Waking up to your phone’s weather report, reading your newspaper on your tablet and getting to work on your laptop. We can all agree that there are a lot more mobile screens in our lives than ever before. These screens constantly have new applications to assist our lives. Anything from monitoring sleep, playing games, getting recipes to running from zombies has at least one application you can download on your mobile device. We are regularly using these devices; social businesses will find it beneficial to create their own application. One that can easily facilitate communication between employees. However, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend can make it difficult to reach the intended audience.

No longer does one smartphone or tablet reign supreme. The mobile device landscape is becoming more diverse. The needs of people are now met with many different brands and languages of mobile devices. Employees generally like the freedom to choose the best product for their lives, however this can create some big headaches for their IT department.

Launching a mobile initiative in your enterprise is made simple by the E2 Conference. Attendees can hope to learn how to adapt to a primarily mobile world.

Sessions include:

• Creating, Managing and Securing the Mobile Enterprise
• Going Mobile: Developing Multi-Platform Mobile Apps for the Enterprise
• BYOD: The Next Phase of Enterprise Mobility

With more people turning towards BYOD mobile devices as their most common way to do business, IT professionals can find it tricky to manage applications as well as security. Let the E2 Conference help with your mobility issues so that your enterprise can flourish into a more connected workplace.

Register today with priority code SMBLOG13 and save $400 on the onsite price of Full Event and Conference passes.

*Discount calculated based on the on-site price and not combinable with other offers. Offer good on new registrations only. Prices after discount applied: Full Event: $1,699.00 Conference: $1,299.00, Workshop: 699.00, Keynote & Expo: $50.00

10 Competitive advantage

Business is evolving – how do you keep up? E2 Conference is the largest and most important gathering for people like you — professionals seeking new ways to advance their businesses with the latest in next-gen enterprise applications.

9 Evaluate the best tools in one place

Meet with the hottest vendors in social, mobile, cloud, big data and analytics under one roof — from established leaders to creative startups — to discover the right tools and technologies in the Expo Hall.

8 Networking

E2 Conference provides multiple opportunities for attendees to network and engage with one another in the classroom, over breakfast and lunch, or during an evening reception.

7 Get real-world solutions to your real-world problems

Hear case studies from large companies and learn how forward-thinking users are putting enterprise applications to work to create opportunity and solve business problems.

6 “How To” Workshops

Full and half-day workshops on Monday take a deep dive into the tools, techniques and strategies you need to make new technologies work for you.

5 Unlock innovation

Learning how to take advantage of new enterprise technologies, applications and practices helps to create an innovative, more productive work environment.

4 Save Money

Moving your infrastructure to the cloud, leveraging social tools, and supporting online collaboration add up to huge savings for your organization. Find out how to get started here.

3 Stay ahead of the curve

After spending 3 days at the E2 Conference, you’ll return to the office ready to share how technology trends on the horizon today will impact your business tomorrow.

2 Talk to the experts

Only at the E2 Conference can you learn and network with the industry’s best and brightest in an intimate setting for 3 days.

1 Unbiased, comprehensive content

Spanning three days, the E2 Conference provides you with over forty thought-provoking keynotes, sessions and workshops, covering critical topics including social, mobile, big data, analytics and more.

With a Full Event Pass, you’ll gain access to the entire three-day E2 Conference program including deep-dive workshops, keynotes, conference sessions, sponsored content, the demo pavilion, networking receptions and more. Register with priority code SMBLOG13 and save $400* on the on-site price of Full Event & Conference passes/

*Discount applies to On-site Pricing for Full Event and Conference passes only, and is not combinable with other offers. Prices after discount is applied: Full Event: $1,699. Conference: $1,299. Keynote + Expo: $50.

A guest post by Andrew Staples, PR Manager for Kerio Technologies.

I recently read an article about a survey that said 10 of the top 50 cloud services used by people while at work are services to store and share files online. The article correctly points out that while there is a huge demand for this, no single dominant player has emerged yet. To me, it also means that the collaboration riddle remains unsolved.

Social business, project management, file sharing, those of us in the collaboration space describe ourselves by many terms, but we have all fallen short.

