I received a review copy of the new The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Collaboration, Q3 2011 by Ted Schadler for Content & Collaboration Professionals. In this research, Forrester evaluated the mobility strengths and weaknesses of 13 vendors in four collaboration categories - document-based collaboration, webconferencing, videoconferencing, and activity streams. Forrester limited the vendors to those with native apps on more than one mobile operating system with a cloud solution and market experience, which means vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, and RIM were not included.
Forrester identified:
Box, IBM, and Yammer as leaders in current offering, determined by how many smartphone and tablet platforms the product runs on and by scores for security, administration, and user reviews. These criteria include: smartphone and tablet platforms as well as the desktop and browser support. Additional criteria were security and administration features. They also relied on a neutral data source — Apple App Store reviews — to evaluate the user experience and popularity of the offerings. Good choice.
Skype, Box, Yammer, and Cisco as leaders in mobile strategy, determined largely by the vendor's strategy for cloud reach and the mobile app architecture (the balance between native apps and cloud services) as well as by the number of years with a mobile solution and the organizational commitment. This category included questions such as: “Does the company have a mobile app Internet architecture with the right balance between cloud services and local apps? Does the mobile development team report to a senior executive? How long has the company had a mobile solution?”
Skype, Cisco, and Google as leaders in mobile market presence scores, determined by the number of paying mobile customers, paying users, and downloads.
They evaluated only the mobile characteristics, not the collaboration category features. The main features were: funding status, enterprise readiness, platform support, and cloud reach. Forrester noted that email has been a “killer” mobile collaboration app since 1998 when RIM first launched BlackBerry. This remains the case as 87% percent of smartphone workers use email on their devices, and collectively they do 32% of their email on a smartphone. There is much more in the report on this fats growing market and I recommend it.
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