Those who follow the HyperOffice blog know that in our last series of posts, we have been focusing on the business problem of collaboration, beyond a narrow technology focus.  “Collaboration” in its broad sense, is what every organization is ultimately involved in – people working together to achieve organizational goals. In our last post, the “three pillars of collaboration” we had emphasized that to be truly collaborative, organizations need to get 3 ducks in a row – policies/processes, technology and culture – rather than depending solely on technology.

But that is not to say that technology is completely subordinate to the other two “pillars of collaboration”. Quite often, technology creates previously unthinkable possibilities. To illustrate, before collaborative mobile and internet technologies – there was simply no way to keep field workers on the company’s information grid. But now employees can be kept on the grid wherever they are, which creates fantastic new opportunities in terms of how organizations can operate and structure themselves. This is an example of technology profoundly impacting the organizational bottom line.

In practice though, most often companies fall in the vicious cycle of stamping out immediate fires. Technology is approached similarly – a tool to share documents with so and so client, a sounding board for remote employees, a tool to collect information from website visitors. This approach however, ignores the true potential of collaboration software and leaves organizations with a rag tag of disorganized and disjoint tools (remember the problem of collaboration sprawl?). As that darling of manager types, Franklin Covey, reminds us, keeping on top of strategic goals is important to long term success, rather than getting caught in the whirlwind of everyday activities. Companies which are strategic, look beyond the myopia of the immediate, and create a framework for future success.

Collaboration software, because of its all-encompassing nature, needs to be seen in a similar strategic light. Here are the long term strategic possibilities that collaboration software creates:

Operate at greater scale: As Thomas Friedman told us in “the world is flat”, globalization and the internet have blown off our roof, knocked down our walls, and swiped out the floor from under our feet. The whole world is now a big market for talent and resources. This creates a massive potential for small and mid-sized organizations who now have access to the best talent and resources across the globe, at the most competitive rates, without the overheads of managing such a team in house. Collaboration software creates the framework within which such teams can be enabled with all the tools to work together and contribute.

Free organizational knowledge. Traditionally, organizational information has been scattered across multiple computers, servers, or email accounts – inaccessible exactly when needed. Collaboration software can be seen as an “organizational grid” where organizational information resides, and may freely be shared across the company network. This has a tremendous impact in terms of knowledge management where every document, record or any other information is readily available to employees exactly when needed.

Beyond that, collaboration software, especially cutting edge social collaboration software, encourages people to go beyond strict roles to contribute knowledge, and help each other out – a freeing up of knowledge trapped inside the minds of employees.

Engage customers and partners. Not only does collaboration software allow companies to extend to employees across the globe, it also allows companies to engage customers, partners and vendors like never before. Companies can even bring customers and partners right into their business flow. The result is happier, hence more loyal customers and partners, besides efficiencies in operations. To illustrate, a company may set up an extranet space for a customer project which involves external vendors. This is a place where everyone has a transparent view of project status, and can access information and contribute when their activities are due.

Streamline processes. Common processes relating to information may be served right through collaboration software – project management and delegation, document review, HR requests etc. Tools relating to specialized processes may be integrated right into the collaboration software using unified login or APIs.  Collaboration software therefore acts as a central hub for company processes. Not only is it simpler for employees to access everything in one place, it also breaks process silos, where processes may share the same information and have interactions.

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Do you have a funny feeling that you seem to be doing the same work over and over in your office? Grand projects are initiated with a flurry of meetings and earth shaking intentions, but amnesia sets in as soon as everyone steps out of the conference room. Or responsibilities are handed from person to person like a baton in a relay race, with a loss in context at every step, till they end up in the lap of someone who has scarcely a clue about the original intentions. Or files sent back and forth, till they settle in an obscure corner of the business never to be found again. And you end up doing the same work over and over, burdened with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, when the exact same issues are discussed yet again in a meeting.

I am certain this evokes pangs of personal experience from everyone.

Many organizations suffer from this malady of broken collaboration. Some much of the time, some part of the time, only a few none of the time.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if every project was realized systematically, graduating from inception to execution to fruition, without loss in time or resources or context? We would surely be so much more productive.

