How to…check your Account Status

Filed under: Help and How To's — Sean Kelly @ 5:30 pm

What is my CORUS account status?

You became a user on CORUS by either being invited or signing up.

If you signed up, you either chose a free demo account or paid account.

With a paid account, you can upload files, invite users, create topics. Basically you get the full functionality of CORUS.

If you signed up for a free demo account, you can create a limited number of topics and are restricted in uploading files.

If you have been invited to use CORUS by a friend or colleague, you are a guest on their account. As a guest, if they have a paid account, you can upload and access all the information on the topics they have created. However, you are limited in creating topics and restricted from uploading files.

To check your account status login and navigate to Settings > Account Admin. See an example below.

Here’s our plan info page.



How to…login using Twitter

Filed under: Help and How To's — Sean Kelly @ 7:59 am

A week ago we rolled out a new feature to make the login to CORUS a little easier. Today we added to this.

You can now either login to CORUS with your username/email and password OR via Facebook or Twitter.

Certain websites like Facebook, Google and Twitter, have in recent times enabled third party websites, eg. CORUS to let their users login using their Facebook, Google or Twitter credentials.

You might ask why?

Everyone knows that remembering your login credentials for every site, is a huge pain. This method helps you streamline the login process and is offered purely for your convenience.

Here’s how we do this on CORUS

On the CORUS login page, select the Sign in with Twitter button. A window will open which asks Twitter for permissions to connect to CORUS. There will be either a login page or a dialog box that asks you to grant that permission.

Finally, for this one time only, you will need to login to your CORUS account.

To recap, the above is a once off setup.

Next time you login to CORUS, you can just click the Sign in with Twitter button and you will be automatically logged in to your CORUS account.

If you wish to disable this functionality first you go to Settings/Applications

Then click Remove Connection

We implemented this for your convenience and hope you like it!



How to…Drag & Drop Files into CORUS

Filed under: Help and How To's — Sean Kelly @ 12:36 pm

Speed up your file sharing!

We have implemented a quicker way to share your files on CORUS by dragging and dropping them onto any open CORUS page.

Watch how in this screencast below. Note this only works with the latest FireFox, Chrome and Safari browsers. Waiting for Microsoft IE….



Wave Goodbye To Google Wave

Filed under: Thoughts — Sean Kelly @ 3:39 pm

Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave.

via Wave Goodbye To Google Wave.

And so starts the article on TechCrunch. Google pulling the plug on Wave. As with most TC articles, reading the comments is the fun bit.

Let me back up a bit. When Google announced the Wave over a year ago, part of me thought the 500 pound gorilla was going to FIX the problems we have with email. A lot of folks were really excited but when most finally got their hands on an invite, their excitement swiftly evaporated.

Robert Scoble wrote about it last year when he got his invite.

Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype

But this service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity.

via Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype — Scobleizer.

My take on this

Every time a new piece of technology or new tool is created, people always bring to it their understanding of the old way. So when most users encountered the Wave, they were viewing it through the lens of their prior experiences with email. Thinking it was going to take them to communication Nirvana, they battled with their old experiences and what “new” things Wave had to offer. It didn’t match up. Had Wave been marketed as an enhanced chat platform, most people would go, OK I get it. It wasn’t.

Collaboration is HARD. It invokes more social rules than technical ones. Wave was a technical solution. A very sophisticated one at that. So what was it meant to solve?

The dictionary tells us collaboration is a noun. I think it’s a verb. Collaboration is a way of describing how we work together.

collaboration
noun

1 the action of working with someone to produce or create something
:he wrote on art and architecture in collaboration with John Betjeman.
• something produced or created in this way : his recent opera was a collaboration with Lessing.

And currently for most of us, this way of working together is via email, or over the phone, or face-to-face via a meeting. It’s not 3 people simultaneously editing a picture in Photoshop or having everyone at the meeting say their bit at once. It’s the designer doing the edit then sharing it with the marketing folks and back and forth until a decision has been made.

Collaboration is the thing we do in order to get decisions done.

So where did Google Wave fail? It broke all the verb rules. It enabled behaviour that was not social. It didn’t do what was currently done but only better, faster or cheaper. It tried to be NEW and people didn’t get it so Google dropped it.

Which brings me to CORUS. We tackle the same problems Google identified with email. Only we do it in a way that doesn’t break the social conventions. We do it in a way that is familiar to folks who have used Facebook. We understand the privacy and security issues that are integral to running a business. And we know it has to be SIMPLE.

Here’s an example of the issues we solve.

Unblock your decision making. Find out more.



Taking the Mystery out of Scaling a Company // bens blog

Filed under: Core — Sean Kelly @ 2:18 pm

One of the best blogs around for entrepreneurs and those interested in building technology companies comes from Ben Horowitz. Ben is the cofounder and General Partner (along with Marc Andreessen) of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz based in Menlo Park.

In this article he share his experience and view on how to scale a company. Not surprisingly most of it comes down to how you communicate. It’s what we designed CORUS for. Have a read…

The purpose of process is communication. If there are five people in your company, you don’t need process, because you can just talk to each other. You can hand off tasks with a perfect understanding of what’s expected, you pass important information from one person to another, and you can maintain high quality transactions with no bureaucratic overhead. With 4,000 people, communication becomes more difficult. Ad hoc, point-to-point communication no longer works. You need something more robust—a communication bus or, the conventional term for human communication buses, a process.

