.

And above, you can see that tasks have a status box so that someone can check off the task as done. (Personally, I favor a three state model — created, in process, completed — but I will wait to convince them of that.)

All open tasks are visible in the ‘tasks’ section of the client, which shows all chats with tasks and provides a count — like 1 of three — to indicate how many tasks are contained and completed.

Missive builds on Gmail, and allows users to file emails in gmail labels. These will be for personal, private use.

I’ve been told that this simple organization technique — I’ve been bumping my head on it for just a week or so, painfully — will be extended in the very near term with tags. As a result, I will be able to pull into a single list all the tasks that are tagged ‘#projectXYZ’ or ‘#finance’ no matter what chat they were originally created in.

Tags, unlike labels, will be shared and available to those in your Missive ‘organizations’ or teams. I am eagerly awaiting the release of tags in Missive, to make it a richer experience and one that is much more manageable. I am also awaiting due dates, and other metadata for tasks, but tags are the most important, I think.

The Bottom Line

Missive is an example of content-based work management — where the tasks are embedded in chats associated with specific email threads or chat contexts — based on a social email foundation. I believe this is one of the few models of work management that will attract a large user base following the decline of web 2.0 era work media tools (like Yammer, Jive, IBM Connections, and so on). Yes, Slack and its work chat direct competitors are getting a great deal of the buzz at present, but email is here to stay, and the emergence of social email — like Missive and its competitors — will be giving email another decade or more of life.

Easy Way to Download

Adrien Sommier and Amplement fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

I recently learned about Amplement, an intriguing tool for professionals to communicate and interact, with a clean and minimal design with features drawn from work chat, video chat, and professional networks. I had a chance to ask some questions of the founder, and I’m even more intrigued afterward.

About Adrien Sommier

Adrien Sommer

Adrien founded France-based Amplement in 2010, and leads the company as CEO. Previously, he worked in web strategy and communications for several large companies in France. Amplement has grown to 15 staff members, and has over 500,000 users.

The Interview

Gigaom: Amplement seems like a modern and minimal competitor to Linkedin and Xing, where professionals can interact in private and public groups, and also find job offers that match their profiles. Those interactions are a lot like chat in Slack, it seems. Is that a motivation?

Adrien Sommier: Amplement is a web application which enables users to collaborate and discuss in real time with other professionals around the world. We aren’t like Linkedin or Xing because we aren’t a social network.

Before Amplement, professionals couldn’t use a single website for business interaction. They were forced to use many tools: Slack for collaboration, Linkedin to find profiles of other professionals, and Skype to conduct real time discussions or video calls.

Amplement is the only web application which brings together — on a single platform — all the tools professionals need. It’s a single page application.

So, to answer your question precisely, we are a little competitor for Slack, for Yammer, for LinkedIn, for Skype. You see?

G: An all-in-one tool for professional communication. I see. But the challenge for you is this: will people that are already using Slack, Skype, Yammer, and so on switch to using Amplement?

AS: There’s basically nobody in the professional world who doesn’t already use one of those tools. That tells me that most, if not all, of the 700 new users we get each day are open to trying alternatives.

The thing that keeps people from adopting new platforms is hesitation to add “yet another app” to their workflow. We don’t face that issue because we’re condensing their workflow, not bloating it. That and we have an extremely short learning curve, so those who can’t yet replace their use of Skype, Slack, etc. entirely don’t have anything to lose with us.

G: Is job search the primary use case, or just a way to monetize the professional network?

AS: No, in fact the job search isn’t hasn’t yet launched in the U.S. Unlike LinkedIn, our job search feature isn’t there for monetization, but instead because it’s an important feature for our members. On a professional platform, people want to manage their professional careers.

G: Which means connecting with others and sharing profiles? Is that the model?

AS: That’s right. And since you use the same profile for your career development and your daily work, employers can import the same profiles they used to hire someone directly into their work channels. They’ll be all ready to work before their first day in the office!

G: I’ve read that Amplement has over 400,000 members, and over 100,000 job offers have been made since the 2013 launch. What are the user expectations when they join?

AS: We have a half a million active users. Users join Amplement because it’s the fastest app for finding other professionals, communicating with them, and doing both quickly.

G: Amplement does not offer file sharing or integrations with Google Drive or Dropbox, at least not yet. Is that on the roadmap? What other features can we expect in the future? Bots?

AS: We plan to support file sharing soon. Users will be able to work with their teams on Amplement like other tools, such as Slack. We have not developed the integrations, but that’s underway.

