E-mail ban in the Enterprise and birth of the first e-mail-less man!

Posted on January 19, 2012 by JC

E-mail ban in the Enterprise and Birth of the first e-mail-less man!

Internal e-mail ban, birth of the first e-mail-less man and more. These articles can be found everywhere on the internet, news magazines and newspapers. The question is, can you really become e-mail-less in 2012?

The facts are clear. Dealing with e-mails is your #1 time consuming task every day. According to a group research, corporate users receive an average of 75 emails per day and send about 35 of them each day. At the same time, it is not uncommon for some users to receive in excess of 200 messages per day. Most of these messages are ambiguous or unclear, unsolicited and often interrupt your work.

Social computing and business collaboration have to do with supporting “computations” that are carried out by groups of people. Examples of business networking computing in this sense include collaborative filtering, online cooperation, collaboration, online tracking, group processing and more.

Several key people and companies have decided to impose a change on how e-mail is used in our daily interactions.

Some examples:

“Atos boss Thierry Breton defends his internal email ban. BNP bans the usage of e-mail. IBM gives birth to the first e-mail-less man and more. These are articles that can be found everywhere on the internet, new magazines and newspapers”

“When Luis Suarez decided to live in a world without e-mail, some of his colleagues thought he was making a mistake. After all, he works for IBM, one of the world’s top vendors of e-mail software. But Suarez was ready to cut the cord. Like any other 21st century white-collar worker, he was bombarded daily with around 40 e-mail messages. More than he wanted to answer”

Global studies showed that some people spend, at work and at home, some 15 to 20 hours a week checking and answering internal emails. They created teams to investigate what sort of tools could be used to replace internal emails and also what sort of management practices  should be put in place to go back to what they believe would be a normal way to behave in a company.

Yes, Becoming e-mail-less is possible and in a managed environment!

In conclusion, most selected to use the well adopted and flexible social media technology. It is open, easy, available everywhere and highly popular. Unfortunately, it is too open and too flexible. Critical information and messages are not centralized, workflow is not documented, people still receive unsolicited messages and more.

What is the alternative? We need a “Cloud based application” integrated with social media technology that will allow us to view  “Activities” and “workflow” in one convenient place. Where we can exchange information with everyone using a standard communication method without to rely on the inefficient e-mail technology.

This technology exists with SCompIT from Soft4ops, a cloud based social computing and business collaboration tool. Soft4ops provides a have fantastic new tool based on a cloud computing environment, social networks, instant messaging, document sharing, pre or user-defined workflow process forms, status reports, action history tracking, status control dashboard, call for action and reminders. SCompIT also includes reporting facilities that can be used to track projects costs and even facilitates projects re-invoicing and many more.

Moving further!

Once SCompIT is implemented in your organization, it can also be used to communicate with your external partners, third party contractors, vendors and even other companies. This without having to keep your e-mail for the external world. But also without any financial cost to any of them.  More features are scheduled to be integrated in the near future such as: micro blogging, knowledge community and more.

ScompIT offers a much more organized and formal business collaboration approach for an information technology company and any other large or mid-sized business.

SCompIT is available for trial at the Zelena web site. You can register and request your free 14 day trial here. The evaluation version comes with all the features.

More information can be found at the Zelena web site www.zelena.com.  You also send us a message.

Posted in Articles, Business networking, e-mail, e-mail marketing, e-mail-less, Facebook, FREE Trial, Google+, LinkedIn, Newsroom, Partners / Resellers, Servers / Mainframe, Social Computing, Social computing, Twitter | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Why e-mail became inefficient?

Posted on December 27, 2011 by JC

According to a report recently published, corporate users are estimated to receive an average of 75 emails per day send about 35 of them each day. At the same time, it is not uncommon for some users to receive in excess of 200 emails a day. Most of these messages are ambiguous or unclear, unsolicited, don’t even contain a call to action and often interrupt the users workflow.

Try  #SCompIT Social Computing !

So what is Social Computing or Business networking?

