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I was reading through this article on the Avaya site and it got me thinking about collaboration adoption in organisations I’ve worked in in the past. Often, incredible collaboration solutions have been implemented but fear of change or lack of interest from people at the CxO level has made and enablement technology into a hindrance.

Collaboration is not just a technology or solution, it has to be a mentality and be built into a system of working. If you try to keep exactly the same staff behaviour and business processes and try to get the technology to fit the way your business already works, you may well miss the best opportunities for streamlining and growth.

When implementing a collaboration solution it’s more crucial than any other to make sure thet there’s buy in at all levels and that the most senior people are leading the company to a new way of doing business, not just expecting the product to bring about it’s RoI all by itself.

Collaboration solutions are there to bring about new possibilities and enable new processes that weren’t viable without them but it only opens the door, you have to lead your business through it.

Let me know how collaboration works (or not!) in your organisation and we will see if there are any best practice examples out there.

Following on from my post about display technologies and their impact on unified communications and collaboration, this video from Corning shows their vision of the future, where embedded displays have become ubiquitous and collaborative tools have been written for many environments, with a focus on education and medical settings. It is an amazing rendering and really shows the level to which this technology can and will progress in time.

A few years ago now I was managing a project where we rolled out tablet PCs to staff who’s principal role involved visiting residential properties and assessing. The idea was that we could give them an interface to use to directly interact with the database system, reducing the need for typing everything up later and saving countless man hours.

Fast forward to today and tablets have become a huge industry. When I was working on that project there was no iPad, if we were to do the same thing over today, I wonder what hardware we’d be considering. It would make more sense to buy some decent 7” android tablet and write a custom app but then those tablets I bought back then ran windows, they could fold out to be laptops, definitely a massive plus.

It seems like there was a split, it’s still possible to buy Tablet PCs like those ones and then there are tablets, more like a phone than a desktop machine. The trend now though seems to be that these devices are converging. Apple shares code between IOS and OSX, Microsoft have made it clear that there shared code between the new windows mobile and the forthcoming Windows 8, many applications are delivered via the web now anyway so the device doesn’t even matter. Most phones and tablets can support Bluetooth keyboards, the line has blurred.

Either way round it seems like the benefits to businesses and consumers are huge, when applications/ apps can be delivered on a fixed or mobile platform, or just through the cloud, innovation can enable and transform business to improve productivity and customer satisfaction and differentiate a brand from it’s competitors.

Now is the time to think, don’t just outdo your competitors, change how your product can be delivered and out-innovate the competition.

The Cloud seems to have gone beyond a simple term and become a real industry buzzword. Different companies and individuals all seem to have slightly different ideas about what we can apply the term to. Where does “The Cloud” end and the good old internet begin?

Hosting companies have been cloud-ified for a while and it seems that the line between a hosted and a cloud service is getting blurrier. At present it seems that the trend is for a multi-tenant system to be called “cloud” while a single-tenant system is called “hosted” but when the single tenant platform is probably hosted on the same virtual platform as the multi-tenant, it would seem that the real cloud is still the part we don’t see.

One of the platforms where this is the most apparent is Microsoft Lync, through the Office 365 system, there is a “cloud” instance of Lync, servers hosted and managed by Microsoft and the platform, a “hosted” version, where the multi or single tenant system is hosted by a Microsoft partner, and an on-premise version, where the system is typically located at the end customer site.

Any of these platforms could be a good fit for a medium size organisation and it shows how far the “cloud” market has come that even large customers might be tempted by the ease of deployment and support for the cloud solution. The only real hurdle is the fear of not being able to get the service level you require from a platform that could be supporting potentially hundreds of thousands of customers. The real fear is that you aren’t important enough a customer if the worst should happen.

When cloud solutions start promising better uptime than hosted or on-premise, how will it change the world of unified communications?

After all, telecoms have traditionally been a “cloud” based service in that the majority of the complexity was handled by the carrier; will UC go the same way?

Only a couple of weeks into 2012 and CES is upon us. The 2012 Consumer Electronics show lets us look at various technological developments and see what new products we will start seeing over the next few years.

It seems like there’s a lot of new display and imaging technologies being exhibited this year and the adoption of these technologies will subtly add to the UC and collaboration packages already available. Heads up display like the Lumus Optical (http://www.lumus-optical.com/ ) and head-mounted computers such as the Golden-I (http://www.mygoldeni.com/) give the wearer an always on screen while they go about their work. The Golden-I also has an add-on camera module meaning that an operative can be streaming video. The collaboration opportunities for engineering work seem obvious here. On the fly access to technical documentation and even procedural video while standing in front of the job! Or how about streaming live video of what you’re doing back to an office or another engineer for collaborative assistance while you work. The move methods we gat of making data and communications available, the richer and more pervasive the collaborative integrations can be.

Telepresence robots like those made by VGo (http://www.vgocom.com/) might not be a new invention but each year we see them getting more capable and streamlined. These may seem gimmicky but the benefits could be huge. Imagine a manufacturing operation spread across a very large site. For an engineer to do an initial visit to look at a fault might involve an hour of moving, only to get there and find he needs to call someone else, or needs specialised tools. Telepresence robots could be installed so that the engineer can have an initial look at the fault without leaving their desk and be more prepared, fixing the fault faster and saving the business money.

Finally OLED Displays, these displays are made by printing the Organic-LED modules directly onto plastic. People have been talking about them for years but this year Samsung are showing off their first 55 inch OLED display, which is proposed to be released later this year (http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/10/samsung-55-inch-super-oled-tv-eyes-on-video/) . This in itself isn’t big news but the fact that the technology is beginning to ramp up is. OLED promised to make displays cheaper and affordable huge display panels possible. One day the panels will be able to be made to near enough any shape and size and when we start to get true “video walls” it’s likely that this is the technology that will be driving the displays. Think Telepresence is cool now, in a few years the whole meeting room wall might become a window to the other side of the world.

Christmas has passed and around the world, thousands of households have purchased Microsoft ‘Kinect’ cameras to use with their Xboxes. Quietly, Microsoft has laid the groundwork for a global consumer videoconferencing system in a way no company has ever managed to before.

After announcing the purchase of Skype last year, it’s obvious that Microsoft aren’t afraid to throw their weight behind their push into UC and Collaboration, but I’ve always felt that what Microsoft do best is leverage. They know where they’re strong and they know how to use that strength. My prediction is that in 2012 we’ll see them leveraging the Xbox and Skype brands and technology to push a technology that only needs consumer adoption to revolutionise the business world.

When Lync/Skype for Windows Mobile, Lync for Business customers and Skype for Consumers on the PC, Tablet, Smartphone and Xbox all start to interoperate, there will be a global, IP based Voice, Video, Instant Messaging and Presence system that doesn’t require deep technical knowledge from consumers to work. The business possibilities for customer collaboration and service, business to business collaboration and mobile workers open up even further than they already have and Collaboration Enabled Business Transformation will kick up into another gear entirely.

I am interested to know how you see these developments will affect your business. Send me your thoughts.