Enterprises these days cannot afford to be technophobic. Most of them realize and recognize the importance of a common platform that provides social networking within the office that increases communication and collaboration and thereby enhances productivity in daily activities and projects.

The space, however, is divided into two camps:

Beyond the firewall: Companies opening their firewalls to available networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn.

Behind the firewall: Companies wary of a “social” networking site being adopted for intra-office communication purposes.

Know thy cubicle neighbour

For the first camp, we can look at Serena Software Inc., a Silicon Valley company, and their “Facebook Fridays”. Serena recognized the latent potential that lay in social networking sites like Facebook and announced a policy last year urging its employees to join Facebook and increase interaction and strengthen its 800 employee-strong team.

As Mary Heen Waldo, Serena’s vice-president of global HR puts it - “From a cultural standpoint, bringing together a lot of disparate corporate cultures can be a challenge, and we see Facebook as helping that effort. How do you communicate when people never see each other or, if they do, it is just once or twice a year? It has been borne out in my years in HR that when you know each other as people — what makes you tick, how you make decisions — you can work together more effectively.”

Burton, Waldo’s boss, says Facebook can be a virtual water cooler.

Make work simpler

Moving a little away from mere water cooler conversations, to the work desk; companies are increasingly using employee-generated applications like blogs and wikis to map categories of information and enabling easy and a more wide-spread information access culture for everyone in the organization.

Eric Miller, president of knowledge management company Zepheira and a former head of Semantic Web Initiative for the World Wide Web Consortium at Massachusetts Insititue of Technology had this to say about an intra-office communication/collaboration tool portal – “… (An intra-office communication network) transforms the way enterprises share, collaborate and exchange knowledge, providing a huge competitive advantage. It will be a differentiator among businesses in the next three or four years.”

Simpler -> Easier to abuse?

While intra-office networking tools are a great way to increase employee interaction, bring the team together and up the productivity levels, skeptics (Those belonging to the second camp mentioned above) are also concerned about security and regulatory compliance issues as the communication most often occurs outside the firewall, where an employer has no control over what’s said.

The common sentiment frequently brought to debate is “Networking tools available online are social tools and do not guarantee any security for my company’s confidential data.”



Whether or not this fear is justified is debatable and subjective.

However, where the fear of proprietary information leaking takes priority over a strongly connected and communicative team of workers, commercial tools like SharePoint Server 2007 step in to provide similar functions within the protection of the corporate firewall.

Microsoft, which claims to have around 300,000 internal blogs and wikis, forayed into the space with SharePoint Server 2007. The service, however, has a substantial installation and maintenance cost attached to it and is fit for enterprises with significantly large employee strength.

Using Web 2.0 to your organization’s advantage, smartly

Other organizations like TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications LLC, a recruitment advertising agency in New York City, are still choosing to stick to utilizing the latent potential of the Web 2.0 space. They recently launched an application that its clients’ employees can use to promote job openings from their Facebook profiles.

While tasks such as job postings (TMP) and team building (Serena) can be accomplished through sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and even MySpace, there is still a need gap that exists for a network that fulfills not only the intra-office networking needs but also gives the users a secure online portal to collaborate on tasks.

An online space that not only helps you collaborate on projects but also keeps you connected with your friends at work. So, how do you stay connected with your colleagues?

Sources:
Businessweek
CIO-Today
BNet

With the feature release today, Remindo becomes widgets-enabled. Your Workpage can now host HTML and XML widgets from GoogleIg, Widgetbox, Labpixies, Widgipedia and the likes.

We are all really excited about this release as it brings us a step closer to our final vision of the Remindo API which will house the Remindo Developer network. This will give developers the opportunity to build gadgets and applications targeted at the working professional (the Remindo user). It will have everything from a widget sandbox to a forum and a host of other features we will like to keep under wraps till it releases the end of this month.

For now, have a look at this presentation to know more about our latest release

| View | Upload your own

It’s as simple as that! So, start adding widgets to your workpage and let us know your comments (the bouquets and the brickbats). We’ll be eagerly looking forward to everything you have to say.

There are a host of start pages online which provide users with a lot of gadgets. When we started working on Remindo we decided on focusing on the working professional instead of trying to pander to all and sundry. The aim of the Remindo workpage is to get all the work-related information you need in one place.

The Remindo workpage helps you keep all the information you need organized in one place. Here are a few ways to start organizing your work-life through your workpage:

1. Add feeds and widgets: Once you sign-in to Remindo and land up on your workpage you see a list of feeds on your default page, which have been customized according to your location. You can add more feeds to your workpage by simply clicking the “Add stuff” link at the top of the page. This takes you to the default editor-managed directory containing a host of other feeds which you can add to your page by simply clicking on the link. If you do not find the feed you are looking for in the directory. You can add the RSS or atom feed you require through the “Add feed” pop-up by copy-pasting the URL of the feed in there.

Pretty soon with our gadgets API being launched, we will also update our directory with a select set of gadgets which will save users the trouble of separating the wheat from the chaff. Besides this you will also be able to add external widgets.

2. Access the address book: The sidebar on the workpage contains a link to the Address book. Anyone who has ever attended a conference is well-acquainted with the trouble of having to return with a stack of cards, which if left unorganized, are often misplaced. You can:

a. Add the card details through the “Add a contact” tab on in the address book and sort them as personal and business contacts.

b. Subsequently organize the contacts you add manually or import through the “Address requests” feature mentioned in the point below, through the “Manage groups” tab. The groups feature allows you to mail specific contacts or a selected group of your Remindo contacts.