In spite of being a technology company, we are amongst the first to admit that technology is not the sole panacea for the solution. Technology can be the backbone to help you implement the right things, or even open hitherto unavailable possibilities, but it needs to have supporting pillars. The following are the key pillars of collaboration.

1. Processes and Policies. The management needs to clearly lay out how things will be done. Who is responsible for what? What is the chain of command? What are the workflows and information flows? What tools will be used? With these basics ill defined, responsibility cannot be affixed, nobody is quite sure how they are supposed to achieve things, scores of cracks are created through which information may fall, and everyone ends up working at cross purposes. Ambiguity is the greatest enemy of collaboration.

Processes need to have collaboration built into them. It goes without saying how much different departments (and further, everyone in the company) can benefit from each other. For example, Marketing and Sales interact with the market everyday, and have much valuable information for Product Development about user needs.  But this sharing doesn’t happen nearly enough.  Don’t expect Sales and Marketing to exchange information on a whim. They already have tons going on. Sharing therefore needs be built into the processes of Sales, Marketing, Product Development or any other department in the company.

Technology is part of the picture, as it implements in practice what is laid out by policy. In the above example, Sales and Marketing should be able to log user feedback, which is forwarded to Product Development and made part of product development cycles. Other examples are workers being encouraged to store documents not on their desktop, but in the shared documents repository where they are available to everyone else. Or making sure that the project management system is used to set up projects, assign responsibilities, and update progress, rather than projects being handed down by worth of mouth and email, so that everyone has visibility of ongoing projects.

Although many policies are implemented by technology, they precede technology, and ensure that everything aligns to organizational objectives.

2. Technology.  Much of the work done in modern organizations involves information flows. Technology, or specifically information technology manages these flows, and makes sure the right people have the right information at the right time. Technology is therefore a key pillar in collaboration. This also explains the huge success of collaboration software, which ensures that workers have access to the information they need to perform their jobs.

Technology can also open new avenues and possibilities which were unavailable before. For example mobile technologies ensure that workers can be productive even when they are at home or on the road. Or social collaboration tools which allow information to be displayed and shared in unprecedented democratic and viral ways which spurs collaboration like never before. Technology can therefore impact policies and processes, and even organizational objectives by opening new vistas.

3. Culture. Culture picks up where policies leave off. Not everything can be achieved through processes and policies, and may not even be desirable, as employees may feel stifled. Culture may be thought of as unspoken and unwritten policies, and yet an equally powerful tool for influencing behavior. A “collaborative culture” is a company where people are encouraged to step out of their formal work boundaries, and share information that may be of use to others. Collaboration is part of the DNA of such companies and employees are self-directing in their collaboration behavior, rather than being directed.

SMB Group’s recent study titled “2011 communication and collaboration study” surveying over 700 decision makers found that companies with a “collaborative culture” actually had better revenue outcomes.

Policies may help reinforce a collaborative culture. For example in the SMB Group study, companies which reward group achievement as opposed to individual achievement were said to have a “collaborative culture”.

Conclusion

It is obvious from the above that none of the three pillars really exists in isolation. They all influence and reinforce each other.  Companies which see collaboration as a desirable strategic outcome need to take this broader, multi pronged approach.

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While it makes sense to take a strategic approach towards collaboration software, as a tool which will have far reaching effects on how a business operates, oftentimes, businesses opt for collaboration software in response to an immediate problem. This is a first of a series of informative articles we will feature on the HyperOffice blog that deal with common problems that businesses face,  and how they can be solved by HyperOffice as well as other solutions.

As iPhone becomes popular as a business tool, employees quite naturally want to be able to access and sync Outlook and iPhone mail, contacts and calendars. There are three main ways to get this done:

1. Wired sync using iTunes

2. Wireless sync using a web service like HyperOffice

3. Sync using an enterprise messaging server like Exchange

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Wired Sync Using iTunes.

1. This is applicable if you are an iTunes user. You need to follow the following steps.

2. Make sure the iTunes plugin is enabled in Outlook

3. Connect your iPhone to your computer

4. iTunes should open up automatically

5. You need to open the Info tab in iTunes, and select “Outlook” from the “sync contacts with:” and “sync calendars with:” drop down.