“is a web-based technology solution that provides rapid and efficient collaboration, information sharing, integration capabilities and working conventions to any enterprise”

Posted in Articles, Contact, e-mail, Facebook, Partners / Resellers, Social Computing, Software solutions, Twitter | Leave a comment

On the road to unified communications

Posted on October 27, 2011 by JC

Unified Communications

After adding both “presence” and “adhoc” meetings, Tixeo goes deeper into collaboration by adding a new messaging feature, halfway between instant messaging and email.

Now you can send messages to all your private contacts by creating chats. Each chat can be turned into a video conference with one click on “invite to an instant meeting”. Unified communications integrate perfectly with social computing for collaborative filtering, online cooperation, collaboration, online tracking, group processing and more.

New messages are notified by a pop-up showing the sender name, and the beginning of his message. You can access your new messages and chats by clicking on “My messages” on the Tixeo plugin. Each new message will be indicated in bold.

WorkSpace3D crosses a new step in collaboration and unified communications, making it the best solution for daily collaboration within companies.

Om more step toward total communication integration. More info is available at the Zelena web site of at the Tixeo site. Free trial is available with vendors above.

 

Posted in Contact, Facebook, LinkedIn, Partners / Resellers, Social Computing, Twitter, Video conferencing, Web collaboration, Web meeting - conferencing | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

About Social Computing

Posted on September 13, 2011 by JC

Social computing can be defined as follows:

“Social computing” refers to systems that support the gathering, representation, processing, use, and dissemination of information that is distributed across social collectivities such as teams, communities, organizations, and markets. Moreover, the information is not “anonymous” but is significant precisely because it is linked to people, who are in turn linked to other people.

Social computing is a general term for an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It has become an important concept for use in business. It is used in two ways as detailed below.

In the weaker sense of the term, social computing has to do with supporting any sort of social behavior in or through computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing, but also other kinds of software applications where people interact socially.

In the stronger sense of the term, social computing has to do with supporting “computations” that are carried out by groups of people. Examples of social computing in this sense include collaborative filtering, online cooperation, collaboration, online tracking, group processing and more.

Social computing has become more widely known because of its relationship to a number of recent trends. These include the growing popularity of social software and Web 2.0, increased academic interest in social network analysis, the rise of open source as a viable method of production, and a growing conviction that all of this can have a profound impact on daily life.

So what are the Social Computing solutions available to us today?

SCompIT [scom-pit] will be discussed in more details in our next post

Posted in e-mail, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Partners / Resellers, Social Computing, Twitter | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Does My Company Need Web Conferencing Software?

Posted on July 1, 2011 by JC

Web conferencing software can help companies of all sizes to find the balance between conducting business and reducing operating costs. It provides complete business continuity, empowering employees to conduct sales calls, host marketing events, perform training for both employees and customers, and much more – without high travel-related expenditures or significant downtime.

Web conferencing software offers a full suite of capabilities that enable unhindered communication between presenters and audience members. With a Web conferencing software package, session leaders can:

  • Conduct presentations using slides created in PowerPoint, Mac Keynote, or other presentation software. Presenters can draw attention to specific topics by highlighting information on the slide as they are speaking.
  • Display live video through the use of a Webcam or digital camera.
  • Converse with session attendees in real-time through VoIP (both presenters and audience members must have headphones and speakers).
  • Make online meetings more interactive by pushing URLs, forms, cookies, scripts, and other data directly to session attendees, so they can participate “hands on” in demonstrations and other activities.
  • Record sessions for playback at a later date. This is particularly useful for marketing Webcasts. Companies can maximize results by allowing prospects who were unable to attend the “live” session to register to view the recorded version at their convenience.
  • Makes notes or draw diagrams on a whiteboard, to further illustrate certain points. Some Web conferencing software solutions even allow presenters to give whiteboard control to an attendee, so they can add their own notes or graphics.
  • Take and answer questions from audience members through text chat facilities. Questions and responses can be kept private between the meeting participant and the session leader, or can be made public for all attendees to view.
  • Conduct polls and surveys, to gather information and feedback from attendees.
  • Share their desktop in real-time. This provides audience members with a complete view of the session leader’s screen, as he or she opens and navigates various applications.
  • Some Web conferencing solutions even allow presenters to pass control of their screen over to co-presenters or audience members. Additionally, most Web conferencing software packages on the market today are available via a hosted or on-demand model.

