microsoft – ipushpull

August 18, 2020April 14, 2021

Moving towards future state in capital markets – The Financial Technologist

It’s a very wide spectrum in capital markets between legacy user environments at one end and the equivalent of the SpaceX Dragon 2 mission and its recent launch at the other, where automation is center stage. There is a lot that firms can be doing today to move towards the latter, especially as fast evolving consumer products set a precedent for other industries. The number of growing millennials in capital markets who are taking up senior positions expect technology in office environments to offer regular improvements and functionality updates as standard. The future state in capital markets is evolving.

Areas which before were considered a nice to have, are becoming the new norm in the dynamic that the COVID pandemic created. Standardization and aggregation of data, multi-application interoperability and reducing the overall screen real estate are becoming essential in the migration to the new environment.

There is one component for many users across the front, middle and back office which is even more often used than Bloomberg, one that has achieved notoriety – Microsoft Excel. An integration of this component is key, whether between users, chat apps or an ecosystem of other applications which can be used to further workflow.

How can we build a better user experience? How can traders optimize their workflow in and out of the office? What is the best way to collaborate on data between departments and locations?

Find out more in the interview by Matthew Cheung in The Financial Technologist ‘Phoenix’ out now.

Tune in to hear more on “Creating a Blueprint for Pandemic Recovery in Financial Technology” webinar on 19^th August at 5pm BST, where Matthew Cheung and an expert panel will be discussing the topic in more detail.

May 22, 2017May 22, 2017

The Future of Work – Symphony, the Latest $1bn Unicorn

2017 has been an interesting year for the enterprise workspace collaboration market with Symphony becoming the latest unicorn fetching a valuation topping $1bn -which means Wall Street now has its own coveted ‘unicorn’ tech company. Symphony now ranks, and competes, alongside Slack, Microsoft, Google and Facebook in the enterprise collaboration market…. and…. of course…. Bloomberg.

Who is Symphony (aka the latest $1bn unicorn)?

Formed in 2014, when Goldman Sachs, leading a consortium of tier 1 banks, acquired Perzo for $60m from founder David Gurle, Symphony combined Perzo’s expertise with Goldman’s own internal chat platform Live Current. With David Gurle at the helm as CEO, Symphony set out to standardise industry-wide communication including end-to-end encryption and regulatory compliance that is necessary for financial markets.

Initially, onlookers saw Symphony as a rival to Bloomberg due to its prestigious banking shareholder roster but it is clear that Symphony has much bigger ambitions. Although Symphony customers are based in financial centers around the world the company still retains its HQ in Palo Alto because, ultimately, that is where the competition is.

Why the ‘Bloomberg killer’ title then?

Within the front office of banks, asset managers, hedge funds and brokers – Bloomberg is king. With 325,000 terminals around the world Bloomberg has become an icon and essential piece of kit on trading floors everywhere. Because of this, a huge network has formed of alpha producers that are plugged into Bloomberg’s own messaging service called IB (Instant Bloomberg) with the sell-side (banks, brokers) talking to the buy-side (pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds) with traders and brokers exchanging news, gossip, orders and flow.

However, outside of the front office environment banks lack a unifying chat platform. Most banks will use a combination of messaging platforms such as Eikon messenger (formerly Reuters messenger, note that Gurle was Reuters Global Head of Collaboration), Skype for Business (Gurle was GM at Skype), ICE chat, Pivot, AOL, Yahoo (now defunct) and Microsoft Lync. Communication problems occur because there is no interoperability between these messaging platforms – they don’t talk to one another – so inter-bank communication often falls back to email.

Earlier this decade it was not uncommon for staff outside of the front office environment such as operations, risk, compliance and management to have a Bloomberg terminal just to access IB chat. However due to cost cutting across the financial industry, this is no longer the case due to Bloomberg’s very high subscription costs.

Gaining traction

Since Symphony’s launch 18 months ago it has quickly amassed 200,000 users, albeit a large proportion are from the same banks that invested in the company, but there is now significant traction among large buy-side players with T.Rowe Price and AllianceBernstein joining Blackrock as users.

The key to continued fast growth, which is essentially powered by the ‘network effect’, is twofold; in the front office for each buy-side Symphony user there could be anything from 5-10 sell-side Symphony users vying to win their business. Away from the front office if Symphony becomes an internal chat platform of choice for a bank, then user numbers will swell because for each front office sales person or trader there may be another 10+ support staff in the back and middle office who need to communicate with them. If Symphony’s ‘pod’ is enabled for inter-bank communication then back office staff can also chat to their counterparts at other banks, adding further Symphony users and ‘stickiness’ to the platform.