6. Click the “Sync” button

Limitations

- You need to connect your iPhone to your computer everytime you need to sync.

- It is only one-way sync, meaning your Outlook information will appear on your iPhone, but not vice versa.

- Although iTunes has a “sync email” option, it only syncs email settings and not messages. To sync email between iPhone and Outlook, you need to set up the same IMAP account on both.

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Using a web service like HyperOffice.

If your SMB does not have, and can not afford an enterprising messaging server like Exchange, a web service like HyperOffice is the ideal option. HyperOffice is a cloud based service that syncs with both Outlook and iPhone, and hence acts as a bridge that allows bi-directional sync between Outlook and iPhone. This offers a number of benefits. Firstly, you don’t need to install any dedicated servers or software. Secondly, you are not tethered to a single computer, and your information is synched wirelessly over the air in real time even when you are travelling. Plus, HyperOffice also includes support for a wide range of other device, and allows you to sync Outlook with devices like BlackBerry, Android, and Nokia etc. You need to take the following steps:

1. Sign up online for HyperOffice and log in

2. Set up synching between HyperOffice and Outlook using the HyperShare add-in.

3. Go to the “Settings” tab, and then “Mobile Sync”

4. Click Setup Phone, and Select the manufacturer, model & carrier from and enter phone number. Click continue.

5. In this step, enter code received on your mobile device and click on verify.

6. On the next screen, select data items to sync.

7. Once HyperOffice is set up, you now need to set up your iPhone. First you click on settings on your iPhone and scroll down & tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars.

8. Tap Add Account & select Microsoft Exchange as the type of account.

9. Enter HyperOffice email address and the password.

10. In the new server field enter hypersync.hyperoffice.com and hit next and select the services (Mail, Contacts, Calendars) you wish to sync.

Read more, or contact us for more information..

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Using an Enterprise Messaging Server like Microsoft Exchange

This option is applicable if you have Microsoft Exchange (2003, 2007, 2010) set up at your company, and powering Outlook. iPhone syncs with Exchange through the ActiveSync protocol. You need to take the following steps:

1. Set up your Outlook account using Exchange

2. On your iPhone screen, click “settings”

3. Click on mail, contacts, calendars

4. Click on “add account” and select “Exchange”

5. On the next screen, fill out your Email, Domain, Username, Password, and Description.

6. If auto-discovery is enabled in Exchange, the next screen will be automatically prepopulated. If not, you need to fill out the server information, and click next.

7. Now iPhone displays a list of data types you want to sync – mail, contacts and calendars. Click on “save” to complete the process.

Limitations

- You need to have Exchange Server installed, which is typically an enterprise product costing up to thousands of dollars. This is not an optimal solution for SMBs.

- If you want to extend syncing capabilities beyond iPhone, Exchange does not support non ActiveSync devices.

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Active Directory is a directory service widely used in organizations to implement policy controls and manage access to company IT resources.  It simplifies things for administrators as well as users by centralizing creation of usernames and passwords. Administrators are saved the effort of setting up usernames and passwords for every person for every computer, software and piece of information; and keeping these policy controls updated. On the other hand users can use the same login credentials to access all the network resources relevant to them.

However, things have changed in the era of cloud software. Employees need access not just to systems and information within the company network, but also to numerous cloud solutions which are hosted on the servers of the solution vendor.

However, the need for integration with Active Directory is as pertinent today as it ever was. Now that many business critical on-premise software are now moving to the cloud – email, accounting, collaboration, CRM etc – managing usernames, passwords and policies for each of these systems separately is highly inefficient. And the more cloud systems a company implements, the greater the number of users, the harder it is for administrators.

Since cloud based software have found wide acceptance in businesses only in the last couple of years, it is only now that vendors are considering advanced technical requirements such as integration between Active Directory and their cloud software.

At HyperOffice, we are fully appreciative this requirement, especially given the strategic nature of our collaboration software. We conduct on-demand Active Directory integrations based on the specific needs of our users. We have developed special tools, which let us do anything from simple Active Directory integrations, to highly customized integrations which meet enhanced security requirements, or let administrators trigger specific actions within HyperOffice right from Active Directory.