Before purchasing or subscribing to a video conferencing or web conferencing solution, you will obviously look at several providers. And you are right to do so. There are currently about 10 major web meeting and conferencing solutions on the market. Of course, each provider will describe it’s product as the best ever, so hereunder is the top 10 reasons why you should think out of the box and choose WorkSpace3D from Tixeo Soft:

10 reasons to choose WorkSpace3D

  1. Best HD audio & video quality: Tixeo is the 1st video conferencing pure player to make the most of the best video codec: VP8 / Google WebM
  2. Rich collaboration features: Share anything from application, slides, files to web pages and more
  3. Easy to use: User-friendly interface. Tixeo is the 1st company to enable on-demand 3D online meetings
  4. Innovative Quality Of Service: Because the Internet is not always reliable, we develop smarter QoS strategies
  5. From your desktop or meeting room: Use a webcam / headset bundle or HD motorized camera with microphone arrays
  6. SaaS or On-Premise: You can directly subscribe to our hosted services, as well as setting up an appliance within your network
  7. Unlimited users or hosts: No limit in the amount of people that can use or host meetings.
  8. Enterprise-class support: Fast and high quality support directly done by the Research & Development team. No outsourced support.
  9. Easy deployment: One click to meet. Firewall and proxy friendly
  10. Safe & Secured meetings: HTTPS tunneling and AES encryption to ensure the highest confidentiality during your meetings.

WorkSpace3D is currently distributed in the US by Zelena Inc. You can visit the web site at www.zelena.com or request a FREE Trial here.  You can also contact us via e-mail

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IBM Centennial Film: A century of achievements that have changed the world

Posted on June 15, 2011 by JC

On June 16, 1911, the company we now know as IBM was incorporated in the state of New York and in 1924 the company adopted the name, International Business Machine Corporation.

We recommend you take the time to view 2 films that describe the impact that IBM has
had on the world in the past 100 years!

First film: They Were There – People who changed the way the world works

Second film: 100 x 100 – A century of achievements that have changed the world

Happy Birthday IBM!

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Enhancing Your Unix Job Scheduling Environment by Implementing File, Output Reports and Resources Management Standards.

Posted on June 9, 2011 by JC

Does “All is well” really mean “All ends well”?

An application controlled by a UNIX job scheduling package ended normally. However, the output results are incorrect! There is evidently nothing wrong within the scheduling tracking tool: the – short – job execution report indicates that everything went well.  Now, your priority is to analyze all the application control reports to identify what went wrong. Theoretically, a standard document should be available to help diagnose such a problem. Unfortunately the document content standards are not enforced. Consequently, you must analyze the various scripts that belong to the application in order to retrieve the complete set of execution reports.  But, as a matter of fact, these reports are short and incomplete!

For example, very few of these reports clearly identify the actual path that was used to read or write the files:  we are effectively lost in a maze of relative paths and symbolic links. Several hours later, we end up contacting the programmers. One of them discovers that a file which shouldn’t normally exist at the beginning of application execution was inadvertently included from a previous run. The application will now be amended to force an abnormal termination should this file exist at the beginning of the process. Meanwhile, all subsequent process will need to be restarted.

Like on z/OS systems, you can reduce the Risk, the Effort and the Cost of re-runs on Unix platforms.

1) The successful completion of a program does not automatically imply the successful completion of an application. It should be easy to define quality control routines that enforce the production rules and are independent from the program code. We need better control facilities than the mere return codes used by the scheduling products. Production staff should be able to easily integrate their own validation steps into the applications delivered by the development team.

2) It is vital to centralize the many control reports that are used to easily analyze the application execution progress. Particularly, one report should provide the absolute path to the programs and the files used during an application execution.

3) We also need to simply express, without changing the programs, how files are used. For example, this file is either a new file or this file must already exist.  Should this file be kept or destroyed when the program ends normally or abnormally. The production staff, but not the development team, is responsible to define files utilization rules. These rules must independent from the applications. Production staff have to guarantee a reliable data flow and a more dynamic disk space management, such as avoid keeping unnecessary files once the application is complete.

We have been doing this for many years in the MVS, z/OS world and we can do it for Unix platforms today!

