I took some time off one Friday morning and went fishing on Lake Murray. Despite being off, I had a couple meetings that I needed to attend, one of which required me to participate via Cisco WebEx on my laptop. I wasn’t about to let a little bit of water stop me from participating, nor was I about to let one meeting stop me from enjoying a day out on my boat. So, I grabbed my Cradlepoint IBR1100 router with Verizon SIM card and loaded it on the boat along with laptop, tackle box, and fishing rods. We pushed off before 8:00 AM; it was a beautiful peaceful morning on the lake. I plugged the router’s vehicle power adapter into the boat’s 12v power socket and had the wireless network up and running within 3 minutes. I popped open the laptop, looked up fishing reports, checked the weather, and streamed music thru the IBR until my meetings started. Once it was time for my meeting, I jumped on WebEx, screen-shared, and participated in the meeting as if I was in my office. All the while the kids fished and had a great time. When my meetings ended, I put the laptop away and went back to fishing. A great morning on the lake, productive and fun.

For the last 5 years, IE’s invited customers to sample the latest technologies and some of the best local beer and food as part of our OktoberTekfest event. It’s a great opportunity to see the latest products and solutions offered by IE and our partners, to meet the IE staff and have some fun. As part of the planning team for IE, it falls on me to determine what Collaboration technology we’re going to present to give our customers a glimpse of the future and prepare their organizations for what’s to come. This is no easy task. There are so many technologies with so much potential. This year we thought we’d take a slightly different approach with one demo. We wanted to not only showcase our partner’s tech but also what creative things our technical team can do with them. We thought about what technology could we show at a German Oktoberfest-inspired event. An event with a fully functional beer garden, lots of beer flowing, and the smell of brats, pretzels and other great food. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could combine two of our favorite things, technology AND beer? And then it hit us, we’ll build a KegBot! What is a KegBot?

Part One Of a Five-Part Series One thing that seems constant regardless of the organization is the struggle to reconcile the relationship between vendors and the business. Every theory and strategy out there. Some want a different vendor for each architecture: the different eggs in different baskets theory. Some take every purchase as a challenge to get an ever-cheaper price: the pit them against each other theory. While others go with my personal favorite, “I like to spread it around:” the I want everyone to like me and get an equal cut of my budget theory.

For years I’ve worked in the telephony industry, both on the customer and reseller side. While on the customer side, it was always a struggle to get my leaders to even accept the fact we had a contact center (call center in those days). They would respond, “No, no, no. We just need some people to answer customer calls. We don’t need a call center.”

Digital transformation is changing the look of the traditional office space as we know it. The days of tan-colored cubicles and age-old desktop computers are long gone, replaced by a widely-distributed mobile workforce who is no longer bound to a single location for work.

In today’s business world, we hear the terms communication and collaboration a lot. We often hear them mentioned together, and sometimes even interchangeably. But do they really mean the same thing?