IntraLinks® has just announced the general availability of IntraLinks Courier™, the only enterprise-grade solution for ad-hoc information sharing. We designed IntraLinks Courier to enable organizations to extend important enterprise security and compliance controls to more frequent, less formal communications in which information is shared with business partners and customers outside the firewall. It’s as simple to use as email, and allows business users to easily share files as large as 6 GB. Try it for yourself by signing up for a free trial.

A CEO has business meetings in London and Hong Kong, and in the mean time his company is acquiring a manufacturing center in South America. He is working with bankers in New York and Brazil to close the deal. In the interim the deal documents need to be reviewed and exchanged between all parties securely across borders, time zones, and teams. Luckily for the CEO he has an iPad®, so he can access and review documents throughout the deal regardless of whether he is in a taxi, on a train, or in his hotel room between meetings to ensure that the deal runs smoothly. 

Ovum, a leading industry and technology analyst firm headquartered in London, has recently published an in-depth research report looking at the benefits and value that IntraLinks provides. The report is titled Technology Audit: IntraLinks Exchanges and is authored by Richard Edwards, a principal analyst at Ovum who focuses on enterprise collaboration and information management. Mr Edwards’ report is an objective representation of the IntraLinks solutions and technology. You can view both the original report and the executive summary.

One highlight from the report is that IntraLinks Exchanges are described as providing a cloud-based collaborative content workspace that offer more security “than a locked boardroom.” Another highlight is Mr. Edwards outlining that organizations following a holistic ECM (Enterprise Content Management) strategy would “find value and utility in the targeted IntraLinks cloud-based solutions”.

The term “collaboration” is rapidly becoming a misunderstood corporate buzz word as it applies to an ever-growing set of use cases. Collaboration is internally focused; it involves external parties. It’s ad hoc; it’s structured. When industry pundits discuss collaboration solutions, what should you pay attention to?

Cloud has been the buzzword for some time in technology. I’m delighted to have recently joined IntraLinks, which has been leading the charge since the beginning. That’s why it was great to see the article and the followup blog post in The New York Times last Friday that discussed the growing adoption of Cloud Services in B2B and the awareness around the benefits of cloud computing.