What can uJES do for You and How?

uJES™ connects applications, services, databases & legacy systems to the mainframe and across servers. uJES™ is a “Job Entry Subsystem” for Unix, Windows and Mac/OS platforms. It provides these platforms most of the job management facilities you get from an IBM’s z/OS System running Jes2 or Jes3.

Ultimately, uJES™ is compared to a Universal Integration Agent that runs on any platform and  communicates with the mainframe and other servers using JES commands. This technology has the advantage to offer the mainframe staff a unique operation and investigation methodology to accurately control all the processes taking place across various platforms.

More information can be found on the Zelena Inc web site and a Free 14 Day trial is available upon request.

Posted in Articles, JCL, Jes2 / Jes3, Mainframe, Unix Linux Windows, z/OS Catalog | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What is uJES and what sets uJES apart?

Posted on June 1, 2011 by JC

uJES is a Universal, Intelligent, multi-platform and sophisticated Agent that provides IT and Application integration for any size Data Center. When installed on a Unix, Linux, Windows, MacOS and other servers like z/OS platforms, uJES uses the same communication language, the same architecture, the same commands and offers the same services no matter where it is running.

What sets uJES apart?

Unlike other solutions on the market, uJES is the only solution that goes beyond the basic “Agent” role.  uJES is compared to a Universal Integration Agent that runs on any platform and  communicates with the mainframe and other servers using JES commands. uJES also provides z/OS Catalog, File and resources management on non-mainframe servers. This technology has the advantage to offer the mainframe staff a unique operation and investigation methodology to control all the processes taking place across various platforms.

ujES is available comes with various features: uJES z/OS bridge, uJES Universal Bridge, and a uJES iPad Console. A uJES Unix2Z/OS bridge should be available very soon.

Interested in partnering with us, feel free to visit our partner page

More information is available at Zelena Inc or Soft4ops USA

Posted in Contact, Jes2 / Jes3, Mainframe, Newsroom, Unix Linux Windows, z/OS Catalog | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Can uJES be implemented in a non z/OS Data Center?

Posted on May 19, 2011 by JC

Yes, uJES can be implemented in a Data Center where there is no z/OS mainframe. In fact, uJES is platform independent and a stand-alone product. uJES doesn’t require any connection to a mainframe or z/OS operating system. uJES uses the z/OS technology and file organization but is not mainframe dependent. This is why uJES is also used in many smaller data centers where event synchronization and file management facilities are not currently available but also required.

If your Data Center only has Unix, Linux or other JAVA SE 1.6 platforms, you can implement uJES nodes on every server and benefit from features only available on the mainframe. More info is available at http://bit.ly/ujesprd

Posted in Mainframe, Servers / Mainframe, Unix Linux Windows, z/OS Catalog | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hiring additional uJES Sales, VAR’s and Partners

Posted on May 16, 2011 by JC

The Zelena Inc Product Partner program is designed to establish distribution and reseller partnerships with independent software vendors (ISVs), systems integrators, consultants, and other technology companies who may benefit from integration with, or distribution of, Soft4ops USA products globally or within a specific territory.

The Zelena Inc Product Partner program also cultivates partnerships with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and software and technology companies whose solutions can benefit from Soft4ops solutions. OEM partners may also allow Soft4ops to incorporate their technologies into individual Soft4ops solutions or product families.

The Zelena Inc VAR/Resellers program also targets independent software application companies to market, sell, and support some Soft4ops solutions like uJES basic, uJES Universal  Bridge and uJES iPad Console. These value-added resellers (VARs) incorporate Soft4ops USA products into their products and services offerings to provide a more comprehensive solutions portfolio. The Zelena Inc VAR/Reseller partners may also provide expert deployment and implementation services and product support. These Zelena Inc VAR partnerships enable Zelena Inc and Soft4ops USA  partners to sell more new-name accounts, enhance maintenance revenue in existing accounts, extend the use of applications, and create additional opportunities for professional services revenue.

More information about our Partner Program for uJES the Universal Agent and Bridge are available here

The uJES products are property of Soft4ops. The uJES solutions are sold and marketed by Soft4ops USA, a subsidiary of Zelena Inc.

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