Who should design a process? The people who are already doing the work in an ad hoc manner. They know what needs to be communicated and to whom. Naturally, they will be the right group to formalize the existing process and make it scalable.

via Taking the Mystery out of Scaling a Company // bens blog.



How to…Manage Topics

Filed under: Help and How To's — Sean Kelly @ 10:57 am

The Topic

In any business, through the course of a day, we work on many different things. You will send and respond to emails about those things. You will edit and share files with colleagues about those things. You will organise meetings to discuss these things. You might even bring some of these things to a resolution. So, in your business this thing might be a project.

On CORUS, we call these things Topics.

Topics lie at the heart of CORUS. A topic is a repository for messages, files, links and calendar events. (Much like a folder on a file server). Putting everyone on the same page means decision times can be sharpened and productivity enhanced.

A topic can be about anything. A class project – a shopping list – a forum for a shared interest – a repository for research saved from the net.

The topic wizard makes it easy to create a topic and add contacts in 3 easy steps.

Name our topic and give it a description. For example, “Marketing”. On the second screen add the people we wish to share the topic with. On the final screen there are some optional topic settings.

Once you have selected Create a Topic, the page is refreshed and you have a topic ready for Content.

Next you want to share some content like, files, messages, links and calendar events that relate to the topic.

To upload a file, on the left select Upload Files.

In this example 4 files have been selected from my computer and I can write a note describing what they are. When uploaded we will see the files on our topic page. Also 2 emails would have been sent to the members of our topic, alerting them to the recent upload.

So, to recap,we have now created a secure and private topic where our 3 participants are able to access, upload and share work related to the “Marketing” topic.



Reinventing leadership in an age of collaboration | Psychology Today

Filed under: Thoughts — Sean Kelly @ 4:09 pm

Leadership in a collaborative era

Succinct insights from Ray Williams, Co-Founder of Success IQ University.

Today, four critical trends are making the old business model and leadership style irrelevant: the demographic trend, the expertise trend, the attention trend and the democratic trend. These trends together are turning the world of work upside down. Gobillot outlines the four trends that will change the current paradigm:

The demographic trend, which will make individual experience less important than collective experience. For the first time in history, multiple generations with multiple socio-cultural backgrounds are working together in the workplace, each with their own hopes, fears, expectations and experiences, which others may not understand or relate to;

The expertise trend, which will make individual technical knowledge less important than collective knowledge. The expertise that drives successful organizations will reside in a network of relationships outside managerial control.

The attention trend, which will make individual efforts irrelevant, and be replaced by collective social and knowledge networks that replace organizations as a source of coherence and cohesion for all stakeholders.

The democratic trend, which will make individual power irrelevant compared to the power of consultants, part-time workers, and networks of collaborative associates, outside of the leader’s span of control.

via Reinventing leadership in an age of collaboration | Psychology Today.



Does Collaboration Really Add Value? « The Strategy Group

Filed under: Case Studies — Sean Kelly @ 12:45 pm

Some great insights and a link to a PDF white paper from The Strategy Group

The adoption of collaboration tools tools can help organizations achieve performance gains and returns because they can enhance the value that an increasing number of individuals, collaborating across a network, bring to business-critical processes. In those that involve many-to-many interactions, such as innovation and new product development, sales, and customer acquisition, the return on collaboration is highest, as the greatest numbers of people are working toward a common goal (e.g., creating a new product). In processes involving few- to- many interactions, such as corporate reputation and shareholder value maintenance, advanced collaboration tools tend to have a more muted impact, due to a correspondingly lower number of connected individuals involved in these areas. At a basic, functional level, line-of-business managers believe that advanced collaboration tools help them to do critical tasks faster, more effectively, and at a lower cost than when these tools are not used.

via Does Collaboration Really Add Value? « The Strategy Group.



How to…hide and move Topics

Filed under: Help and How To's — Sean Kelly @ 5:23 pm

Your wish – our command

Any business owner knows you have to “listen” to your clients. The beauty of the internet software business is how rapidly you can respond. So yesterday one of our clients asked, “Can you guys make the topic groups collapsible?”

So today we’ve added this.

Once you start adding a number of topics on CORUS you’ll need a way to organise them. We covered one way in this post about Grouping Topics.

On the home page under Topics you can now hide or show your topics by simply clicking on the group name.

And that’s not all. We also implemented drag and drop to help you sort the topics in any order. Just click on the topic you wish to move and whilst holding down the mouse button move it up or down. When ready, release the mouse button and your topics will remain permanently sorted.

We implemented this for your convenience and hope you like it!



The Rise of Consumer Tech – Computerworld

Filed under: Thoughts — Sean Kelly @ 5:42 pm

Scot Finnie writes a piece for COMPUTERWORLD. We are seeing a lot of this as well. Have a quick read.

The rise of interest in Web 2.0-based social tools for business use (also known as Enterprise 2.0) is in many ways a sister trend. Business people are weary of complex, monolithic software. They want lightweight, Web-based tools that echo the feel, and even sometimes the purpose, of social media apps like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. They want to blend personal and professional communications because it’s all about multitasking. They want slick devices that unify all aspects of their lives. And they want to be able to use that software on their devices for business and personal needs wherever they go. No limits.

via The Rise of Consumer Tech – Computerworld.



Older Items »