Weblog HOMMES & PROCESS - English Edition

2010, Happy New Year

Celebrate New Year time with HOMMES & PROCESS, get GrooveIT! Suite holydays discount until January 5th. Enter coupon code "grooveit2009" on our webstore: - US$ 10 and - US$ 20.

The GrooveIT! Team wishes you a Merry Christmas!

Did you discover the 2009 new GrooveIT! Solutions? A range of enterprise-ready collaboration applications that integrates with Microsoft Office Groove 2007 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System helping people work together more efficiently. Celebrate Christmas time with HOMMES & PROCESS, get GrooveIT! Suite holydays discount until January 5th. Enter coupon code "grooveit2009" on our webstore: - Essentials Edition - OR - Professional Edition -

Enter coupon code "grooveit2009" on solutions.hommesetprocess.com

Choose the GrooveIT! Suite Essentials Edition to get more efficiency and more flexibility

From now on the HOMMES & PROCESS team proposes a choice of GrooveIT! editions corresponding to your individual use:

Discover the GrooveIT! Suite Essentials Edition, a powerful concentration of the GrooveIT! range which includes:

• GrooveIT! for Microsoft Outlook Office
• GrooveIT! for Microsoft SharePoint Office

You can also benefit from another advantage: You buy a perpetual license from $59.00 and you benefit from the technical and evaluative support during 3 years.

GrooveIT! Solutions accelerate your personal productivity in profit from the team’s productivity. Effective and easy to use, the GrooveIT! products allow you to benefit from the power of Microsoft Groove Office 2007 workspaces and as soon Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010, linking with your daily work tools. 

Discover and try the GrooveIT! Suite Essentials Edition
 

Green growth and collaborative work

While the Copenhagen international congress is starting, the expectations seem to be quite encouraging in spite of the actual global economic context.

Indeed, the International Labour Organization forecasts 3.5 million jobs being created between now and 2020, in the construction industry, thanks to the new technologies and approaches for sustainable building projects in Europe and the United States.

According to this same survey, in the said period, at least 20 million now posts would be created in the renewable energies sector all over the world.

The United States plan to create 1.7 million jobs following new government legislation with the
« American Clean Energy and Security act », passed in congress in June 2009.

HOMMES & PROCESS support this kind of approach and try to contribute in proposing an offer for every profession and each sector of activity, the deployment of collaborative solutions will allow for a reduction in energy consummation, facilitating resource optimization.

 

Discover our collaborative and mobile solutions:

http://solutions.hommesetprocess.com/collaborative-solutions.

Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010: the Beta version is at last available to the general public

Some months ago Microsoft announced that “Microsoft Groove Office 2007” will become “Microsft SharePoint Workspace 2010” in their next version.

SharePoint Workspace 2010 is now publicly available as a beta version, try the solution in prime time: http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx

Workspace Dashboard: a single place to manage offline and online collaboration with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® and Microsoft® Office Groove®.

HOMMES & PROCESS launches a new Groove Workspace solution called Workspace Dashboard. Workspace Dashboard is dedicated to organizing and scheduling team projects within Microsoft Office SharePoint. Using a single dashboard, it also provides a social mapping tool allowing human resources departments to analyze social networks within their organizations.

Workspace Dashboard enables the creation of projects sites within SharePoint and can also generate templates for Microsoft Office Groove workspaces which will be used to coordinate and standardize online and offline collaboration.

Key benefits

Online collaboration or centralized mode with SharePoint enables:

• Convenient supervision
• Usage reporting
• Project life cycle management

Offline collaboartion, or decentralized mode, with Office Groove 2007 enables:

• Mobile teams collaboration (without or bad internet connection)
• Agile teamwork – Cross-organization projects
• Security is always on – encrypted data storage and transfer.

 

How does it work?

The main site enables users to search for existing projects and easily view the most recent changes. A collaborator can join a project or create a new one when this is an authorized option. A new project involves the creation of a new SharePoint project site and new Groove Workspaces. The project manager will then be able to invite his/her team members, assign them roles and give them access to the SharePoint site or to the Groove workspace(s) or both.