While Dropbox and others have fixed the email attachment problem, and apps like Mailbox are making email a more pleasurable experience, we still haven’t given people a better way for them to work with their colleagues. True, we have given them ways to share files, we have given them corporate IM tools, we’ve even eased their need for Microsoft office.

However, collaboration in the workplace is about culture; it’s about understanding how people want to work together. It’s not including every possible feature, it’s not about offering 10 GB, 20 GB, or 100 GB of storage.

For a social collaboration product to truly be successful. We need to focus on a few things:

• Ease of Use, especially in the beginning – Most products that try to bring more than simple file sharing are difficult to get started with. When you add a social element, either things get disorganized, or people don’t know where to begin. This leads to products not being used at all, or certainly not using them to their potential.

• Start from the bottom up, not the top down – It’s regular non-IT department employees that need to bring these products into the business, share them with colleagues and nurture their usage and uptake. This is not happening near enough. When the CEO sends out an email saying. You should not be trying to sell a collaboration product, you should try to seed it.

• File sharing is so 2010. Yes, you need it, but dozens of companies to it. Yes, we all know Steve Jobs quote, and he is right. File sharing is only a small portion of helping people work together better.

The long-term vision and opportunity for collaboration products is very interesting, compelling and potentially disruptive across multiple product categories, from file sharing to social and email, to voice and video. But first, we need to move past square 1.

Samepage.io is a sponsoring the social collaboration track at E2 in Boston. To continue the conversation, look for the Samepage hoodies or stop by our booth.

Guest post by Romi Mahajan, President of KKM Group

Over the last few years, certain themes have taken over the collective imagination of technology and business professionals including:

• The Rise of Cloud Computing
• The Advent of “Social Business”
• The Flock to Mobile
• The Opportunities provided by Big Data

That these themes have become dominant is not simply happenstance – they are a product of the tectonic shifts in business and technology. Through scientists’ and engineers’ flights of imagination, these enabling ideas were invented and made possible. It is now up to all of us to make them stick, to make sense of them, and most importantly apply them to the way we conduct business.

Which brings me to my excitement about the upcoming E2 Conference in Boston; there, we’ll find the right combination of the high-level views of the changing world of enterprise software and the “practical” view of ways in which each of us is implicated in this sea-change.

I’d suggest you join me there.

Romi Mahajan is president of KKM Group. Prior to joining KKM, Mahajan was chief marketing officer of Ascentium Corp. A well-known speaker on the technology and media circuit, he serves on a variety of advisory boards and speaks at more than a dozen industry events per year.

The integration of our professional and personal lives is triggering an incredible shift in the way we work and reward employees today. When Facebook eventually opened its doors to literally, everybody and their mother…and your coworkers and your manager and your future employers, it tore down segregated social circles and forced its users to become even more social (read: open).

Facebook made it desirable and easy to share everything: your high score on a game, baby photos, a promotion, a relationship, and everything you’d be okay admitting to at least some subset of your “friends” as parsed by your privacy settings. This desire to share, or rather, when given the opportunity to do so quietly from behind a keyboard or smartphone, has highly influenced the way we work.  It allows those comfortable with social media to be self-indulgent and self-deprecating without the backlash or reaction of other’s eyes. We’re headed into the heads-down (on your device) digital age and enterprise applications are nurturing this movement. Continue Reading »

Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable recently launched an effort to help community and social business leaders better understand how executives support, invest in, and adopt social technologies themselves. In order to articulate the executive journey, Happe and her team spearheaded a research initiative called The Social Executive; and UBM proved to be a worthy case study, illustrating our own journey in establishing an internal social network.

The study highlights UBM’s implementation of The Hub, the perspectives of key senior executives, and some of the groundbreaking innovation made possible by a more networked communications structure. It illustrates the importance of both executive leadership and engagement, covering CEO David Levin’s early decisions and his personal use of social tools and how those decisions helped to unify company culture and made collaboration and employee engagement easier and more prevalent, ultimately leading to innovations that would not have been possible otherwise.

The E2 team is proud that our company is a shining example of social collaboration in the enterprise. Read more about the UBM case study.

For more case studies and to further the discussion, consider joining us for the E2 Conference in Boston, June 17-19.