We just put out a white paper discussing in detail the relevance of Active Directory to the cloud, and presenting HyperOffice as a case study of the various degrees of integration between Active Directory and cloud software.

You can read it at “Active Directory and the Cloud”.

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iCloud is great news

iCloud is great news for the cloud industry as a whole. As everyone knows, the genius of Steve Jobs is to show everyone the importance of “sexy” in technology (for lack of a better word) – take an existing technology, and make it so compelling, so beautiful, that people can’t wait to lay their hands on that sleek shiny new thing.  He did that with iPhone, and repeated it with iPad.

The same could well happen with iCloud. The cloud has been around in the consumer market for more than a decade, and the business world has finally embraced it in the last couple of years. But Steve Jobs’ visibility and marketing genius could make the “cloud” meme so commonplace, that no cloud vendor ever has to lose hair again trying to explain to a prospect what the cloud is.

However, iCloud is not a team tool, nor is it intended to be.

iCloud is not for collaboration

Firstly, iCloud is designed as a personal data management tool. You have a personal account, which you use to access data across the iPhone, iPad and Mac. It simply has no “sharing” or “groupware” functionality.

Secondly, iCloud is not a traditional “cloud” solution. It has no web-browser access option, which is the cornerstone of most cloud solutions. All data (music, mail, apps) must be accessed on local applications on the iPhone, iPad or the Mac desktop. Therefore, in effect, the cloud is invisible in the background, and it pushes and synchronizes data between local applications. It has been argued that this model is simply not suitable for collaboration, which is more about everyone accessing a common instance of data on the cloud and working on it. In the “sync” model, an instance of the data is pushed locally, and changes synced back to the master copy on the cloud. The more the number of users working on that bit of data, the more complex the situation is.

Thirdly, iCloud restricts users to the Apple ecosystem. It effectively excludes users who prefer to have online access to their data, access it on their PC, or want to access it on one of the myriad mobile devices around in addition to iPhone and iPad.

HyperOffice lets you collaborate on Apple devices

However, quite undeniably, there is a segment of users and businesses who work primarily in the Apple environment, and want a solution that will let them share data in the Apple ecosystem. At HyperOffice, we have made a constant attempt to make our solutions compatible with an ever larger number of popular business environments. We have kept a constant eye on various Apple devices as they have gained importance in the businesses world, and continued to add support.

HyperOffice is the ideal solution for businesses looking to access and share corporate email, contacts, calendars and other information across their iPhone, iPad and Mac devices, and beyond.

Here is how HyperOffice supports each of these devices:

iPhone: HyperOffice support all mobile devices based on ActiveSync. This means iPhone users can push and wirelessly sync their business email, contacts and calendars on their devices. Since HyperOffice is a team solution, users can even share iPhone contacts and calendars with other team members. Anytime you create a meeting or edit a contact, you can choose to let everyone in your team know immediately.

Plus, HyperOffice is optimized for access from the iPhone Chrome browser. Users can access advanced HyperOffice collaboration software tools like shared documents, projects, forums, and workspaces right from their iPhone.

iPad: In addition to iPhone, HyperOffice also supports synching with the native mail, contact and calendar apps just like iCloud. Only, you can even share this information with team members. Besides, users can access HyperOffice features from their iPad Chrome browser.

Mac: HyperOffice allows synching with the native mail, contacts and calendars of Mac using a third party tool called SyncJE. Entourage in turn, is designed to automatically synchronize with these native Mac apps. In effect, Mac users can access their corporate mail, calendars and contacts from the native apps of Mac or entourage, and keep them in sync across devices.

Beyond Apple: Unlike iCloud, HyperOffice by no means restricts users to sharing and collaborating on information only in the Mac universe. All of HyperOffice’s features can be accessed from any PC or Mac web browser in the world. Support for mobile devices is also not restricted to iPhone and iPad, and fully extends to phones like Android, Nokia, Windows Mobile and even BlackBerry. Plus, people who are addicted to Outlook, may continue to use Outlook to access and share mail, contacts, calendars and tasks using our Outlook synchronization functionality.