Each project site allows working with documents, files and/or business forms. These data are  synchronized in the corresponding Groove workspace. Also workspace member management can be handled by project: member invitations, role assignments, project access management.

According to the project requirements and defined user rights, a project member can work within the SharePoint project site or within Groove workspaces. When a project has terminated, it can be closed and archived. When needed, a project can be easily restored on request.

The Groove workspace reflects the content of the SharePoint site. It enables mobile and offline use. Additional tools are available if needed for mobile users.

The social mapping tool can help Human Resources departments identify the links between users, learn about who is working with whom, view the most successful projects and identify expert profiles within the organization. This kind of valuable information translated into graphical schemes can help make the right decisions when dealing with Human Resources.

A capacity planning functionality is available to help managers, analyze application use, plan the resources needed to make it work better and make sure users get the required service level at controlled costs.

Learn more about Workspace Dashboard solution

Discover the range dedicated to the managers

Expert Solutions: Trusted Domain Services and Backup Enforcer solution

Discover expert solutions by HOMMES & PROCESS to benefit from:

• Centralized management of Groove users
• Secure data transactions
• Corporate policy compliance
• Enterprise intellectual property protection

Management solutions by HOMMES & PROCESS

• Trusted domain services

Trusted domain services permit the creation of managed Groove environments that can be customized for user teams that complies with corporate standards security policies.

Discover the advantages of the Trusted domain services

 

Backup Solutions by HOMMES & PROCESS

The HOMMES & PROCESS backup solutions assure that all Groove workspaces are properly backed up, allowing data recovery at any time.  Groove users invite a backup agent into their workspaces in order to make sure they will be correctly backed up.

The challenge:
Make sure Groove users have invited or will invite the company’s backup agent into all existing workspaces.

• Back up Enforcer

The Backup Enforcer solution(1) eliminates the risk of omission as it checks the backup agent’s presence in each and every workspace. When Backup Enforcer does not find the backup agent in a workspace, it automatically sends an invitation to the domain’s backup agent.

IT administrators will be reassured knowing that all Groove data are correctly backed up thanks to the Backup Enforcer. Moreover, this makes for compliance to corporate policies while at the same time end users do not have to bother about backups.

Finally, HOMMES & PROCESS can help organizations implement and maintain their Groove backup infrastructure.

Learn more about Backup Enforcer

Contact us about Backup Enforcer or Trusted domain service

(1)Requirement: A Groove Backup Server must be already in place and a backup agent invited into each workspace.

Collaborative Information System: centralized or decentralized?

Jean-Michel Davault and Fabrice Barbin, both MVP Groove experts, have recently co-signed an article published in the French IT magazine “IT-Expert” for its September / October edition 2009. The article entitled “Collaborative SI: centralized versus decentralized” deals with the advantages and limits of Centralized and Decentralized information systems. Following this analysis, both authors propose their conception of company information systems, allowing for a solution which balances usage and a company’s IT resource management.

Centralized architectures play an important role in the approach of business intelligence, in particular in the capitalization of strategic information within the company.
In contrast, decentralized information systems which are often more agile, allow a better reactivity and a better adequacy with the open and distributed aspects of companies (in particular for telecommuting workers, mobile collaborators and within environments with limited connectivity).

1. Centralized architectures

Advantages :

• Economy of scale
  Objective: To realize resource pooling and consolidation (technical and human resources)
  Result: Shared resources allow more competitive costing and constitute financial and organizational benefits
• An exhaustive and strategic information structure
  The centralization of information allows for the creation and improvement of the company’s knowledge capital.
• Simplified access and security
  Centralization facilitates information accessibility. Indeed, security policy definition (including the access authorization) has been simplified and in most environments is consultable in real time.
• Integrity and uniqueness of information
  The centralization facilitates the creation of a global referential, in assuring the uniqueness of the information and in simplifying the control of integrity. Indeed seeing that the resources are in local access, technical verifications can be made in real time.