Symphony are aiming for 300,000+ users by 2018 which would rival Bloomberg and Reuters within financial markets, except the established vendors are limited to front office users only. With the recent $63 million fundraise, Symphony are setting their sights much higher and are planning to expand into other security conscious sectors such as government and healthcare as well as enhance functionality on the platform to include features such as video calling.

The financial market incumbents

Bloomberg and Reuters have had a stronghold on high cost financial terminals for decades, leaving other vendors way behind. However, one factor that led to the creation of Symphony was Bloomberg’s now infamous snooping of users activity which came on the back of complaints made by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan (later becoming major shareholders in Symphony). Financial market players are a paranoid bunch who do not take well to being spied on.

Costs – As important to tier 1 banks as it is to you and I

Bloomberg does provide a lot more than just messaging, yet a large proportion of their user base only uses a fraction of the terminal’s functionality. For these users cost then becomes a major factor. Bloomberg charges around $2000pm, with no discounts for higher user numbers and contracts are for a minimum of two years. To put this into perspective, in 2015 JPM had 7000 Bloomberg terminals and Goldman had 5000, that’s more than a combined $250m a year in subscriber fees alone. Since the financial crisis banks have been in cost cutting mode so any reason to reduce costs will be looked at. It’s no coincidence that last year Bloomberg lost terminals over a 12 month period for only the second time in its history (losing 3000 terminals to 324,485, although still managing to take home $9.2bn in revenue).

When it comes to cost Symphony is in a different league. Access to the young, disruptive technology company costs $15pm per user for corporate access.

In workflow where back office staff use Bloomberg chat to communicate with the front office or to simply check reference prices then $2000pm vs $15pm is a no-brainer. For sales and traders in the front office, maybe not so much – there is a lot of invaluable functionality on a Bloomberg terminal. But Symphony doesn’t need to build everything itself. It has opened up the ‘Symphony Marketplace’ where tech companies and financial market vendors can add features and functionality that would otherwise be hard and expensive to build. In addition, Symphony has an Open Source Foundation which is an environment to share ideas and shape the direction of development, with members spanning across the financial market space.

On the other hand Bloomberg is a walled garden, restricted to the alpha producers – as the Financial Times put it, “Symphony similarly aims to spread widely rather than seizing the high ground“.

Regulation, compliance and security

Compliance, oversight and security goes to the very core of Symphony. Goldman’s original messaging platform called Live Current was created to meet the stringent regulatory requirements of the financial industry. According to financial regulations, confidential client information must be secure and separate to internal business functions and banks must “retain unaltered, auditable and retrievable records of information flows with demonstrable, proven controls and surveillance“.

This is one of Symphony’s biggest selling points and where a large portion of the millions of dollars raised has been put towards. Symphony clients hold their own encryption keys and compliance departments can review and recall full audit trails and history of conversations and interactions of everything on the Symphony environment.

Information (email) overload

Symphony describes itself as a ‘platform that powers work’ for secure workflow, communication and collaboration. With 140 billion business emails sent daily with an average of 6 attachments per day (which would be fair to assume is substantially higher within a back office environment at a bank), staff in operations and middle office want to move away from inefficient emails going backwards and forwards with attached Excel spreadsheets. In today’s workplace, email is no longer the best way to communicate – Symphony’s Palo Alto staff would argue moving to a secure, audited ‘social operating system’ means the entire financial market ecosystem (and lots of others to follow) will benefit from improved productivity, efficiency and workflow.

One lesson Symphony has learnt from Slack is to allow developers to build their own applications inside their platform which means content from other services is pulled into one location for the end-user, which avoids productivity killing ‘context switching’.

ipushpull has been working with Symphony to enable live connections into the messaging environment from data applications such as Microsoft Excel or internal databases. Both Symphony and ipushpull are striving for interoperability across applications and across data.

Complementing Symphony’s real-time collaborative environment ipushpull is targeting significant improvements in back office workflow by removing the need to attach files, such as spreadsheets, when working on trade breaks or reconciliations with traders or counterparties and instead share and collaboratively work on data, helping to reduce context switching into other applications and avoid email entirely.

