Category: News

According to a new survey conducted by research firm Ipsos for Microsoft, many employers are at odds with their employees when it comes to social networking.

The global survey, among 9,908 information workers in 32 countries, found that while 46 percent of employees believe social tools help with productivity, 34 percent of companies undervalue the benefit of such technology in the workplace.

As a result, 17 percent of respondents say they ignore their organization’s IT policy and install social tools on their work computers or phones, and 31 percent say they would be willing to spend their own money to buy social tools to help them do their jobs.

The survey found the tools were most used for communicating with colleagues (68 percent), sharing and reviewing documents (50 percent), and communicating with customers and clients (47 percent), but they were also useful for growing a professional network (36 percent) and finding an expert or information within their own company (29 percent).

Perhaps the most damning aspect of the survey was 39 percent of respondents felt people in their organizations just didn’t collaborate enough.

“Just as email accelerated the pace of business in the ’90s, enterprise social will be the driver of greater agility and transformation in the 21st century workplace,” Kurt DelBene, president, Microsoft Office Division believes. “As we look ahead at how collaboration and communications continue to evolve, we believe the tools people use today — email, instant messaging, voice, videoconferencing, social — will come together and be deeply integrated into apps in ways that will speed collaboration and truly transform the way people work”.

To go with the survey, Microsoft has launched a new site called The Worldwide Water Cooler, which allows people from any country to have their say on social tools and workplace collaboration.

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In February of this year, Opera announced a major revamp of its browser portfolio that involved ripping out and replacing some key components – in a nutshell, the innards of Opera’s new browser now resemble Google’s Chrome a heck of a lot more than they previously did. The first version of the browser to make an appearance was that for Android: it came out in beta in March, and arrived in full a week ago.

Now it’s the turn of Windows and OS X users. Again, this is a beta we’re talking about (although Opera calls it a “Next version”), but it does show off what is to be expected in the full release of Opera 15.

Those features should mostly be familiar from the Android version, but here’s a quick run-down anyway:

• Speed Dial – For those unfamiliar with Opera, this pretty much refers to bookmarks. And, like bookmarks, they can now be organized into folders. Speed Dial also seems to give Opera a chance to earn some cash from partners such as Twitter and Facebook, whose services it puts front-and-center in this feature.
• Discover — This feature is a bit like Google Currents, in that it brings up articles according to the user’s tastes.
• Stash — This one’s new: a read-later facility designed to reduce the necessity of having tons of tabs open at once. Just click on the heart button to “stash” a page.
• Search — You can now search from the address bar in Opera, same as in Chrome and co.

The look of the browser has also been refreshed to make it more platform-appropriate and, of course, there are big changes under the hood. Opera 15 uses the Chromium engine and its “Off-Road” data-squeezing mode – previously known as Turbo – now supports Google’s SPDY protocol.

The only other major thing to bear in mind for existing Opera desktop users is that the new version doesn’t have an integrated mail service. The M2 mail application has now been hived off into a standalone version, the first release candidate for which can be downloaded from here.

In a blog post on the new features, Opera web evangelist Bruce Lawson said the decision to split off M2 was made in order to reduce the footprint of the main program, and also because “not all current Opera customers use M2″.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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When you’re busy with some online research then you’ll often want to save interesting web pages for easy reference later. So it’s a pity that while every browser has some kind of “Save As” function, the end results are usually unimpressive, awkward to share with others, and may not even bear much resemblance to the original page.

This is such a fundamental requirement that you might have thought the big-name browsers would have come up with a solution already, but while we wait you can always try Mozilla Archive Format, a Firefox add-on which extends the usual “Save Page As” function in several very useful ways.

If you’re engaged in some major research session, for instance, you no longer have to save each page individually. Mozilla Archive Format allows you to save the current page, selected tabs or everything in just a few clicks.

The add-on’s “faithful snapshot” feature helps to ensure the saved documents look and feel more like the original pages, too (there’s even support for saving embedded audio and video).

The pages can be saved in a compressed single file format, saving disk space and making them easy to share with others. And better still, they’re only zip archives, so you don’t need to have a copy of Mozilla Archive Format available to read them: they’re easily accessible anywhere, on any platform.

Of course if you’re used to working with MHTML files then moving to a new format might cause problems. No need to worry, though — Mozilla Archive Format not only reads and writes MHTML files which are fully compatible with other browsers, it also includes a tool to convert your saved pages between the two formats (and several others).

There are other common-sense improvements, too; the title of a page is used as the default file name when you’re saving, for instance.

And best of all, while Mozilla Archive Format delivers plenty of extra functionality, it’s still extremely easy to use. When you need to save something, just click Save Page As and choose whatever new format you need.

Photo Credit: sheelamohanachandran2010/Shutterstock

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