But centralized architecture presents some limits…

In the article, the authors make a point of noting that despite the advantages of centralized architectures, company information systems need to be more open and intelligent. New needs are emerging today, for tomorrow, aligning work and organizational trends:  mobiles workers or dispersed collaborators in multiple sites, telecommuting workers, workers without enough network bandwidth work or unreliable connectivity, etc.

A decentralized information system adapts itself better to the changes linked to the economic fluctuations.

2. Decentralized architecture

Advantages

With a decentralized approach, users can immediately access pertinent and exploitable information even without a network connection.
From a technical and organizational point of view, this approach is interesting for mobile users. Indeed this model ensures information availability and resource continuity even if in case of a network problem, while securing the company data and its access (contribution, copyright, electronically certificate…). Moreover this approach leans on the matrix management model and not a hierarchical model.

But organization and coordination are necessary. In spite of its advantages the decentralized approaches present several limits:

• The lack of supervision and control
• In a professional context, rules must be respected (technical and organizational)
• Security and sharing information must be verified (norms, indexation, etc.)

Illustration of a mixed approach through the Microsoft collaborative solutions

Finally the article concludes on the complimentarily of the Microsoft collaborative solutions: Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Groove and Microsoft Services Online.

The complimentarily of this solution is a positive illustration of a mixed information system, allowing companies to improve its capacity of knowledge management in a strategic objective.

These technical solutions associated with HOMMES & PROCESS’s expertise allows possible global solutions, agile and efficient, linking up management requirements in the company and the best practices for the users and the collaborators.

Social network: Visibility and stakes

The social networking takes a significant part in the web 3.0 phenomenon. They are many different profiles and their authors come from the all social strata. But we shall be reserved about this fact. Indeed, a sociology survey which reveals your “web appeal” by analyzing your habits in the social networks shows that the amount of private information available for a profile depends on the social background.

In summary, the global trend shows the degree of exhibition fluctuates accordingly to the social and cultural background. So people white collars would publish more personal information than the executives and the company managers. This behavior could be explained by a will to enlarge their network beyond their social background.

Indeed to build an efficient social network through the web, one must define his own objectives first, personal or professional, public or chosen network, uncontrolled or secured. Office Groove 2007 and SharePoint Workspace 2010 enable secure social networking for business for those who are looking for solutions that let them control their own data without compromises.

In the professional context, Microsoft Groove Office is a secured professional network which allows an efficient collaboration and interaction between business contacts and identified users.

Learn more

How can organizational and technical innovation help to get out the crisis?

Whereas economists and governments are trying to forecast when and how will the current crisis end, at     HOMMES & PROCESS we propose solutions, a sum of both organizational and technical innovations, which help organizations improve their competitiveness during those hard times and get ready when better times are back.

Which are the expected scenarios to get out of the crisis?

Economists differentiate three possible scenarii to get out crisis:

• The "V" Scenario: Growth is back immediately after the depression

• The “U” Scenario”: Recession lasts longer than in the “V” scenario but growth begins immediately afterwards
• The “W” Scenario: recession periods are followed up by short growth periods that are too weak to last.

Recently, several economists warned that we must remain careful, that the crisis might not be finished. According to OCDE and the IMF, growth may remain negative until the end of 2009.

Is it worth investing in innovation during down times?

Innovation is one of the key to stay ahead and prepare for the future, when it creates real value. However decision-makers ask themselves:

“how do I do to invest in innovative solutions when jobs are in danger?”

At the same time, some values and principles such as trust, responsibility and team spirit become top priorities. These core values must be taken into consideration within the organization but also in the relationships with external organizations (customers, partners, co-contractors etc.).

To improve competitiveness, organizations must define their own strategy first, then have their employees committed to the corporate strategy.

 

At HOMMES & PROCESS, besides helping organizations implement new technologies, we can help with change management for a smooth transition period and successful human implementation of new teamwork methods.