3. Sending address requests: You can also send address requests to your professional and personal contacts through the “Send address request” link on the workpage, which takes you to the address book tab. You can send personalized invites to a select group of contacts or use the import contacts feature to import the e-mail IDs of your contacts and send group invites.

These are just a few of the features on our workpage. We will keep this blog constantly updated with any new feature that we keep adding to Remindo. Till then we’d like you to explore the site and keep us updated with your comments and suggestions regarding the current and upcoming features.

Old friends, new acquaintances, family, clients, future bosses, etc, etc , etc. I can’t even begin to count the number of times conversations have ended with those four words ‘Let’s keep in touch’. Sure it sounds simple enough to do, though I’ve found in recent times, can get pretty darn complicated.

Take just family and friends for example. I’ve got about a dozen diaries containing several people named Aunt Mary and hundreds of crossed out and rewritten numbers and addresses. Just sorting out who’s who is enough to make a grown man cry. Add to that, having all their e-mail addresses scattered across my Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL address books, and you get a situation I’m sure all of you’ll are a familiar with.

And let’s not forget all my business contacts. The latest pile of business cards I’ve managed to gather from the recent convention, the numbers and e-mail id’s of my clients, associates and future business partners, spread across my palm top, and my e-mail accounts. If this is how it’s going to be, then I would rather not keep in touch at all.

But then there came Remindo. It was ray of sunshine in the chaotic world of numbers and addresses. It helps me keep all my friends, families and business contacts organized in one place. So I can finally get rid of all those diaries and definitely will never have to go hunting through a mountain of business cards ever again.

Also, it makes it easier than ever to simply import all my contacts e-mail id’s and other information from my different accounts and have it all in one place. Plus, with the unique and simple messaging system, it lets me send messages, to anyone or everyone on Remindo with the click of a button.

So, if you ever need a better way to keep in touch and keep organized, Remindo is the perfect solution. Take it from me!!

A while ago I read an interesting article which said the average 21^st century individual is exposed to more information in one day than an average 18^th century individual was in his entire lifetime. While I don’t know how true that piece of statistic is, I only have to take a look at Sarika to know that she’ll beat entire nations (18^th century of course) in information overloading.

Given that she has 12 tabs open at any given point (not to mention I make it worse by sending her more links) Sarika’s probably more eager for the customizable workpage to be launched than Rehan himself. Hopefully then, she’ll stop scrolling through her numerous tabs and muttering to herself (which, considering I sit at the next bay, is a little spooky).

If you’ve been enjoying our numerous feeds from the feed directory, be sure to drop a line to Kris who’s worked really hard on it. I’m sure you should find the most popular feeds in the directory. Otherwise, you always have the option of adding your own feeds onto your workpage. Kris has also spent time figuring out the most popular feeds for each state which is what you see as default widgets when you log in for the first time. The flip side however, is his facebook status “I’m feed-up”

What Sarika and I are impatiently waiting for is the time when we can finally add more stuff. Rehan dubbed this “use-cases” and has a whole list of things neatly listed out. The development team has promised to meet cases 1 and 2 by Jan 30^th. The use-cases are basically addition of widgets independent of user data. Which means apart from checking feeds, you will also be able to do a variety of tasks such as track packages, make your sticky notes,play games and message the world.

We are eagerly looking forward to this because it means we finally get started on what we want Remindo to be — a “digital work-tool aggregator”.

Remindo supports a strong work culture, but that doesn’t mean we don’t believe and encourage having fun. From ‘Dare games’ (*see below) to Christmas parties, from day long treks in the great outdoors to water fights in the office, from basketball (that’s right we have a basketball hoop, take that Google!!) to team outings, there’s always something happening to remind us that there is more to life than codes and numbers.

What is the Dare game:
Each member of the team draws a card from a deck and holds it face down. At the count of three each member slaps their card face up on their forehead. This means they can see everyone else’s cards, but not their own. Judging by the other’s cards and what you perceive your card to be, dares are thrown forward. A bit of haggling a little higgling and eventually a consensus is reached on the dare. Now each member displays their cards and the one with the lowest card has to perform the dare.

This game is a lot of fun though may backfire. An example would be of one member who thought she had a very high card, but ended up losing, and had to walk to the CEO’s cabin and scream YABBA DABBA DOO!!

Don’t worry, she was not fired!!!

Starting up an internet company is no walk in the park. It takes sweat, blood, dedication and lots and lots of coffee. You are in a continuous race, where even a small delay could mean you’ve already lost.

It’s a war, with your brain being the ultimate WMD. You are always striving to stay one step ahead of the enemy (competition), and most often, ahead of yourself.
Unlike established companies, a start up needs to employ a 24×7 attitude, where each member of the team is required to always be alert, like commandoes always ready for battle, where instinct serves as guide, where each member needs to pitch in beyond their area of expertise and support the other.

Starting up an internet company may not be easy, but it sure is interesting, and definitely worth it!

As you gaze into the vast expanse that is the internet universe, you can’t but notice the lack of sites offering quality tools to aid the working professional.

That’s when Remindo Founder Rehan Yar Khan decided something needed to be done to address this and thus Remindo came into existence, as the one stop for all your business needs.

With updated feeds & widgets, the latest news & information and customized features, all personalized to assist you to work in a more organized and efficient fashion, Remindo offers the working professional exactly what he needs, all in one place.