| Information has become such a vital asset that people want and need it anytime, anywhere to match their ever-mobile lifestyles and business needs; this fact has pushed Internet and wireless penetration. |
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| Desires for efficiency, simplicity and convenience are common as well, the same rules apply to businesses - they want to operate efficiently, effectively, cut costs and maintain competitiveness, all at the same time. |
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| Email has been a contributor to efficiency gains we have seen since late 1990's; in hindsight, email technology was a pace-setter and created a need far larger than it could fulfill - further enhanced and more mobile communicating and computing needs. A part of that need is fulfilled by services such as Blackberry as it provides one with the critical ability to receive and send emails when and where needed. |
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| Unbeknown, Instant Messaging is become entrenched and the primary means of communication in many industries - IM's let you know who is available and provides real-time 'interaction' capabilities - a feature not possible with email technology |
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| A Case in Point |
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| Brokers and customers at a large financial services company presently use a popular public messenger. Cognizant of its failings, the brokers continue to use this public messenger since it offers the most effective means of communicating in that scenario. The possible threats and security breaches in using public IM's are immense. There are already SEC regulations that require the enterprise to maintain auditable information. This financial services company remains exposed to: Confidential communications with client susceptible to security breaches, No audit trail for orders received and recommendations made on public IM, Limited documentary evidence in event of lawsuits, SEC investigations and penalties for non-conformance. |
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| Solution Description |
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| I Collaborator is multi modal, enterprise-grade messaging platform compatible with consumer grade messaging and SpeechDesk technology platform; I Collaborator as an integration platform is designed to allow interoperability between diverse collaborative and PIM tools through the real-time awareness of people, places and events enabling it for remote access via cellular and landline telephones, PDA's, web browsers, BlackBerry, etc. |
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| I Collaborator provides system wide security of varying strengths depending on the application scenario which addresses issues for a business having non-integrated communication tools and their inherent security risks they present. I Collaborator can be customized for industry-specific usage. The example of I Collaborator DayTrader in Solution In Action below shows usage of I Collaborator in a finance-specific scenario. I Collaborator is available as a business-ready solution for use in Enterprise, Engineering, Finance, and Education. Further business-specific functionality can be provided upon request. |
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| Instant Messaging Framework |
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| An effective collaborative suite brings together a range of features and functionality such as 'presence awareness' (via IM) and chat capabilities such as one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many audio/video/IP conferencing. "However, this handful of features doesn't make a collaboration system enterprise-ready. The problem these systems are trying to solve is the real-time one-to-one and one-to-many collaboration on a single object. People need to be able to look at the same file, such as a word processing document or spreadsheet, make annotations and changes, and save the final version. |
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| More advanced systems can even let users store multiple revisions, letting team members revisit older versions of the file. "Structured" collaboration allows you to categorize, group and track messages, documents, edits, tasks, schedules, etc. in searchable and sortable lists." Keith Schultz is a contributing editor at InternetWeek and President of NetData Consulting Services Inc. He can be reached at kschultz@netdatacs.com. What Ken Schultz describes in the above article is possible with I Collaborator. |
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| Business Needs |
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Industrial grade security |
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Audit trails for analysis and reporting/compliance |
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Secure file transfers |
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Interoperability and compatibility with public IM's |
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Application sharing |
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Collaborative Whiteboard |
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Path to growth and integration |
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Plugins 3rd party applications possible |
| Other features of a real-time collaborative system will be the ability to remotely and interactively brainstorm on documents or a whiteboard, the ability to annotate to help track and edit updates. |
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| Solution in Action – I Collaborator Daytrader |
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| The DayTrader version of I Collaborator provides the ability to connect, display and the ability to react to any stock ticker or other information source that provides market-specific information services. |
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| Within the DayTrader, one can set communication to provide automated alerts on the basis of market-driven events. The DayTrader can also be made to perform actions such as communicate buy or sell orders on pre-defined triggers (i.e. "sell when XYZ reaches $ 23.25 or ZYX increases by 20%"). |
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| I Collaborator DayTrader can connect to any information pool to retrieve trading information and alert you to it while you are not desk-bound, regardless of the communication device you can be accessed at. |
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| I Collaborator DayTrader allows the user true freedom and mobility without losing out on opportunities that normally accrue to desk-bound investors. |
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| Summary |
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| I Collaborator incorporate a powerful suite of communication options. I Collaborator can help an organization and its people to stay connected to one another. I Collaborator dramatically reduce communication costs by allowing instant communication no matter what device you use. Currently I Collaborator supports desktop-to-desktop (voice and text), desktop-to-cell-to-PDA. Future versions will support other portable devices, and household appliances etc |