G: What about LinkedIn’s approach to support posting, updates, and so on? Will we be seeing that in Amplement?

AS: Staying up-to-date with your network is a key part of your career, so absolutely. Many of those features are already finished.

---

The recent acquisition of Linkedin by Microsoft shows that the integration of professional networks and the tools that people use to get their work done makes sense. Amplement’s founder, Adrien Sommier, may have seen that future fusion coming earlier than others.

---

This post was sponsored by Amplement, but the content has been created by Gigaom.

Easy Way to Download

Zenefits makes more cuts; Twitter Selfies; Dropbox profitable* fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Zenefits, the online HR platform that ousted its founding CEO recently as a part of a regulatory investigation regarding insurance sales (where the company makes its money), has announced more layoffs, an additional 9% of the company’s workforce, around 100 people. 250 were cut in February, as part of a revamp of sales and operations, following David Sacks — the former CEO of Yammer — assuming the helm as CEO. The company was valued at $4.5 billion in a raise of capital last year, and has disrupted the market for HR tools. Sacks has also jumped on the Zappos’ model of offering money for employees to leave in this reduction of force, he calls this ‘the Offer’. Sacks say he is making a new version of Zenefits: Z2. He spoke with William Alden of Buzzfeed, saying

The company isn’t making The Offer because we don’t want you. We do want you, but we want the best of you.

---

Twitter now allows self-retweeting, or what I want to call Twitter selfies:

---

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says that the company has achieved a milestone that investors will like: the company is free cash flow positive, meaning operating cash minus capital expenditures. This will set the stage for an easier IPO, which is anticipated.

Easy Way to Download

2016 Workforce Communications Narrative fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

I’m announcing a few upcoming report projects from Gigaom in the next few days. One is the long-awaited 2016 Workforce Communications Narrative:

Workforce communications is a class of message-centric work technology that is principally geared toward the modern mobile workforce, especially geared toward enabling communications between workers in retail, manufacturing, transport, security, and construction. These are mobile-first applications, although they also support other enterprise functions, but with an emphasis on the efficient functioning of the mobile worker, often working outside the typical workplace, and in particular, often without access to PCs. They incorporate elements of messaging, chat, social media, and file sharing, as well as more workforce specific capabilities like shift scheduling, calendaring, task management, and other functional tools.

Here’s where workforce communications fits in the broad spectrum of work technologies (note that the chart below does not include all work technologies, just a few categories):

We will be scheduling briefings with vendors in the space — including Avaamo, Fieldwire, Lua, Red E App, Sitrion One, and Zinc (formerly Cotap) — in the coming weeks. If you are the representative of another vendor, please contact me.

I am also looking to work with at least one other analyst on this report, so please contact me if you are interested and you have a background in work technology and analysis.

Easy Way to Download

Moving beyond digital signage in the workplace fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

At first, thinking about digital signage in the workplace makes perfect sense. We’re all familiar with big screens in airports, hotel foyers and sports stadiums, so, yes, how about seeing similar kit in business environments, for example in headquarter lobbies, or indeed in coffee rooms?

Yes of course, the concept can find plenty of use. Corporate visitors can be offered videos, presentations and data. Employees can more easily be briefed and can share their own content, such as the latest inter-departmental soccer results. Touch screens and kiosks also have a place, for campus navigation and training information dissemination.

The benefits are pretty straightforward — not only that content can be updated faster, or printing costs can be saved but also increased staff motivation and wellbeing, improved health and safety knowledge, higher productivity have been cited. As hardware costs come down, business cases become more evident (though of course, remember to account for the overheads of managing real-time content).

So, what’s the problem? Let’s take a look. Ultimately, such a signage-centric, “Let’s take what is working over there and deploy it over here” mindset is missing a trick. It’s worth reviewing a number of other areas where screen use is prevalent, and seeing these as input to the decision process.

First, the smart screen has come a long way. Back in the early nineties, I can remember de-boxing a whiteboard with a built in printer; since then such devices have become giant input and output panels. Pioneer in the field is education: from sharing an office with a manufacturer of interactive whiteboards for this sector, I’ve seen just how much of a difference such technologies can have on classrooms.

Most importantly, it’s not about the screen but the environment. Consider, for example, the ability to create information on a tablet computer, then share it onto a screen for somebody else to edit. Imagine being able to do this on a wall screen in the meeting room, with input from people in another office.

It should be straightforward, and both schools and home tutors are using such capabilities all the time, but they have yet to make an impact in the workplace.