So, if you are a Apple die hard, and looking to fully leverage your shiny Apple gadget to collaborate with teams, do hit us up.

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Given the growing importance of mobility in HyperOffice capabilities, we thought it was time to give our mobile sync services a slight image makeover. So what you have hitherto affectionately referred to as HyperSync, gets the crisp, all-new, and descriptive title of HyperMobile. The same beloved product, but in new garb. There are a couple of reasons for the change:

HyperSync had the potential of being confused with the other “sync” services HyperOffice provides, namely, Outlook synchronization and the ability to sync with Mac mail and contacts. We felt that “HyperMobile” was a lot more descriptive, in that it makes clear the mobile specific capabilities of HyperOffice.

This is a great opportunity to re-emphasize our commitment to support an ever greater range of “mobile” features, and help popularize the concept of “mobile collaboration”. Mobile collaboration does not refer merely to the ability to collaborate on mobile phones, but reflects the emergence of new age devices – mobile phones, tablets, netbooks – and workers’ desire to access and collaborate on business information independent of device. Workers want to instantly collaborate and access information across all these devices depending on where they are – at office, at home, at a client site or on the road – without being tied to a single one. That is the spirit of “mobile collaboration”.

HyperMobile already offers powerful mobility features  including the ability to push and sync mail, contacts, calendars and tasks on their devices; share this information with colleagues; push information from third party sources like Gmail, Yahoo mail, and Hotmail ; and support for most major mobile devices. We plan to keep building on these capabilities and exciting new mobility features form a prominent part of our product roadmap. Keep following us to keep updated!

“Email archiving” wouldn’t normally ring a bell for a small business owner. The general impression is that the regulatory requirement of keeping all company email records for a certain number of years, falls only on enterprises, and hence the inapplicability of email archiving software to smaller businesses.

2010 was a pivotal year for HyperOffice. Not only did we find ourselves right in the eye of the convergence of multiple market trends, but HyperOffice grew and matured as a product more than ever before in its history. Our efforts did not go unnoticed, as our brand is stronger than ever, and rubbed shoulders with the biggest names in the industry, backed as they are by astronomical marketing budgets.

The Market

2010 will be looked back upon as the year when cloud computing finally went main stream. It was great to see our vision of more than 10 years – the ability to access business applications over the internet without expensive infrastructure – finding not only wide acceptability, but wide adoption as well. Vendors have shifted from selling the model to arguing for the superiority of their cloud products over others.

Apart from the mega success of cloud computing, we found ourselves plonk in the middle of two sub trends in the larger growth of the cloud.

Cloud collaboration was one of the main areas of growth in cloud computing. Studies from Sandhill, Forrester, MarketResearch.com, AMI all found collaboration as one of the fastest growing SaaS segments in 2010 and beyond. This is understandable as collaboration software caters to a supra trend afoot in business today – increasingly distributed teams which need to work together and coordinate effort. As insightfully observed by the editor of CloudAve “cloud has the necessary DNA for collaboration”, since it allows people anywhere to contribute to a shared system.

Another trend in evidence was the convergence of messaging and collaboration software. HyperOffice has been offering integrated business email and collaboration tools since before 2005. Companies have found that having their messaging and collaboration solutions in separate silos is expensive and inefficient. Integrated solutions are a counterweight against the temptation to use email for everything, and great synergies arise from data of different types – documents, emails, tasks, contacts, discussions – being able to freely interact in a unified system. Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 from industry heavyweights have validated this approach. HyperOffice however offers the best solution with a laser focus towards SMBs.

The Product

Without doubt, 2010 proved to be the year when HyperOffice evolved and grew more than ever before in its more than 10 year history.

Late in 2009 we released the beta version of the biggest ever overhaul of our HyperOffice Collaboration Suite, rebuilding it ground up in AJAX. Over early 2010, we put the beta through months of rigorous testing, made hundreds of enhancements and thousands of bug fixes, before finally making it widely available. Apart from a completely redesigned modern interface and more tightly integrated features, our users get countless new features like full text search, color coded calendars, database applications and web forms, wikis, drag and drop publisher and more.

