General Consultant Discussion

Dropbox has become much more than just a cloud file storage site. The Dropbox for Business and Project Harmony offers some significant document collaboration abilities. I am not a Sharepoint expert, but I suspect that this capability will elminate the lower portion of that app's market. Does anybody here have any commentary on how real this is or where the gotchas in it are? http://bit.ly/TwfuNo

I think much of this is an ecosystem play. Dropbox is great at file storage. Is a company that uses Microsoft Office going to not use OneDrive in favor of DropBox? There's also a billion collaboration tools which use DropBox integration. It's a very competitive market and one which I believe will be won by the strongest ecosystem.

I agree that the collaboration ecosystem is important to success in this commoditizing product space. I was struck by the theme of the video: make things easy again. Certainly MS is aiming at MS-centric shops, and certainly enterprise. But I wonder about the smaller companies, especially $5-50mm, which is SmartBridge's sweet spot. Will they sign up for Yammer? What explicit involvement with Sharpoint doe MS require to provide collaboration within OneDrive? What portion of this market segment will continue to purchase MS Office instead of the 90% functionality offered by Google Docs? I'm looking into the pro's and con's of helping our customers implement modest collaboration tools and processes. At this point, most don't have a clue about the potential for them.

By observation: 1. Most customers say they want this more than they'll actually lift a finger to make it happen 2. See #1 3. So far as I can tell almost all the collaboration platforms have priced themselves in the $3 per user per month ""rack"" rate. That means you could negotiate the rate down in some cases. I've observed that this rate appears on both newcomer and established collaboration sites. My takeaway: Stay with market leaders. It's very rare to find a company that does not use MS Office so unless you want to swim upstream Yammer seems like a good place to start.

Thanks, Wayne. Your analysis fills in my sketchy start to thinking about this!

Unfortunately tools like Yammer and Socialcast aren't tools that people or customers take to willingly normally. It's only on seeing that it indeed has had a positive effect on their business that customers get it. When they have Yammer completely bundled in with Office and hosted Exchange, then we may see that change. As much as I end up using Google Drive, it's still not MS Office. I think your 90% is high.

I have the same questions - I recently decided that I needed to jump into the Office 365 world (E1 subscription which is $100/year per user). Microsoft has smoothed out a LOT of the awkwardness of their initial Office 365 administration and setup. It's still not perfect and I suspect they realize that and are working on it. Ultimately in this space the physical install of products is becoming turnkey. I don't think there's a big future (at our level of the market) in offering installation / configuration / troubleshooting. Where the bigger money lies is in the implementation - showing an organization how to drive adoption. Unfortunately much of my experience with end users/customers is that their organizations are pretty dysfunctional, my lead contact is often in an area (accounting) that does not exert a lot of control over the entire organization and my owner contact is often minimal or very surface level. If you find an approach to paid engagements in this market (versus what I've seen which is a lot of polite head nodding) - I'm all ears.

To follow on with Robert's comment about customers not taking on tools willingly - totally agree. I've had perhaps half a dozen customers where I tried to get them to share info into Basecamp on upgrades, etc. In most cases the customer just wants me to do the work and in maybe 1:10 or 1:20 I'll get a customer who will continuously engage. With very limited exceptions I think one large barrier is the ""I need to create another account - forget about it! "" problem. The other is is that the customer is paying us to fix the issue so their motivation to collaborate except for high pain (usually a big internal corporate project) events is minimal. Arguably I could probably push harder -- but at some level I don't want to repel customers.

Wayne, I don't have experience -- yet -- with MS's online stuff, and I think you're likely correct about MS reversing its exclusivity course of several years ago. But I'm with you 100% on the rest of your last post, especially the driving adoption and organizational parts. Getting out of the accounting-contact ghetto is very, very hard. One of my first steps is trying to fashion an effective description of what our higher values entails.

Change is hard, and adopting collaborative tools is even harder because of the implicit threat to employee's flexibility in doing things themselves, keeping their failings secret, and maintaining some control through limiting information exposures. And then there are companies that embrace collaboration. Last year I came across a remarkable little company using QB, salesforce Excel and Google Docs. They were all in the cloud except for QB on a local computer. The rest of the machines were all Apple, running CAD and design software. They managed orders, production and delivery entirely through Excel collaboration stored and shared in Google Docs. There wasn't a fit there for us, but it was an impressive operation from that perspective.

I recommend you subscribe to one of the Office 365 offerings. I believe most are 12 month commitments. I took the E1 - $8/mo - $ 96/yr - because I wanted access to Yammer as well as to evaluate the Exchange offerings. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/compare-all-office-365-for-business-plans-FX104051403.aspx

good idea. Thanks!