The future – integrated collaborative workflows

Symphony is ideally placed to benefit from both intra-bank and inter-bank communication. “Cross-company collaboration is critical to streamlining complex workflow and to helping people work efficiently“, according to the CEO of MarkitSERV and Gurle sees “a pressing need in financial services to simplify disparate communications streams” and expects “to see a tidal wave of innovation to streamline traditional financial services workflows”.

Bring in the ability to add bots to a users chat to automate and reduce manual workloads and set trade alerts and notifications that are integrated into banks internal systems, then the potential market for Symphony suddenly looks a lot bigger than Bloomberg’s. Morgan Stanley thinks “Symphony could be the gateway for financial market participants to move away from traditional bundles to lower-cost products” with “unbundling likely leading to increased competition given that new entrants can compete on individual parts of a legacy product“.

With a fresh funding round of $63 million Symphony will be throwing its bank balance and pushing the ‘network effect’ harder than ever.

March 16, 2017March 16, 2017

No More Slacking….Microsoft Teams Launches To Office 365 Users

Microsoft Teams is no longer in soft launch or ‘customer preview’ as the $500 billion company likes to call it. As of now, Teams is included in the Enterprise and Small Business versions of Office 365. During its soft launch the collaboration platform managed to attract more than 50,000 companies (including Accenture, ConocoPhillips, Deloitte, Expedia and Sage to name a few) and have added over 100 new features and integrations which include bots, ability to email channels and audio calling from mobile devices. Also including a host of other features pointing to the technology trend of convergence.

Why the mad rush to get Teams out to market? Well the answer is Slack, the white hot collaboration platform that is the fastest growing business application ever. With 5 million users Slack isn’t afraid of the the 40 year old incumbent demonstrated by its brazen NY Times advert back in November.

Sun Tzu – The Supreme Art Of War Is To Subdue Slack And Launch Teams Without Fighting

However, it looks like Microsoft’s strategy is not to directly target Slack users but to pick up Office 365 users (all 85 million of them) who do not use Slack or any other similar applications – something we picked up on in our previous blog on Microsoft Teams back in November.

Since then the workspace collaboration platform market continues to heat up with Google recently reigniting ‘Hangouts‘, bringing in integrations with Google Apps such as Sheets and Docs as well as natural language parsing bots (something Microsoft is also doing) and Workplace by Facebook (previously called Facebook at Work) is quietly gaining users. Gartner research predicts that globally businesses will spend $5.1 billion in 2017 on collaboration, conferencing and social tools.

There is also Symphony which rarely gets a mention in the same space as Slack because of its major focus on financial market participants. Might be one to watch as back in 2015 Google was part of a $100 million investment round into Symphony. Perhaps Google’s plan is to integrate Google Apps like Sheets and Docs into Symphony in order to break into financial institutions who are all huge enterprise users of Microsoft Office?

On Your Marks……And They’re Off!

2017 will be an interesting year – which company can innovate faster and gain more traction?

Slack was first off and has even upped a gear to appeal to enterprise users by offering the ‘Grid’ (perhaps they are concerned about the competition). Teams is free to its own Office 365 user base, which if Microsoft can crack gives the perfect entry point into the 1.2 billion desktop users Microsoft is pushing to the cloud (an area where revenues have doubled over the last quarter).

With ipushpull ‘s vision of live data interoperability between all apps, whether desktop or web, our integrations with Slack, Symphony and Microsoft Teams mean whichever way the wind blows we can play an increasing role in this fast growing collaborative market.

Watch this space…..

January 6, 2017January 6, 2017

Top 5 workflow tools – supercharge your Excel and spreadsheets

Microsoft Excel‘s entrenched position as the most popular business tool owes a great deal to its breadth of functionality and flexibility. Over the years Excel users, from small businesses to financial professionals, have found that they’ve been able to turn its power to solve a huge range of challenges. However, many people are also using Excel for purposes that it isn’t suited for. I’d hazard a guess that every business has at least one critical spreadsheet that has spiraled out of control over time to the point where no one fully understands how it works, making it difficult to collaborate on. So we’ve come up with the top 5 workflow tools for Excel to help you overcome this problem.

Many fully-featured spreadsheet competitors to Excel have been launched with varying degrees of success, including Google Sheets and Zoho Sheet. However, for this article we’ve compiled products that solve self-contained problems – the kind of challenges that people have used Excel for, even though that’s not what it was designed to do.

