The Evolution of Social Collaboration within the Enterprise

We’ve been talking a lot lately about how technology is changing the way we do work. It no longer matters where we work but how we work. We work in a constantly changing, ever-mobile work environment, which embraces new technologies, policies and work spaces. This new way of working demands a more collaborative approach to [...]

Enterprise Social Technologies to Power Innovation – Part Two

In part one of this two part series we defined what innovation means in the context of enterprise social and the traditional Engage, Evolve, Evaluate, Execute model.  At a high level, innovation managed through a social tool can be represented as a pipeline not unlike traditional R&D-driven ideation cycles, again aligning with our four step [...]

The Three Frontiers of Social Collaboration

It seems to me that today’s organizations are demanding more and more from their employees, who are also increasingly becoming information workers. They consume increasing amounts of information and context and they are expected to be constantly informed while producing faster results and making better decisions.  It also seems that the employees themselves are expecting [...]

Enterprise Social Technologies to Power Innovation – Part One

In this two part series, we’ll take a look at leveraging new Enterprise Social Technologies to manage ideation and ultimately to realize innovation in today’s modern companies.   The value of fostering innovation is undeniable.  By definition, innovation most traditionally results in the creation of a novel market-ready product or service, or in ideas aimed [...]

Social Collaboration: The New Reality for 21st Century Companies

Only 7 years ago, in 2005, I remember two co-workers staring at a computer screen and I wasn’t sure what they were looking at. Turns out they were watching someone dance on a site called YouTube. I had no idea what they were talking about, now everybody on the planet knows YouTube. Facebook crossed the 1 billion [...]

Avanade to Show Up in Force at SPTechCon

When SP TechCon 2013 was announced, I got really excited because I love SharePoint and I love San Francisco. Right there, I had my favorite platform in my favorite city combined in one neat package. We are ready to be there in force this year and the Avanade team has been preparing for the event [...]

Avanade Ranked a Top SharePoint Service Provider by Gartner

Being involved with SharePoint over the past seven years, I’ve been a faithful user of the platform. After attending the SharePoint Conference in 2012, I was enthusiastic about the capabilities and the tremendous improvements in terms of social collaboration, business intelligence, and all of the other aspects of SharePoint. I sat in session after session [...]

A New Beginning for Azaleos Managed Services

Azaleos has come a long way since its founding in 2004.   After just six years in business, we had surpassed 500,000 subscribers and built a solid reputation on our Exchange legacy.   Just one year later, the company ranked #28 in Deloitte’s FAST 500, and then—in 2012—listed #14 in the global Managed Service Provider ranking. [...]

Welcome Azaleos to Avanade

Some of you may have seen our news that we have completed our acquisition of Azaleos. Over the past eight years, Azaleos has built a reputation for offering private managed cloud services using advanced technology to remotely monitor and proactively manage email, collaboration, and unified communications systems … at very high service levels that large [...]

How Do You Measure Your Collaboration Efforts?

You have defined your collaboration and social networking strategy and have high expectations for business results. After the implementation, your analysis of the platform consist of only very technical metrics such as number of page views or gigabytes of content. What if you could continuously measure the real impact of the platform, in business terms? [...]