Second, ‘telepresence’, the term coined by Cisco and also offered by HP to describe the immersive impact of seeing full-sized people on screens in a videoconference. Apart from (addressable through software) issues with eye movement, it’s like they are in the room.

When they were launched a few years ago, such technologies were too costly for all but head office installations. With today’s network bandwidth and with screen costs having plummeted, the ‘telepresence’ notion has a much broader appeal.

And third, we can look to transactional areas of the business for best practice in terms of screen use. ‘Starship Enterprise’ style, centralised network and equipment management hubs have plenty to offer in terms of what should be visible on the big screen, and how it should be presented relative to individualised views on smaller desktops.

Similarly, call centres and sales environments make extensive use of screens. From these parts of the organisation we can learn not only the options available, but also how to strike a balance between operational efficiency and keeping staff motivated.

Learning from these areas, the bottom line is that digital signage is only part of the opportunity offered by either passive or interactive screens. Direct information sharing, collaboration, workflow management, employee feedback, resource scheduling and booking, training, brainstorming and team building are just a few areas that a deployment can achieve.

Perhaps, yes, a quick win is to deploy some screens for the purpose of disseminating information. But,as some sectors are already discovering — such as non-obtrusive up-selling in the hospitality sector— active interaction yields new opportunities for enablement and empowerment, beyond passive information sharing.

So, it’s worth thinking outside the box, and treating screens as a viewport onto a shared data set, which can also be accessed via other devices. What starts as digital signage becomes a series of windows onto a brave new world, which drives a set of considerations, not least in terms of type, size and location, that should be considered before any deployment.

Easy Way to Download

Linkedin is a many-splendored thing for Microsoft fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Microsoft has stirred up a swirling buzz of discussion around the Linkedin acquisition for $26.2 billion. There are a number of angles that have been considered in the gazillion news stories floating around. Here’s a few of those threads:

• Linkedin is a Salesforce counter by Satya Nadella — It has been argued by Steve Nellis and others that Linkedin’s efforts at developing and selling the tools in the company’s Sales Solutions unit have not gone very far, but the data in Linkedin’s network — when coupled with Microsoft’s own Salesforce competitor — Dynamics — could become a real player. Note that Nadella’s rumored efforts to acquire Salesforce stalled because of a too-high price tag (10X revenues), while Linkedin was much more affordable (7X revenues). Plus, with Linkedin in there are other angles to play.
• Linkedin is a professional social network, and could counter Facebook for Business — Facebook has not yet released its business variant, Facebook for Business, but it’s supposed to roll out this year. Nadella might be trying to get there first by offering a fusion of Linkedin’s current mix of blogging, social networking, and recruitment use cases with Office 365 productivity options. Linking together the professional graph (Linkedin) with the work graph (Office 365) and getting a premium on the integration of the two is probably a smart move so long as the seams can be made low friction. There is a devil in these details, but this is one of the most powerful visions for the merger.
• Linkedin alone was a company with real problems — Linkedin stock got hammered earlier this year after lowered sales estimates. This would be bad in itself but doubly bad for Linkedin, since many of its best and brightest are compensated in part by stock grants, so when the stock falls, so does compensation. As a result, Linkedin was facing a mass exodus unless they could right the boat. This is one of the reasons Microsoft got the terms that it did. And now, people will be compensated in the more standard Microsoft way (as will the accounting for these expenses, which were clouded by non-GAAP practices).
• Microsoft sees Linkedin as a way to deflect Slack — Personally, I don’t buy this conflation of threats to Microsoft. Yes, Slack is making huge inroads in work technology — specifically as the defining product in the exploding work chat space — but just because is has some of the features of a ‘social network’ (in that people are logged in for long periods of time each day, message each other, can coordinate outside of company boundaries) that doesn’t mean Slack and Linkedin are in some way head-to-head competitors. Yes, Slack is a competitor to Microsoft’s productivity/work technology products — most specifically Yammer, but also the core functionality slowly growing in Office 365 — but that doesn’t mean that Linkedin is intended as a Slack killer. Although Microsoft should be working on that, as well. I just don’t expect it will come from the Linkedin side of things.

After all the dust settles I expect that we’ll see a reoriented Linkedin, with a greater focus on CRM technologies and networking, and also a much enlarged focus on people operations (HR) technologies and networking, an area that Microsoft has functionally no offerings. This will take the form of enlarged platforms, and an ecology of partners building on Microsoft/Linkedin capabilities, as well as other, subsequent acquisitions. And Linkedin will immediately find its operational core — and culture — pulled toward CRM and HR by the Microsoft sales operation.

