How internal social networks boost workplace innovation

used with permission from MSFT for Work

Your business may already be tapping into social networks to analyze data and make real-time adjustments. But it's time to turn the tables and bring the same people-powered network to your office. While the issue raises productivity concerns—will employees spend more time socializing than doing work—social tools are actually shown to increase output. Businesses applying this trend to their work environments are finding that working like a network spurs more creative thinking, idea-sharing, and ultimately, business innovation.

Transparency across departments

You may not need, or want, to know everything that's going on in your business, but having the information readily accessible for employees companywide can bring about collaboration and help avoid duplicated work efforts. It's about moving away from silos and thinking in terms of systems. This means that while your business will probably continue to have individual teams, each team needs to open itself up to collaboration with other teams as a way to advance business goals instead of department goals.
In doing this, your business can promote more information discovery and delivery. Employees at all levels of the organization can discuss ideas, share information, ask questions, and provide updates. Your business is full of experts in various areas, and social channels are another way for employees to share skills, knowledge, and learn—about each other and what's going on in the business. Having a place to collect this information can also give your business a better understanding of how employees across different departments approach problems or look at a situation. It can help teams develop better ways to communicate and work together for a common cause.

Adapt to employee needs

You're listening to your customers (or at least you should be), but are you engaging in social conversation with your employees? Internal social channels can provide a place for employees to get information and stay in the loop. They also provide a place for ideas and feedback. Giving a voice to employees allows them to be heard, especially if you can incorporate the feedback into real-time changes, or resolve conflicts before they arise. This can help you meet their changing needs and ensure that top talent stays with your organization. When employees feel more connected to your organization, they can better understand its business goals and direction.

Grow business faster

Social, collaboration, and communication tools give your employees the power to get work done anywhere, on any device. Instant messaging tools can connect colleagues for immediate answers, while sharing documents lets workers collaborate in real time on projects. Giving employees a place to voice seemingly crazy ideas can, in the end, help your business capitalize on new opportunities and deliver better customer experiences. As long as you have policies in place for internal and external social media, your organization can expect the same high level of work, while raising the bar for innovation.
And remember: Implementing social solutions doesn't have to be complicated. You can seamlessly weave tools, such as Yammer and Office 365, into how you and your employees already work. Check out how these cloud-based applications and others are already helping businesses connect to colleagues and easily share information across teams.

Have you seen the Cisco Internet-connected billboard that delivers messages based on traffic conditions?

You’ve heard us talk a lot about the major value at stake – or increased revenue and reduced business costs – around the Internet of Everything (IoE) for the public sector and various industries including retail, healthcare and manufacturing. But what about the one nearest and dearest to my heart — the marketing and advertising industry?

Cisco has identified a $1.95T value at stake for advertising and marketing organizations that harness the potential of the IoE.  Companies will realize this value by becoming more connected with their customers and delivering individually targeted messages and offers to them on any device, at any time and at any location.

And today Cisco is becoming more connected with its customers and showcasing IoE in a way we never have before by launching our first ever billboard…connected to the Internet. Read More.

Social Media & Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Tips

 

There's no doubt about it - social media is changing the way we communicate. These online tools, once thought to be for personal use only, have asserted their dominance in times of emergency as go-to sources for news and updates.

Here are two great resources to help bring sense to this subject. Check out this on-demand webinar "Social Media & Disaster Recovery" and this blog post, "The Link between Crisis Management and Social Media."

Warning: Internet Explorer Hack Discovered

 

A new zero-day attack is targeting Internet Explorer users, prompting a warning from Microsoft. The zero-day threat is targeting a flaw in all versions of the browser, including Internet Explorer 6 / Windows XP, and could allow remote code execution. An attacker could host a specially crafted website that is designed to exploit this vulnerability through Internet Explorer and then convince a user to view the website. You can read more about it here.

Is a fix coming?

Due to the end of support for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, which include Internet Explorer 6, there will not be a security fix for Internet Explorer 6 to patch this vulnerability. If you are running XP and/or Server 2003, we recommend that you upgrade as soon as possible to Windows 7/8.1 and Server 2012. This is only the first of multiple vulnerabilities and "hacker's paradise" type scenarios that experts are predict will endanger XP users' security.
If you are running a later version of Windows and use Internet Explorer versions 7 through 11, you can expect that a fix will eventually patch this vulnerability. There are circumstances that mitigate this vulnerability and Microsoft has also listed some Suggested Action and workarounds for the meantime.

What should you do?

We strongly encourage you to not use Internet Explorer until this vulnerability is fixed; use a different web browser such as Firefox or Chrome. This hack is dependent on Adobe Flash as well, so disable Adobe Flash on your machines.
If you would like assistance in upgrading systems with XP or Server 2003, please contact Emerge for help at 859-746-1030.

Gain Operational Simplicity With Lower Costs

(see bottom for IWAN Lunch & Learn information)

Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) delivers an uncompromised user experience over any connection. Now, you can benefit from the right-size connections for your branch offices, while gaining operational simplicity with lower costs.

Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) At a Glance

With Cisco IWAN, you can:

• Optimize your WAN use to increase ROI, as IWAN helps IT fully use their WAN investments, and avoid oversubscription of lines. The growth of new cloud traffic, guest services, and video can be easily load balanced across multiple WAN lines.

• Support provider flexibility to lower costs and speed up service delivery time, by moving to less expensive transport options without compromising performance, reliability, and security.

• Secure all your branch endpoints, as IWAN can efficiently offload traffic onto the Internet while transparently scaling security.

• Deliver an application-aware network for optimal performance, since IWAN gives IT full visibility and control at the application level (Layer 7), to tune the network for business-critical services, and quickly resolve network issues.

• Apply advanced compression for minimal WAN load, to reduce WAN bandwidth requirements and help applications perform better with the smallest load possible.

• Simplify branch operations, as IWAN delivers comprehensive services on a consolidated platform. It gives IT a scalable approach to remotely manage WAN traffic growth from trends like cloud, mobility, and video on a smaller branch footprint.

Please contact you Emerge representative today for a personal invitation to the June 11th IWAN Lunch and Learn hosted by Emerge and Cisco at Embers in Cincinnati, OH. Space is mimited so call today - 859-746-1030.

Smell the Coffee with the Next Wave of the Internet

 

Used with the permission of http://thenetwork.cisco.com

by Sue Tabbitt

Will touch, smell and taste be part of the Internet of Everything experience? The ‘pervasive computing' department of a UK university recently launched a mobile app capable of transmitting aromas remotely, paving the way for a new era of multi-sensory digital communications.

Experts have plenty of ideas about what will constitute the next wave of the Internet and mobile communications. But in the ‘Pervasive Computing' department of City University London  in the UK, Professor Adrian Cheok and his team are certain this will involve a fuller sensory experience – involving smell, taste and touch.
It is a future that is already starting to take shape. In late January, Professor Cheok took his department's technology to the world-renowned Madrid Fusion culinary festival in Spain, where he unveiled a mobile device and app combination – Scentee – which is capable of emitting food flavors. The technology, developed with a partner in Japan, is believed to be a world first.
Because of the context of the launch, the emphasis at the Madrid festival was the potential for chefs to showcase more of what they do to potential customers - above and beyond photos of their dishes which rarely do their creations justice. But Cheok notes that this is just a glimpse of what's possible.

‘Wish you were here'

Cheok's background is in augmented reality – the type of technology we're seeing now in innovations such as Google Glass. But to achieve a rich simulated reality you need to go beyond audio-visual media, he says. This is also the next area of potential for the Internet, he claims.
"Smell, taste and touch are important means of communication," Cheok explains. "As we move beyond the ‘information age' to an era of sharing experiences, what we want to do is give others more of a sense of ‘being there'."
That means being able to smell the coffee, taste the ice-cream, and feel the touch of another person. Cheok's innovations include ‘huggable pajamas', "so parents/grandparents and kids can feel each other's presence from opposite sides of the world via the Internet," he explains. A more practical, scaled-down version of this is a wearable ring – RingU - that can remotely transmit a squeeze to a loved one's hand (via a Bluetooth 4.0 connection to a smartphone). "Touch is so important for communication, and for times when you can't take a call, receiving a reassuring squeeze via the fingers can mean a lot." Remote ‘kissing' applications are further areas of exploration.
Taste and smell, meanwhile, are important because they are attached to the limbic system and associated parts of the brain that are responsible for emotion, mood and memory. The ability to simulate these sensory experiences at distance has great potential in all sorts of applications, from in-store advertising (for example, assigning wafts of scent to frozen food aisles – of what a product would smell like when cooked), to the use of smell as a memory trigger (with potential use for Alzheimer's patients, and so on).

Emotionally wired

So how does it all work? At this stage the technology is pretty crude, but undoubtedly this will be refined in future iterations, once the mechanics have been perfected.
In a taste scenario, a device with electrodes is used to stimulate taste neurons and taste sensations on the tongue, activated by digitized information sent over the Internet (as chemicals themselves can't be transmitted). Smell, which continues to be a work in progress, is the subject of similar projects, this time applying magnetic fields to the back of the mouth to stimulate the olfactory receptor, again without chemicals. In the case of Scentee, the smelling device is a bit like an inkjet printer, containing sachets of scents, triggered by a smartphone app.
Cheok sees potential for a fuller sensory experience in TV, cinema and art as well as ‘emotional' advertising, medical applications, and remote interpersonal communications. The gaming world will undoubtedly be keen to embrace it too – creating even deeper immersion experiences where players are able to smell the burning rubber during a car chase.
He says his university department in the UK is one of only a few groups of computer scientists globally to be looking seriously at multi-sensory media today. The City University London Pervasive Computing faculty combines several disciplines, from electrical engineering (Cheok's background), to neuroscience.
Cheok has connections to a team in Japan which is doing related work. In particular, a professor in Tokyo is working on new kitchen utensils that can alter the taste of food, for example to artificially make a dish appear sweeter or saltier - without the need to add the actual ingredient. With growing pressure on families and food producers to reduce levels of sugar and salt, this could be a development with both positive health implications and considerable commercial mileage.