Rethinking collaboration: 6 new alternatives to remote work
With the need for efficient collaboration tools exploding in recent months, a variety of companies hope to refine how those tools work and what they can do. We look at six now pushing the envelope. Thinkstock Keeping employees connected and working productively has become the glue holding many businesses together during the COVID-19 pandemic. And with social distancing ruling out face-to-face meetings anytime soon, the need for new digital tools to help teams collaborate better has soared. In addition to…
How to have Teams meetings with people outside your organization
Microsoft Teams was designed for collaboration with colleagues in your own company, but that makes it harder to meet with other people. Many organizations rely on Microsoft Teams to conduct voice and video calls, since it is part of the commonly deployed Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites. Although other videoconferencing systems are better, Teams adds little to no cost to the IT budget, so it is fast becoming the corporate standard. But Teams is designed for internal team communications —…
How to go incognito in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari
While ‘incognito’ mode in any of the big four web browsers offers a measure of privacy, it doesn’t completely hide your tracks online. Here’s how the feature works, and how to use it. Thinkstock Private browsing. Incognito. Privacy mode. Web browser functions like those trace their roots back more than a decade, and the feature — first found in a top browser in 2005 — spread quickly as one copied another, made tweaks and minor improvements. But privacy-promising labels can…
4 tips for getting the business to stop hating IT
Long seen as back-office problem solvers and the department of ‘no,’ IT still has an image problem with business executives and users alike. Here’s how to fix it. Andre Hunter (CC0) A few months ago, the IT department at networking systems company Ciena had a virtual all-hands meeting. Although the meeting was led by the IT department and its roughly 350 employees, all of Ciena’s 6,500 employees were invited to join. The meeting was a company-wide rollout and test of…
How PaaS could drive sustainability into the PC market
IT buyers have long wanted a true PaaS (PCs-as-a-Service) option, and, more recently, high sustainability products from their tech suppliers. The PaaS model, done right, potentially provides both. Getty Images PaaS, or “PCs-as-a-Service,” is a concept we’ve been chasing under different terms ever since we moved from mainframes and terminals. The irony is that back when the mainframe was dominant, computing was a service. You didn’t initially buy a mainframe; you leased it and effectively paid for monthly. Then…
Is the coronavirus the genuine Chief Digital Officer?
IT veteran and academic Josef Langerman, head of engineering capability and ways of working at Standard Bank Group, explores how organisational change helps businesses deal with crises. RomoloTavani / VladimirTimofeev / Getty Images With the business landscape evolving as a result of COVID-19, organisational change is becoming more important as a way of helping businesses adopt new strategies and modes of working. We discussed why transformational charge is so hard, and technologies that support remote work during the current crisis,…
Facebook’s Workplace embraces video, amid pandemic
At the same time CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new remote work policy, Facebook moved to strengthen the collaboration capabilities in Workplace to meet growing demand. Facebook Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise collaboration offering, got a variety of new features this week designed to strengthen the platform and help users better collaborate during the ongoing pandemic. As for Workplace, Facebook said the app now has more than 5 million paid users – with 2 million added since October 2019. That pace of growth is in line…
Amid the pandemic, using trust to fight shadow IT
With most workers scattered at home and trying to come up with their own ad-hoc IT workarounds, there’s an easy way for IT shops to build trust: communicate. Warren Wong (CC0) Shadow IT, where workers sometimes go rogue in their efforts to solve business problems, can create challenges – and opportunities – for companies in the best of times. With the COVID-19 pandemic still unfolding, these are not the best of times. With most employees and executives still working from home,…
