LinkedIn is compulsory for atleast one hour in my office” was an unanticipated reply from a friend, when most of my them were complaining about the same being banned in theirs. This guy, working in one of the more prestigious process consultancies in India, explained that it was in the name of business networking.

Professional Networking

My dear friend’s pride in his company was soon found waning when asked if there were any colleagues in the prominent number of acquisitions on his new ‘friend’s list’ and that if he was doing any networking in his own company (I must point out here that he isn’t in the sales department).

This made me wonder why people focus on networking outside their organizations viz-a-viz within their companies. Why not look for a promotion in your own job?, more so since this is mutually beneficial in terms of decreased hiring and training costs, reduced attrition and greater job satisfaction. The onus is not just on the employee, I think . . makes me wonder what organizations are doing to improve networking within!

We are unveiling a brand new look, here is a sneak peek into what our interface will look like in a few days’ time.

If you haven’t tried our premium features like unlimited users and higher storage, we encourage you to go ahead and try it free for 60 days along with our new look. You can upgrade to the free trial from your Intranet Management area.

We have added a new Messaging system, now you can Private Message your office colleagues, without having to recall email ids securely. Let’s  go through some of its main features:

Overzealous = Unproductive

In recent times, we have seen that the resonance of social networks as a marketing tool among even the most “old school” marketing practitioners. No more “who’s going to see my brand amongst inane banter, mass-poking and random pictures of cats!”.

Now we talk of targeting, recall, TOMA and all the fancy stuff from a social media perspective and engagement opportunities. It has been a spectacular turnaround indeed.

Social collaboration is going the same way, if not even bigger. Collaboration suites have been around for years and years. However one felt they always lacked that one key element to push them beyond the tipping point. No prizes for guessing that it is “social”.

Now social collaboration is being talked about even by the purist management experts. Bill George, Professor of Management Practice at Harvard University, noted late last year that “social networking is the most significant business development of 2010.” Huh?

Well, the following beautifully and somewhat poetically explains it, read what Dave Gray, a well-known business visualization expert posted on his blog recently:

Dave wrote “Although we tend to design companies like machines, we instinctively and intuitively understand that companies are not made of cogs, levers and gears. In the end, they are made out of people. For top management, it would be wonderful if we could put our business strategy into the machine, push a button and wait for the results. But it doesn’t work that way. You have to put your strategy into people if you want to get results.”

And today, thanks to social technologies, we finally have the tools to manage companies like the complex organisms they are.”

Collaboration has changed as we have progressed as a collective workforce, gantt charts are not for everyone, collaboration to be
effective today has to be social and reflect what the workforce deems a worthwhile way to communicate.

It always pleases us at Remindo when we see CEOs of large corporations helping us get insights into their vision of a workplace of the future and echo our views to some extent. Case in point: Thierry Breton, CEO of Paris based Atos Origin, a multi-national IT corporation with over 50,000 employees and operations in over 40 countries.

Thierry spoke recently in a conference on innovation in Paris and spoke at length how e-mail, one of the key components of the information revolution is now crumbling under its own weight. He said “We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives” and adding that “Volume of emails we send and receive is unsustainable for business. Managers spend between 5 and 20 hours a week reading and writing emails.

Also, Managers are already using social media networking more than search, and spend 25 per cent of their time searching for information”.
Atos Origin is now committed to putting this theory into practice and is encouraging use of social community platforms to share and keep track of ideas on subjects from innovation and lean management through to sales. Initial feedback has been that these types of tools reduce email by between 10 and 20% immediately. Atos Origin and Thierry have some well researched facts on their side:

• By 2013, more than half of all new digital content will be the result of updates to, and editing of existing information
• Online social networking is now more popular than email and search
• Middle managers spend more than 25% of their time searching for information
• In 2010 corporate users received 200 mails per day, 18% of which was spam
• Email works in silos and closed groups and does not help keep the organization at large involved

We will follow this story and hope to see the impact of Atos Origin’s efforts for a less polluted information flow in their organization in one of Thierry’s future addresses.

Instead of constantly adding new features,  for the last month we’ve focused on improving Remindo’s speed and stability.  Last week’s release has vastly improved speed, especially when you 1st sign in; and stability in Internet Explorer. We’ll be plugging away at this till the end of the month, after which we’ll get back to adding features.

Tweet all the time? Wanna share with your office? Many of our users wanted to and so did we.  So today we’ve released a simple way to add your Twitter account via your Profile and share with the office.

Goto Profile>Edit Profile>General Information Edit> Scroll to the bottom and you’ll find My Twitter, follow the cues and Tweets from then on will be shared with your office.

Sharing your Tweets is a great way for your colleagues to keep up with you and know more about the person behind the designation.  Discovered a great new coffee place? Stuck at the airport? Have a view on the elections?  Your colleagues will also be able to comment on your Tweets just the way they do for everything else on the Intranet.

INTRANET MANAGERS, PLEASE NOTE: You can disable this feature or selectively provide it to people from your Intranet Management panel.

The Remindo “My News” is one the most valuable features within the software.  Managers and Employees alike can keep track of articles on blogs and online newspapers, view them and share them easily with the whole office or with select Groups. For example, using My News,  Shawn, our Marketing Head keep tracks of various blogs related to Google Analytics (GA), that way he is updated with new features, tips and insights that bloggers write about on GA (he found them using the Search within Find Stuff); he views the full articles of the headlines he finds interesting; and using the inbuilt Share on Remindo, he shares them with his Marketing Team Group. That way his whole group is clued in. This is a great way for Managers to keep their teams engaged and informed on the stuff that matters. Its also a great way for the company CEO and Senior Management to engage the whole company on Industry and Market news; Research; and articles that illustrate their vision. We have now linked the Sharing of News with the Email Alerts System. So now when users Share a New article, all those it is shared with are notified by email.

We also revisited Groups and revised them to make them simpler and more in sync with user feedback. We have removed Sub-Groups as we found that this was confusing users and remained virtually unused.  We also revised the nomenclature of some sections to make it easier to understand, or example, My Colleagues is revised to Group Members.

We are now hard at work to launch the paid edition of Remindo, which you can expect by middle next month. The earlier plan was to launch it this past April, but we wanted to add a more robust SLA, thus we revisited some of our infrastructure and took it up a few notches.

Thanks for reading!

As you use your Intranet and the number of people, conversations, groups, files and other stuff grows, you will need a powerful Search function to help you find what you need. We have been working hard the past few months to offer Remindo users a powerful, fast and easy to use Search system, and we are happy to announce that this went live earlier in the week.

You will notice the Search box on the upper right hand side of each page, simply enter in people’s names, words from a message or attachment names and you’ll get results in an instant in date descending order. If you want to filter your results, multiple filter options are listed along with results on the right (People, Files, Milestones, etc).

Happy Searching.

Ps. Watch this space,  we have another great feature coming up next week.

To ensure better uptime and prevent loss of data, we now host our servers over multiple datacenters; thus in the highly unlikely event that our primary Amazon datacenter is unavailable, Remindo will be available from a secondary data center; and vice-versa! As we prepare ourselves to come out of Beta in September 2010, we wanted to offer our customers a highly reliable and highly available product.