Keeping with the mobility revolution, push messaging was a natural extension to HyperOffice’s capabilities. Although HyperOffice was already optimized and available on mobile browsers, we increasingly found users wanting solutions which leveraged their mobile phone’s native mail, calendar and address book applications. Moreover, most solutions in the market work only with single devices, or require expensive server based implementations. To fill this gap, HyperSynch was born, a mobile messaging add-on to HyperOffice which allows users to push, sync and share mail, contacts, calendars and tasks across mobile platforms including iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Nokia, Android and more.

Since the mega upgrade, HyperOffice has undergone four upgrade cycles implementing more than a 100 customer requested enhancements. Most notably, we bolstered our project management features. HyperOffice is now a full blown project management solution with sophisticated project management features like task dependencies and interactive Gantt charts to handle complex projects. New features like the ability to convert email to tasks demonstrate the benefits of having integrated messaging and collaboration and tools.

The Brand

HyperOffice’s developments have caught the attention of end users and tech experts alike, and our brand is stronger than ever. HyperOffice is one of the most well recognized names in a jam packed online collaboration market. Our developments kept making it to leading publications such as NY Times, ZDNet, GigaOM, Entrepreneur.com, CMS Wire, eWeek, Information Week, MSP Mentor, PC Magazine, PC Today, Information Today, Small Biz Mag and more.

“Can HyperOffice out simplify Google Apps?” asked Christopher Dawson of ZDNet. PC Magazine listed HyperOffice as one of the “Top 10 Apps that can make you productive”. “HyperOffice to Take on Google Apps, Microsoft Web Apps?” was CMSWire’s reaction to our mega upgrade. HyperOffice was compared to MS SharePoint in Entrepreneur.com’s “Collaboration or aggravation?”

HyperOffice was reviewed by Edward Mendelson, an eminent software reviewer for PC Mag, known for his rigorous analysis of solutions. We were more than glad with his comments – “Overall, I was deeply impressed by HyperOffice’s depth of features, tight integration of all its elements, sleek appearance, and crack support team that was admirably responsive in both acknowledging the problems I discovered, and in many cases, fixing them almost as fast as I reported them.”, and that some of our key messaging points were echoed in his review – “Bottom Line – (HyperOffice is) A fully hosted alternative to building your own Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint servers.”

As one of the oldest players and thought leaders in the SaaS collaboration market, the opinions of our leaders were frequently sought by analysts and experts. Shahab Kaviani, our Executive Vice President Marketing and Product Marketing was one of the panelists in Small Business Tech Magazines nation wide SMB Tech Tour. Phil Wainwright, one of the leading minds on SaaS, interviewed Shahab for his podcast series on ebizQ. Shahab was also interviewed by Laurie McCabe of the SMB Group, as by Peter Radinski and Rich Tehrani from TMCNet.

HyperOffice was also one of the solutions covered by SMB Group’s study “Moving Beyond Email: The Era of SMB Online Collaboration Suites” along with eminent names like Google Apps, Microsoft BPOS, IBM LotusLive, VMWare’s Zimbra and more.

In Conclusion

The ultimate test of any solution are its users. The SaaS game is not only about getting new users, but keeping and satisfying current users. We believe we did a great job of that this year, by making an effort to provide them great service in addition to great technology.

2010 was a year of great satisfaction, a testimony to everyone’s effort in development, service, marketing, sales and administration. But our eyes are now firmly focused towards the future. We’ve got all the right cards – experience, technology, and brand – and when the cloud surge takes place in 2011, we want to ride it right at the crest.



SMB Group, a premier consultancy group which specializes in analyzing and researching the SMB market, recently released its study “Moving Beyond Email—The Era of SMB Online Collaboration Suites”.