Smartsheet – the project management tool

Even the smallest business needs a tool for managing employees’ time and tracking the progress of projects. For many years Microsoft Project has set the gold standard for this purpose, but it’s expensive and far too complex. Consequently, many businesses have gone back to using Excel for scheduling and time-tracking, which has given way to version control problems arising from spreadsheets being shared between multiple users.

Enter Smartsheet – a web-based project management tool with a spreadsheet-inspired interface. It’s taken the best features of Excel and Microsoft Project, added new features like notifications and real-time reporting and presented them in a powerful but simple-to-use online package. It has no version control problems that Excel files have and it automates many of the manual workarounds. It does this without the steep learning curve of Microsoft Project, that’s why it’s in our top 5 workflow tools. Simple enough for small businesses and powerful enough for large enterprises, it counts Netflix, Bayer and Accenture among its customers.

AbleBits Suite – the timesaving tool for Excel

If you’ve recently had to merge large tables in Excel or remove duplicates then this painstaking, fiddly process is fresh in your mind. It can take up a large chunk of your time, time you could have spent doing something a lot more productive than squinting at cells one by one. Ablebits delights everyone who completes these tasks day to day with their suite of Excel add-ons, taking away the manual chores that plague Excel. To name a few of the tools, Merge Tables Wizard does exactly what it says on the tin. If you think that you could merge tables even without this tool, then you should try working with bigger tables. Advanced Find and Replace Tool gives a lot more flexibility and allows to search inside notes, formulas and even all the sheets in your workbook. If you need to Remove Duplicates and Trim Spaces or just Fill Empty Cells, they’ve got the tool for you. All in they have 10 add-ons that incorporate a variety of useful task automations.

iPushPull – share and manage Excel data tool

Most businesses have critical data with functions to analyse it held in multiple Excel files. If they want to share this data across their businesses or with clients and customers they have to send entire files as email attachments or manually upload them using services like Dropbox. This inevitably leads to version control and security problems. It’s rare that these sheets get redeveloped as standalone applications – business requirements keep changing and there’s limited budget or desire to do so.

The iPushPull cloud service lets you share data ranges directly from desktop Excel and access them in other spreadsheets, on the web, on mobile and in other applications like Slack and Symphony. As your spreadsheet data changes, it automatically updates everywhere else. It’s the perfect tool for aggregating sales and finance data from multiple sites across organisations. With this live collaboration tool you can distribute information to customers or clients without leaving Excel, with built-in permissions and auditing to control who views or modifies the data.

Workday Worksheets – forecasting and planning for enterprises tool

This new addition to the host of Workday process management and planning tools, creates a new way to reconcile the forecasting and budgeting process for financial services. The original app is a collaborative tool for organisations to share live data and manage spreadsheets, and even has a chat interface. It gives enterprises a more adequate solution to working with spreadsheets than Excel. The Worksheets application looks great as a standalone tool, but you have to migrate to the Workday platform. A subscription to which is quite pricey, therefore making it more viable for large companies such as enterprises. The app isn’t directly integrated with Excel but spreadsheets can be uploaded to Worksheets.

OpenasApp – turn your sheets into mobile apps tool

Anyone who’s tried to open a full-sized spreadsheet on a mobile device will know that the user experience is not great. Finding the data you’re looking for is time-consuming, involves lots of swiping, pinching and zooming. Trying to manipulate the data or perform calculations is even more difficult. The new offering from OpenasApp lets you transform your spreadsheet data into an interactive mobile app. You select tables of data from your spreadsheet and use OpenasApp’s wizard to create your app. It attempts to work out what kind of data you have selected, and automatically generates graphs and charts using its built-in BI functionality. It even lets you integrate simple calculations into your new web app (unfortunately it doesn’t support macros yet). It’s a new product so it’s yet to be seen how popular it will prove, but we’ve put it in our top 5 workflow tools because its ability to create web apps on-demand using your existing business data is very attractive.

As a result of its functionality and flexibility, Excel has outgrown its original purpose. So there’s an increasing range of products and tools to help customers make their spreadsheets better such as the top 5 workflow tools we’ve described above. If you have a favourite tool that’s improved or replaced your spreadsheets, please tell us! And if you’d like a free trial of iPushPull, please sign up here today.

December 22, 2016February 23, 2017

Tech trends 2017: Convergence – Not the movie

Convergence. Sounds like the title of a dodgy b-movie, doesn’t it? And it is. In fact, there are several. But I’m not concerned with badly-scripted, straight-to-streaming films today. Convergence is one of the hottest subjects in tech press at the moment, particularly in the area of cloud services and productivity tools. For tech trends 2017: convergence is likely to remain there and here’s why.

