With the recession stubbornly lingering, many small and medium businesses (SMBs) are still pinching pennies and looking to trim expenses. Dimdim, which provides free Web conferencing for up to 20 users, and charges just $25 per month for Dimdim Pro (which supports unlimited meetings for up to 50 users) gives SMBs a way to eliminate or cut Web conferencing cos...
Tag: Collaboration
What is an Online Collaboration Suite, and Why Should You Care?
(Originally published on June 30, 2010 in Small Business Computing) What is an Online Collaboration Suite? An online collaboration suite provides businesses with an integrated set of tools that span a range of collaboration needs. While not every collaboration suite includes the same capabilities,...
What is Hybrid Computing, and Why Should You Care?
(Originally published on June 9, 2010, in Small Business Computing) What is Hybrid Computing? A hybrid computing platform lets customers connect the packaged small business software applications that they run on their own internal desktops or servers to applications that run in the cloud. As discussed in
Does IBM Lotus Really Want to Get Small? My Take on Brent Leary’s Podcast
I still haven’t had time to write about Lotusphere 2010, but in the meantime, you may want to listen to the conversation I had with small business guru and friend Brent Leary. Last week, Brent interviewed me about my take on this year's Lotus event, announcements and news. Naturally, our conversation centered on the small business angle, which...
SMB Collaboration Battle Heats Up: VMware Announces Deal to Acquire Zimbra
As we predicted just a couple of weeks ago in our 2010 Top 10 SMB Technology Predictions, the collaboration battle is heating up! VMware just announced that has entered into a definitive agreement with Yahoo! to acquire
What Is Green IT, and Why Should You Care?
(Originally published in Small Business Computing, December 29, 2009) Technology insiders tend to throw around technical terms and business jargon, assuming people outside the industry understand what it all means. By its nature, technology vocabu...
2010 Top 10 SMB Technology Market Predictions
Fellow SMB analyst Sanjeev Aggarwal and I have teamed up to bring you our top ten technology related predictions-plus three bonus predictions--for the SMB (companies with 1-1000 employees) market for 2010. Details for each prediction follow the list below. Remember to vote for your top prediction
What is Social Networking, and Why Should You Care?
(Originally published in Small Business Computing, April 7, 2009) Technology insiders tend to throw around technical terms and business jargon, assuming people outside the industry understand what it all means. By its nature, technology vocabulary is often confusing and complicated, and insiders often add to t...
IBM Lotus Foundations: A Real Choice for Small Businesses and Partners
As I mentioned in a blog I posted after Lotusphere 2009, IBM Lotus has been reluctant to go head to head with obvious rivals, particularly Microsoft. At Lotusphere, however, the company came out swinging, declaring intentions “shatter Windows” and “change desktop economics” with Symphony, the free Lotus desktop suite, and compete aggressively against Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) with t...
What Will Social Networking Displace?
Just a couple of years ago, many people were still debating whether digital social networking was just a flash in the pan. With social media growth surging, that that debate is over. People have moved on to try and figure out where social networking is headed—as evidenced when I Googled the “future of social networking” and got 542,000 results. Now of course I didn’t read all of them, but a co...