Evaluating Zoho at GE

Since Dr Sukh Grewal was kind enough to speak at the Office 2.0 conference earlier this month there has been much discussion of the mature large scale GE collaboration environment 'supportcentral'.

I follow GE closely: as an enterprise collaboration consultant any information they share with me is valuable to help me better advise my clients to build large scale environments. GE should be congratulated for publicly lifting the veil on a strategically important part of their business and revealing what makes them tick.

By pure coincidence after I posted my previous piece about misinformation travelling fast this morning I was going through my RSS reader catching up on stories prior to heading off to Oracle OpenWorld.

Last week Bernard Lunn of Read Write Web picked up the Office 2.0 GE video and presumably read my previous GE blogposts to write a mostly reasonable piece about Zoho's relationship with GE.

A much wilder, presumably third hand story has appeared this morning over at webguild claiming GE has 'dropped Google' citing 'an unknown GE spokesperson who does not want to be identified'.

For the record and as Dr Sukh Grewal has clearly outlined, no decision has been made on Google Docs, Zoho or any other vendor at this time, but a rigorous evaluation is taking place.

Speaking as someone who has previously been in Dr Sukh Grewals role (albeit on a smaller scale) of managing a global collaboration environment at Sony PlayStation, I know first hand how tough it can be to deal with this type of overreach.

By its nature managing collaboration environments means you are at the epicenter of company politics, users who love or hate you, and keeping accurate information flowing is key.

The webguild story is wildly inaccurate and is a classic example of how misinformation if not corrected can propagate.

It is also a good argument for internal - and external publicly available where appropriate - roadmaps so there can be no excuse for embroidery and exaggeration by interested parties. Again, transparency simplifies and solves problems...