Some are euphemistically calling it a bundling event, which sounds like a Black Friday sale at Walmart, but it amounts to the same thing: implement or acquire exactly the same features as everyone else and force them into your core product. In other words, the tech equivalent of a huddle of hipsters hanging-out in the same Dalston dive and choosing to assert their individuality by growing exactly the same beard.

Dropbox announced their new suite of productivity tools, which amount to a loosely-related collection of features that have been cherry-picked from the likes of Evernote, Office 365, Quip and others.

Slack integrated voice calling into their product earlier this year, just in time for Microsoft to announce Teams, which is essentially Slack with voice and video calling (as noted by CEO Stewart Butterfield in a full-page ad in the New York Times). In a move that surprised nobody, Slack responded this week with the addition of video calling (sadly lacking the very useful screen-sharing facility in Teams). Incidentally, both of these products look a lot like Yammer, which is, of course, owned by Microsoft.

I don’t know about you, but I’m struggling to keep up. You might argue that this sort of product convergence is good for competition and consumer choice; I can see that argument too. The problem for end-users is, when every product claims to do everything for everyone, how do we choose the right one?

Tech trends 2017: Convergence or integration?

Convergence is just another way of saying the current trend in tech is to value convenience over function. If it continues, we will simply end up with a selection of cloud-based multi-tools and users will find themselves choosing between the digital equivalent of a tin-opener attachment or the tool for removing stones from horse’s hooves.

The trouble is, as anyone who has ever tried to fix the car with a Leatherman or put up a shelf using a Swiss Army Knife will know, these general-purpose tools will only get you so far. They are fine for simple tasks, but bigger projects require more specialised and sophisticated tools to get the job done well.

It’s a feeling that will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to perform some serious financial analysis using an online spreadsheet (assuming you’ve solved the not-insignificant problem of accessing the data you need in the cloud), or do something as simple as generate a table of contents in the online version of Microsoft Word.

When it comes to technology, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery; integration is. At iPushPull, we are striving to bring together the tools you know, whether on desktop or mobile, with the accessibility of the cloud. We don’t believe convenience has to come at the cost of function, and we certainly don’t subscribe to the view that you need to give up the powerful, fully-featured applications you need in order to be productive.

The list of tools we are integrated with is expanding continuously, and now includes Slack, WordPress, Microsoft Teams, PDFs and of course Excel. You can chat in Slack with your team while viewing live updating data, host it on your WordPress website, or simply view live data on your mobile with our platform.

Start your 30 day free trial to see what iPushPull can do for you.

December 14, 2016January 6, 2017

Real-time Profit and Loss, Risk and Alerts on your Mobile

As a trader or risk manager in the digital age, is there any reason for you to be tied to your desk? Could you be spending more time doing more productive things, improving systems, analysing markets or even freeing up time for the family? Read on and find out how to keep track of real-time profit and loss, risk, and get immediate alerts.

How iPushPull can help monitor real-time profit and loss….

Whether you need to get out for lunch for an hour, away for the day or on a business trip or vacation, with iPushPull you can be away from the office with more confidence. Letting you stay on top of your work with any mobile device.

It’s easy – using simple Excel add-ins or APIs you can securely share real-time profit and loss, risk and other live data via the iPushPull platform direct to mobile devices and desktop browsers.

You can now see your live risk screens on the go and set custom email alerts based on your own limits or calculations. You can even set up SMS alerts for when you have no internet access. Now you’ll never miss a market move.

iPushPull is your very own automated trading assistant keeping an eye on things when you can’t.

Less Hassle – More Control

Ever tried accessing your risk systems remotely via VPN, remote desktop or similar? By the time you’ve logged on to the VPN and tried to resize your desktop layout just to make it viewable on your mobile – you’ve probably given up, unless you have lots of patience. Viewing data on the go can be so much easier.

With iPushPull you can control exactly what data you share and with whom. Our permission features lets you define and control what you can view when you’re out of the office, not your colleagues, developers or system providers.

You can share data purely for your own consumption or you can share different data with colleagues or clients, but you don’t need to give them access to the whole data set as you would with many other methods of remote access.

Cross Platform and Less Risk

If you know your way around Excel you can easily use iPushPull to pull together live data from one or more platforms and aggregate or manipulate it as you wish. Then simply push it out to the users you’ve given permission to so they can access it using desktop Excel, on their mobiles or at www.ipushpull.com.