The SMB Group brings deep expertise in how latest technology trends impact how SMBs operate and compete. The study follows the increasing importance of distributed collaboration in SMBs, and the consequent increase in use of collaboration technology. According to Laurie McCabe, co author of the report: -

“Until recently, most small and medium businesses (SMBs) could get along just fine with a few tools such as email, calendars, document sharing, and the good old telephone. But today, many SMBs are finding that they need more effective collaboration tools to share knowledge, streamline processes, and keep everyone in the organization “on the same page”. They need to make information easier to find, share, and use as well as to connect with the right people at the right time—on any device”

As Laurie points out, email is no longer the collaboration tool of choice, and workers have moved their many of their collaboration activities to other tools. But it is not an either or situation, as email continues to be important, as most of us can testify. Keeping in mind this close relationship in mind, we had started offering integrated email and collaboration tools. In the past couple of years Google and Microsoft have also entered the arena with Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS, making the “communication and collaboration” space well defined.

An SMB Group survey found that a quarter of SMBs intend to invest in collaboration software in the coming 12 months. And the online, or “software as a service” model for collaboration solutions is ideal for SMBs because it has been designed for their specific needs and budgets.

Recently, have been numerous reports on the SaaS market by Forrester, Gartner, McKinsey, IDG and AMI on the SaaS market in general, but none deals with the online collaboration market in such detail.

The study brings more than abstract, high level information of the kind that SMBs find particularly hard to digest. The report brings a detailed assessment of the top 8 players in the online collaboration suite category. We are more than pleased that HyperOffice has been featured in a lineup that includes names like Google, Microsoft and IBM.

The intuitive “SMB Readiness Grid” compares the eight vendors in terms of their marketing strategies, solution capabilities, service offerings, and differentiation for the SMB market.

In addition, the report also brings interviews of SMB customers who have used these suites.

The purpose of the grid is not just a feature assessment of the suites, but their fit for the SMB market. We believe HyperOffice will stand out in this respect because Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps are more focused towards the more profitable enterprise segment, while our bread and butter comes from SMBs, around whom we have developed our solutions.

Journalists interested the SMB market will find bountiful insights in this research, and of course, SMBs will find it immensely useful is devising their collaboration strategy. You can download the research abstract here, and find further details on how to purchase the report.

We’ve been busy this summer rolling out our second update since releasing the modern AJAX interface. Most product improvements and fixes have been reported by our users. You, as our clients, are a major part of the development process and the feedback guarantees the best collaboration suite on the planet. Here are some of the highlights in this upgrade.

Email

1. Convert an email to a task directly from the mail module. Simply click the task icon beside the email subject, and add it to your personal to-do task list, or move it into the project management system.

This small feature will drive big improvements in solving your overstuffed inbox problem. No more hunting for to-dos and team tasks in your inbox. No more missed tasks. Not only does this clear your in-box, but you get additional management tools your inbox doesn’t offer such as progress tracking, status updates, task priorities, assign and notify, etc.

2. Preview attachments. A “preview” button beside your attachment let’s you take a quick look at the attachment before you send it. This will help you when you need to make doubly sure that you are sending out the right file and the right version.

Project Management

1. Subscribe to a project. If you are part of a project you want to keep top of, or simply want to track a project you are interested in, simply click on “subscribe”. You will be notified of all changes to the project including the addition of new tasks and changes to tasks already contained within the project.

2. Task assignees are now notified when a task is completed. Whenever the status of a task is changed to “complete”, everyone who was assigned to the task will be automatically notified, and they can heave a sigh of relief.

Contacts

1. Copy text directly from the contacts screen using the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste.

2. The issue in contact management where all categories were not listed has been corrected.

3. When modifying the headers in the contacts module, you may now view up to 10 columns at once.

Personal Desktop

1. Improved the personal desktop settings area. The screens are more intuitive and settings easier to manage.

2. You can now filter and adjust what tasks are seen on your personal desktop. You can view all tasks assigned to you in every group for example. Simply click the “Modify Desktop” button at the top right hand corner of the personal desktop if this is permitted by your administrator. Then click the settings gear icon located near the title of the tasks component.

Site Publisher

1. System templates. You get to choose from a number of pre-built templates whenever you want to design a new homepage in Publisher. We have built templates for a number of contexts – landing page, navigation page, informational page etc. – which can just start adding your logo and content to.

Forums

1. Fixed bug that limited the number of posts

General

1. The print button is now working in all sections