Totally mobile collaboration

As the BYOD movement meets the business use of social media and staff collaboration regardless of location, the obvious tools  that working people need are smartphones and tablets, coupled together with a range of collaborative tools.

This is the market being targeted by MangoApps, which has just added to its range of mobile-based software with a new social media tool called Office Chat. This joins a MangoAppscollaboration network that combines Employee Social Networking, Team Collaboration tools & Intranet into one seamless product.

Office Chat is aimed at providing a collaboration environment for the fully mobile user, in both senses of the word `mobile’. As such the initial version does come with one weakness: data generated using it cannot, as yet, be accessed or ported to external mainstream business tools such as Salesforce CRM, or Netsuite’s business management systems.

At present, therefore, Office Chat is halfway to being a useful product. It provides staff with a convenient and flexible collaborative tool that can be always to hand to capture instant thoughts as they occur. The current downside, however, is that potentially vital data will not be portable to other important mainstream business tools for immediate action or subsequent analysis.

According to Product Manager Vipin Thomas, however, the other Mango products do have this capability, and it will be added to Office Chat in a future version. Until that happens, however, the company has for now produced what should be a good application development tool.

Office Chat is designed to offer businesses better security features, chat history storage, and privacy options like off-the-record-mode. Teams can use it to share rich messages, documents, videos and location with their colleagues.

It is currently distributed, free, through the App stores on iOS & Android, and will soon be released in a  Windows phone version.

Office Chat has been designed to give companies a better way to communicate with colleagues and project members without incurring the cost of expensive premium text plans.

The established MangoApps product range are designed to allow coworkers to collaborate on projects so they can keep track of personal and project tasks, build knowledge bases using wikis, blogs and posts, and stay informed through official company intranets.

In addition, they can share documents with colleagues and partners, as well as important information with all coworkers. They can discuss and brainstorm ideas, collaborate using smartphones while travelling, discuss confidential topics in private groups, and ask and answer questions from colleagues. Instant messaging and group chat are also available.

The existing systems can be integrated with various enterprise systems including CRM's like Salesforce, SugarCRM, as well as enterprise collaboration systems such as Sharepoint, Skydrive, Google Drive, and directory authentication systems like AD/LDAP for single sign on. It allows fetching as well as posting data with other systems through its open API's.

Can be multi-tenant or single-tenant hosted, with datacentres in US, Europe, Asia, Australia and Latin America, or it can be run as an on-premise application.