With end-to-end encryption, iPushPull offers next-generation cloud security – meaning simple, secure access to live risk data from mobile devices and desktop browsers wherever you are. And you can share just the data you really need in an easily-viewable, read-only format, so there’s absolutely no risk of fat fingers and unintended mouse clicks.

For more information go here or to set up a demo give us a call on +44 20 3808 4085 or email sales@ipushpull.com

November 25, 2016January 6, 2017

Faster Excel workflow with new iPushPull Add-in

Following the release of the new iPushPull web platform, the Excel add-in has now been updated with great new features for a simplified experience and a much faster Excel workflow. These features provide a streamlined version of the Excel add-in and automates manual tasks, saving you precious time. Download the new version here.

We’ve put together a few tips on using the new add-in:

View the support article for creating new iPushPull pages from desktop Excel for an easy step by step guide to using this upgraded feature. Learn to create a simple Live Push without functions or a simple Live Pull in just a few clicks.

Intuitive features for faster Excel workflow

One of the great new features is a quick access of functions through right clicking, where iPushPull options are now available. You can also navigate to an iPushPull page in the web platform just by double clicking on that page through the My Pages/Push/Pull dialog boxes. View the support article on this feature here.

Download the new Excel add-in to take advantage of these great new updates.

November 24, 2016January 6, 2017

On Premise and Remote Desktop to Cloud Sharing

Uploading and downloading files, cutting and pasting, is that how you share on premise and cloud documents right now? Not as smooth as you’d like, is it? There is a much more streamlined process, without extra downloads or extra copies of files cluttering your drive. With iPushPull you can work with files straight from your desktop, with on premise and remote desktop to cloud sharing.

Let’s take Salesforce and Cloudera for example, in fact any cloud data storage is tied to uploads and downloads. In the time it takes you to do so, the information you download might already be outdated. If you’re sending your clients current prices or sales forecasts, you’ll probably need to go through the motions every time, slowing your production. Perhaps you’re using the company FTP server with multiple files on your hard drive, that need to be saved with a different handle on their name, every time. Except when you open the folder, you’re baffled about which file is the latest. The iPushPull platform eliminates all the unnecessary manual tasks, and automates the process. Instead of struggling with multiple copies, you can share your data straight from your desktop.

Connecting on premise and remote desktops to cloud sharing – an in-depth look at the service

It’s not secure to attach files to emails, so instead of risking your client data being accessed by outside parties, opt in to secure end-to-end encryption. iPushPull’s powerful user access control system allows you select exactly which part of the document you send to other users or clients. More specifically, you can select one or multiple cells to be accessed by particular users. Parts of a spreadsheet can even be invisible and there’s a handy read-only choice too. Extensive control from the comfort of your desktop has never been easier.

Remove technical barriers from your day, by sharing this system with clients as there is no integration required from client side, desktop sharing is easily available from their existing in-house system. Plug and play with the secure add-in connecting from MS Excel and other client side applications. Instead of spending days on producing product proof and closing deals, you can now do so in minutes. Through better automation combined with the iPushPull live data page model, real-time results are within reach. So make your data work as hard as you do!

Automated live updates is one of the features most favoured by our users. Now you don’t even have to update your spreadsheets manually in the cloud. Just set up your spreadsheet with the live feature and your clients can receive updates in real-time (per sub-second).

Such a simple, easily integrated solution can bridge the gap between your local data and the cloud. All you need is to download the iPushPull Excel plug-in and you’re good to go. We’ll even throw in real time text alerts and easy to use mobile access, so you can do your work on the go and keep on top of updates wherever you are. Contact our team today for a tailored solution or a free trial of our on premise and remote desktop to cloud sharing platform.

November 3, 2016January 6, 2017

Effectively Share and Collaborate on Excel Data: iPushPull vs. Dropbox

When it comes to effectively sharing and collaborating on Excel data, one might think that iPushPull works similarly to Dropbox. Both applications incorporate cloud hosting, data sharing, and editing by multiple users straight from desktop applications. The main difference is files. Dropbox is a file sharing service whereas iPushPull is a data and content sharing service. Files have issues with version control, access control, security are are static snapshots in time. Because Dropbox relies on files it does not enable users with real-time functionality, monitoring, or access controls.