I also don’t believe that Jeff Weiner will be at Microsoft for longer than his required tenure, two years or whatever it is. More likely he will find new worlds to conquer, and Satya will find someone in Microsoft or Linkedin who will better execute what will rapidly become an integration strategy, rather than a trailblazing one.

Easy Way to Download

Is ‘low code’ just old wine in new skins? fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

I confess to have been a bit cynical when I started the call with Martin Scovell, CEO of software vendor MatsSoft, about this great new idea that is doing the rounds. Here’s the skinny — rather than having developers program business processes from scratch, you can use a drag-and-drop tool to create process models. Press play and, hey presto! You have an application.

If you thought you might have heard the ideas around ‘low code‘ before, you would be right. Such ideas have been doing the rounds for as long as I have had the term ‘analyst’ on my business card, which means going beyond industry analysis, to when I occupied the lowly position of a business analyst in the mid-Nineties.

Even before that I was writing about the prototype-based software development approaches which started to materialise in the mid-Seventies, but which no doubt had their roots long before. But despite the deep desire to yawn vocally in the face of this clear re-hash of old ideas, I remained intrigued. “Why now?” I thought to myself “What’s changed?”

My interest was piqued by the nature of MatsSoft’s arrival on the scene. Software companies form for a number of reasons, for example that someone has spotted a gap in the market and gone cap in hand to the VC’s. More intriguing are those companies that find themselves growing unexpectedly and base their business strategy upon that.

As was the case as process management tools provider MatsSoft. “As we started to expand, we found we had a really good code base but we were still a body shop, we still needed coders. If we paused and rebuilt, thought to ourselves, we could move beyond that.” Not only did MatsSoft find itself better able to meet its customer needs, it also discovered that customers could do the same for themselves.

So far so good — but has the company found itself in the front lines of a revolution, or has it merely reached the same epiphany as so many BPM tools providers before them (most of them subsequently bought by Tibco, Oracle, IBM and others)? The answer may well lie in the nature of computing today, and how the boundaries of innovation have moved beyond the IT department and into the lines of business.

This phenomenon has been called many names, not all of which are particularly polite. We talk about Shadow IT, consumerisation or how the CMO is getting a bigger technology budget than the CIO, for better or worse. Fact is that control over technology delivery has fragmented and is never likely to go back to the long-cycle, change request oriented approaches of the past.

Businesses want agility, they want to be able to innovate and move fast, in many cases fearful that if they do not, some upstart will steal their lunch. Mantras such as ‘fail fast’ or ‘test and learn’ are an increasing part of boardroom conversations. As such the impetus for technology-based innovation is coming as much from the business, if not more, as from the IT department.

As business use of technology matures, so it makes sense that the tooling the business needs also starts to grow up. Let me put it another way. Back in the day, when I would say to a business user, “You can do this bit yourself,” they would look at me as if I was mad. These days, the business is doing a number of things for itself, for better or worse, and is increasingly ready to take on the tools it needs to do so.

In consequence, while the tools may not be all that different, the user base is changing. Perhaps lines of business may not do the work themselves, but they can work with providers without having to go through the bottleneck of IT. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as IT’s role itself moves to being platform curator rather than keeper of the keys for all things tech-related.

The overall result is less cost, and therefore more opportunity to use tools that help smooth the activities of the business. “You can automate and standardise things that would not previously be dealt with because it was too expensive,” says Martin. Sure, this means more productivity, greater efficiency, more innovation, improved customer experience, all the things people say you can get out of process management tools.

More importantly however, is that it puts the business into the driving seat, at a time when the business is looking to drive. Yes, ‘low code’ might be yet another term to describe a familiar capability, but it is pushing on the door of a far more open and technologically savvy set of business user.

Not only this but, rather than presenting itself as something that can make the organisation more ‘agile’, the low code model is being offered in response to an organisation asking for increased agility. Of course, many organisations still play lip service to such terms but at least the request is coming from the right place.

For sure, we are not yet at the finishing posts. Such technologies, and our working practices, will continue to evolve but as says Martin, “There’s no going back – the die is cast. This is how the businesses we work with are choosing to embrace technology.” As organisations continue to mature, they will need the right tools to be used by the right people, in the business and in IT. If that means re-inventing the wheel or creating new terms to describe old mechanisms once or twice, that’s all good.

Easy Way to Download