WebEx: Ideas in Motion

Supporting Our Troops

As happy a time as the holidays are, they can also be very stressful, especially for families with loved ones fighting the war in Iraq.  Although we’ve seen several stories in the media this year about soldiers’ blogging and IM’ing their loved ones, the reality is staying in touch with family and friends is a real challenge. Telephone availability, cell and satellite phone service and email can be inconsistent and the time differences can make even simple interactions difficult.

To help soldiers stationed overseas stay connected, WebEx has donated its WebEx WebOffice service. Free to all soldiers stationed outside the U.S., these WebEx WebOffices provide a free, private web site for members of the armed forces and their families to meet, share letters, photos, documents, sound and video clips, and even term papers and report cards.

Each WebEx WebOffice is private, so the significant time differences aren’t a problem since users can leave messages and files on the site at anytime and then meet live when available. They provide a place where a soldier can talk to his wife and daughter in Texas, his parents in Idaho and his friends in California. Users can customize the site to their liking and since it’s WebEx, it’s all very secure and reliable.

Interestingly, we started this program several years ago after being contacted by several soldiers who used WebEx in their civilian lives to solve identical remote collaboration issues.

You can get more information here.

Colin Smith
Dir, Corporate Communications
colin.smith@webex.com

IM is growing up...

Looks like IM is “growing up.” No longer just the fun, personal mode of quick back and forth chat we’re all used to at home. It has finally found its place in the business world.

With its new home in the enterprise, IM is not just IM. Nope. IM has taken on many other features – desktop sharing, group chats, file sharing, VoIP, video conference calls and the like. IM is integrated with other desktop applications that found its home in the enterprise years ago like email and calendaring.

Being “grown up”, however means that IM has become official business communications and with that distinction comes a whole host of requirements to centrally control, secure, audit, archive and retrieve it. Yes, this is the big, bad IT staff looking over your shoulder. And, arguably, with good reason. Corporate governance is a real requirement. And IT holds a lot of that responsibility in the electronic communications world.

Case in point, check out a recent news story making headlines just a week ago -

“New Rules Make Firms Track E-Mails, IMs.” U.S. companies will need to keep track of all the e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees thanks to new federal rules that go into effect Friday, legal experts say.

The rules, approved by the Supreme Court in April, require companies and other entities involved in federal litigation to produce "electronically stored information" as part of the discovery process, when evidence is shared by both sides before a trial.

It has been long theorized that IM should fall under the company’s electronic communications requirement for storage, archival and retrieval. Those suspicions have been realized. And if you’re not doing anything about the IM software your employees are using today, well, it’s probably about time you did.

Security. Control. Auditability. Archival and retrieval. Basic requirements for any business instant messaging solution. Time to get to it.

Linda De Los Reyes, sr. product marketing manager, WebEx AIM Pro BE

Information Technologists: Can you trust On-Demand?

With any I.T. system, a good measure of its quality of service is how many support calls are received by the help desk afte the ‘go-live date. Combined with backend patches, repairs and downtime, a poor implementation could dash ROI expectations while underestimating TCO early on.

Often, the burden to rollout, train, support and maintain an I.T. system falls squarely on the I.T. team’s shoulders. Finding and evaluating the right package that will do the job are only a part of the solution. Fitting capabilities to business needs and aligning and training teams on usage make up the majority of the challenge.

Solutions that include fluent support and training, high availability and business process expertise minimize the greatest risk to ROI. TCO may be enhanced by engaging with vendors who provide an on-demand, hosted, multi-tenant and feature-rich stack running on a global, private infrastructure. Costs are mimized when care and feeding of the solution are left to the service provider whose stake in maintaining uptime far exceeds that of any one customer.

A top reason for massive migration to SaaS/On-Demand today is the combinatorial issues of ease of use, rapid deployment and ongoing maintanance. These are vastly improved by the service provider experienced with many successful integrations of their solution. When looking for a vendor you can trust, ask yourself “Does this provider know what successful business integrations look like”?

Once a proven, high-availability provider enters the scene with a rich services offering, securely managed for your organization and architected for the purposes it was intended, I.T. can begin to worry a lot less. Costs also go down as a result of spending less time maintaining and supporting the solution yourself.

SaaS/On-demand applications, if properly architected and provisioned, tend to be more reliable, scalable and maintainable. Service-providers bring great resources to bear on these applications in order to guarantee the highest quality of service, performance and business integration possible.

Trust is self-legislated in this scenario with the service provider compelled to provide the highest quality of service on behalf of its entire customer base and not just a single consuming organization.

Steven Levine

Technical Marketing Manager

Product Marketing Group

WebEx Communications

www.webex.com

steven.levine@webex.com

Successful eLearning: It’s more than introducing a new technology

Just about any eLearning blog out there features in-depth discussion about leveraging technology to move training online. What I don't see enough of, however, is a discussion about the important considerations – outside of technology - that can make or break our online training efforts. Many of our instructors, much of our content and many of our learners, for example, are not prepared to simply turn on a dime and transition from traditional to online training.  Yes - web-collaboration technology is something organizations should embrace to step their training up to the next level – BUT, overdependence on a seemingly simple “plug-and-play” approach puts us at risk of crippling the potential this technology can bring. 

That said - we must make sure our organizations are ready to employ an eLearning strategy, making certain our learning objectives are defined, measurable and capable of being executed via the web.  We also have to take an honest look at our resources:  can we truly afford to have our staff take on the challenge of transitioning to a web-touch learning environment, and still manage day-to-day responsibilities? If we can't commit our resources – do we need help from domain experts to guide us along the way?

Content is another essential factor to consider because repositioning existing content is easier said than done.  It's critical that we become educated on “web-writing” that is bulleted and formatted for online delivery.  We see situations all the time where it’s assumed that classroom content can be pushed online without a hiccup and that is simply not true.  Just like traditional learning channels, we must continue to cross-check content designed for online delivery with subject matter experts and members of our sample audience that can help us reinforce our message and intended teachings.

Transforming from traditional to web-based training practices is not easy, especially if process uncertainty and/or resource constraints are a factor.  Afterall - truly successful eLearning practices can only occur with the right combination of people, process & technology.

Jon Madsen

Product Marketing Manager

jon.madsen@webex.com