DropBox creates multiple versions of the same file when changes to a document are saved at the same time. Valuable time is spend merging changes to make sure that all modifications to a document are correct. Is it an inefficient way to work collaboratively. iPushPull’s unique technology allows multiple users to edit the same content at the same time. By keeping your content up to date and live, all the correct and relevant data is always at your fingertips.

Share and Collaborate on Excel Data – Cells, not Files

A common problem is that there is lots of data in multiple Excel spreadsheets but only a few cells or ranges of data are of interest. With Dropbox you need to manually collate and update data in spreadsheets which puts you at risk of copy-paste errors. However, with iPushPull, you save time and avoid risk by cutting out the extra work. The iPushPull Excel add-in updates the Excel data automatically from your desktop onto the web in real-time, enabling you to access the relevant information on any device including mobile.

DropBox lacks the ability to effectively share and collaborate on Excel data as it does not possess advanced monitoring features. For every data page you create, iPushPull provides you with a statistics and analytics dashboard. Activity is recorded every time a user pushes or pulls data, giving you centralised control of your information.

Additionally, with iPushPull’s access control settings, there is no need for separate spreadsheets for different users. You are able to allocate different levels of access to individual users or user groups (read-write access, read only access, no access). You can apply these access controls to a whole data page, down to a singular cell of data.

Take control of your data today and sign up for free to iPushPull!

November 3, 2016January 6, 2017

First Look at Microsoft Teams

Earlier this year Microsoft executives were internally pushing for a bid for Slack at about $8 billion (at the time Slack was valued at $3.8 billion). However this was vetoed by none other than Mr Gates and CEO Satya Nadella. They both believed that it was better to build than to buy, and chose to beef up Skype instead. So Microsoft Teams was developed as a “chat-based workspace that’s focused on real-time collaboration”. The first look at Microsoft Teams generated an interesting reaction from their biggest rival, Slack.

Yesterday, on the morning of Microsoft’s launch of Teams, Stewart Butterfield the CEO of Slack took out a defiant and defensive full one page advert in the New York Times (see below).

….but Slack has good reason to be concerned.

Here is what our first look at Microsoft Teams showed

The overwhelming first impression is the excellent integration with online Office365 (Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Outlook etc..). It is very impressive. This will immediately be of interest to enterprise users familiar with the Office ecosystem who hadn’t even considered Slack before. Microsoft 1, Slack 0.

Slack is the fastest growing start up in history because people are fed up with email, especially for collaborative work. In addition, Slack has had extremely strong user growth because the real-time chat effectively becomes a ‘one stop shop’. Slack users can pull information from any integrated 3rd party service, directly into a chat channel without having to open another program. For example, you can pull in Salesforce data while you are having a chat with your sales team or the developer team can have automatic server messages within a chat. This concept of pulling information into Slack from different sources has also helped the recent rise of “Bots”.

However, Microsoft yesterday demonstrated similar capabilities by pulling Twitter messages into Teams, and is looking to build a similar suite of offerings and integrations much like Slack has. iPushPull will be one of them.

We found the UI to be cleaner then Slack, even if it is noticeably slow. Perhaps, because everyone around the world is testing it out for themselves.

Live data in Microsoft Teams

The tabs feature is very cool. For example, you can add an Excel tab to a channel which displays any Excel files that are on Onedrive. You can make changes in desktop or online Excel which, after a refresh, will be viewable on the Teams tab. Great for collaborative working. However, you cannot display live data in Excel on Teams. This is where iPushPull comes into play.

While we work on a full integration for Teams, in the meantime we can integrate a full iPushPull page within Teams using the HTML tab function. Et voila you can get live real-time data on Teams direct from desktop Excel.

Who will win the race from here?

Perhaps Microsoft Teams makes Skype for Business and Yammer redundant. My guess is that ultimately Microsoft want to get everyone using an Office365 account (I couldn’t log-on with an ancient Hotmail account for example) which is why you can’t import your personal Skype contacts (quite annoying). There is a also a much greater scope for richer integrations into Microsoft Teams, compared to Slack’s mainly text-based interface.

It feels like Teams is a superior offering for enterprise users. Slack may well be the contender for the anti-Microsoft crown aimed at non-enterprises, start ups, small business and millennials who did not grow up with Microsoft and use Google Apps for Work instead. Office 365 does have 85 million users versus Slack’s 4 million and this is a great offering from Microsoft to stop ‘pesky upstarts’ biting at their heels. Looks like they have learnt from their mistakes with Yammer.

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