Your usage patterns, feedback and yes – complaints too – helped us make what is an outstanding release of Clamr! 2010. We took every single user request and placed it into our product backlog and then sprinted like mad people to deliver as many improvements as possible.

There’s still a couple coming in an incremental release in a few months, but almost 80% of the user requests we had for version 1.0 are in there.

Just some of the highlights of the release:

• A completely redesigned look and feel and experience. We’ve delivered real-time text messaging inside a revamped Clamr! phone. Now when you text or call a contact, you see all the activities you’ve done with them on your Google Voice number (including messages and voicemails) on the phone as well.

• We’ve added a feature called Clamr! Call Sense where a user can select an email thread in Microsoft Outlook and extract all the telephone numbers automatically and present them inside Clamr! Phone to call or text. And since the Clamr! Phone now shows messages for numbers or contact selected, you’ll see the text and calling conversation that took place alongside your email conversation. Very cool feature.

• We enabled attaching a file through Clamr! to a single recipient text (file storage and delivery are free when you subscribe!)

• We completely redid the Clamr! Broadcast text scheduler and removed the dependency on the Outlook calendar which significantly improved performance and reliability.

• We now handles multiple sign-in with Google Voice which was a limitation in version one of Clamr! 2010. Now you can have multiple sign-in activated on your Google Account and Clamr! 2010 functions perfectly.

• And lastly, a billion optimizations.

We recently ran into an issue with WPF’s WebBrowser not handling #’s introduced by Facebook in URIs during the authentication process. There’s been some good discussion on workarounds … host Winforms (which for WPF proponents like me is disappointing) … distribute your FB app secret and use “code” instead of “token” on responsetype and then exchange the code for a token. Smart thinking, but I wasn’t really satisfied with either solution.

So for community commentary and/or usage, I thought we’d share what we did to resolve this issue. We decided to use AwesomiumSharp and Awesomium’s WebControl in-place of the WebBrowser control from Microsoft.

A little background … when you’re using WebBrowser in WPF, you’re using Internet Explorer. There are many great products from Microsoft, but I’ve never included Internet Explorer among them. Not only do I have to use a browser I’m not fond of, but I’m stuck using whatever version of IE the user has installed on their deck. Not a great experience if you have users like we do who thought a recent upgrade from IE6 was awesome (just poking fun, guys!).

Awesomium on the other hand uses the Chromium project as its basis. And for those of you who are Chrome users, you know the elegance and speed that Chromium provides since you’re using the same foundation. And these kind and extremely talented gentlemen at Awesomium have also worked to provide a .NET wrapper around this Chromium base as well as a pre-rolled WebControl that replaces the functionality of WebBrowser. There are a ton of great things to say about this product … but they say it better here.

Long story short, the issue went away immediately and we were getting our access token without distributing our app secret or hosting the Winform’s browser. Not to mention we got a better control for creating integrated client and Internet experiences and we’re using something other than IE under the hood. If you’re developing in WPF, check it out.

Download the latest version of Clamr! 2010 on the Download & Buy page. Install the new client and service. Enable your Gmail Chat (click the photo to go to the Gmail Chat instructions site) and then set your forwarding number in Clamr! 2010 Options to “Gmail Chat — username@gmail.com”.

Now all your calls will be handled with Gmail Chat (for free, we might add) and you can use your computer speakers and microphone to handle your calls.

Also — for those of you who use non-US date formats locally … we now support non-US date formats as well.

Enjoy the sweetness of Clamr! And stay tuned as we add more features and functionality …

Google Apps Marketplace is the directory for Google Apps add-ons and extensions and provides a forum for customer feedback on experiences with respective products.

If your organization is considering Google Apps as a possible alternative to Microsoft Office Servers (e.g. Exchange or SharePoint), I’d highly encourage you to peruse what is growing to be a very robust offering of products and services that would significantly enhance your company’s experience with Google Apps.

Some of the awesome features in Clamr! 2010 include:

• Calling contacts for free from Microsoft® Outlook®
• Texting contacts for free from Microsoft® Outlook®
• Check your Google Voice texts and voicemails and missed calls from Microsoft® Outlook® 2010
• Broadcast texts that can transfer files, send messages to multiple recipients and request a flash conference call that the recipient can join with a touch. No weird meeting keys!!!
• Schedule texts so you can walk away from your desk and still have everything you need to have meetings on the go or send your customers limited time offers.
• Users get a tiny URL to view all transferred files … so this whole experience works well on any phone, computer or tablet.
• Clamr! Call Sense where a user can select an email thread in Microsoft Outlook and extract all the telephone numbers automatically and present them inside Clamr! Phone to call or text. And since the Clamr! Phone now shows messages for numbers or contact selected, you’ll see the text and calling conversation that took place alongside your email conversation. Very cool feature.
• Attaches a file through Clamr! to a single recipient text (file storage and delivery are free when you subscribe!)

There’s a lot of cool stuff here … and it’s only $2.50/month! Give it a shot for 7-days for free. If you don’t like it … bummer … but check out our future versions. If you like, register and get a year of all that Google Voice goodness inside Outlook.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/09/why_corporate_leaders_wont_abo.html

We would like to welcome GEDPRO to our ManageScope partner program! We’re extremely excited to be working with GEDPRO given their European presence, Spanish-language capabilities and their deep-expertise in Project Management! GEDPRO has deployed ProjectGoo to a number of their clients successfully and we wish them continued success!

Dealing with error gracefully is the mark of a mature organization. This article is a very interesting discussion with a Google search executive about how Google deals with error from anorganizational and technological perspective.

I read the blog post here and the original article the author referenced here and really wondered if the whole ‘small team’ advantage is a reduction in communication overhead at its root. I appreciate the lessons as we all do about hiring ‘insanely passionate’ people. But there are many examples of companies laying in the dustbins of history who were populated by insanely passionate people. Sun Microsystems immediately comes to mind.

At the heart of a startup culture is the emphasis on leanness and I appreciated Sachin’s comments about Microsoft. Inserting multiple ‘hops’ in communication paths in the form of multiple management layers is a sure way to choke any project or innovative idea to death. Providing oversight without constant intervention is an art. And one that Apple seems to currently master.

It is imperative that companies are able to identify areas of risk vs Dodd-Frank and to rectify any possible situation as fast as possible. This means understanding your employees interactions in real-time – both topically and structurally within your company. Anomalous communications and interactions should be identified and examined proactively and investigated further before much greater liability is incurred. With possible huge payouts, the incentives are all on the side of governmental intervention vs. internal resolution. Vigilance is more important than ever both from the governance perspective as well as the risk management perspective.

Question:

What is your company doing to improve insight into employee interactions and their meaning vs your company’s risk profile?