Vantage 2013: Another fine vintage

Today’s post comes from Norv Leong, Director of Product Marketing at Actiance.

Just like any popular restaurant, Microsoft continues to deliver sumptuous dishes and please its customers.  Let’s take Microsoft Lync as an example.  According to Microsoft, Lync revenue grew 45% in its Q4 2012 and, even more eye-popping, was the 822% growth in hosted Lync Voice in particular.

Goodness all around, but it’s all for naught if you’re in a regulated industry and/or subject to a lot of potential litigation, where having records of everything is absolutely critical.  What counts is that you have a management solution in place that can capture and monitor Lync communications so you stay out of regulatory and legal trouble.

Think of it as a wine pairing.  Meals at restaurants are almost always enhanced with a glass of fine wine (or perhaps a craft beer for you beer lovers out there).  It complements the meal and ensures a holistic experience.

That’s where we come into the picture.  Actiance has been and continues to be the gold standard with respect to its varietal of wine, namely, the management of unified communications platforms.   Rather than get complacent and rest on our laurels, we’ve actually done the opposite.  We’ve managed to make an awesome product, even awesomer!  (Not sure if that’s a word, but today it is.)

With the release of Vantage 2013, Actiance has set the bar even higher for ensuring compliance and security for the leading UC platform on the planet.  Just taking a look at the latest features included in the release and it’s a no-brainer why financial services companies, technology firms, and government agencies all turn to Actiance to meet their governance requirements.

Let’s start with the obvious:  support for Lync 2013.  Vantage picks up right where it left off in Lync 2010.  Vantage supports the monitoring and capture of Lync IM, Persistent chat, and now Voice.  Dodd-Frank and PRA/FCA (for our UK friends) regulations are driving demand for Lync voice recording solutions, and Vantage is the cleanest solution in town to do just that.

Next up is real-time Jive capture.  UC may be growing leaps and bounds, but the enterprise social software space is growing even faster.  Jive’s the poster child of the space, and Vantage 2013 adds real-time capture support so you don’t miss a thing.  The social space is dynamic, and it’s important not to miss any key postings, deletions, and edits that a regulator, auditor, or attorney would find of interest.

Finally, you’ve got direct integration with Symantec Enterprise Vault, the beast in the email archiving space.  By integrating directly with EV, customers can retain the invaluable metadata so crucial to quickly understand the essence of conversations in a social world.  With all the blogging, commenting, replying, and sharing going on, it’s imperative to have a tagging and archiving workflow that retains as much context as possible.  Without it, your legal and IT costs can blow through the roof.

So, Actiance provides benefits on several fronts – from UC to collaboration to archiving.  With governance headaches out of the way, a compliance officer or general counsel can sit down, relax, and enjoy that glass of Vantage 2013.

Farewell Live Messenger, Hello Skype

When I started my career, I couldn’t have imagined how social my online work world would become.

Things like LinkedIn®, Microsoft® Lync®, IBM® Connections, and Skype™ are so integrated into my workday that connecting, IM’ing, and blogging with colleagues are all as natural and effective as sitting face-to-face over coffee.

Just like new ways to keep in touch with my colleagues and friends have emerged, some headed for the sunset like long-time friend Microsoft Live Messenger. But don’t say “Bon voyage!” just yet. You can use your Live ID to move your Live Messenger account and contacts to Skype today.

And if you’re a Skype user who works in a regulated industry like financial services, or if you work for a company that has other strict legal or corporate governance requirements, Actiance has great news! With Vantage™ for Skype, you can use Skype on your company’s network to stay in touch with the folks you need to get things done in a safe and compliant way.

It gives your company the tools it needs to meet strict requirements for regulatory, legal, and corporate compliance across a wide variety of networks, including Skype. And for a limited time, existing Actiance customers using Vantage or USG to support Microsoft Live Messenger can enjoy special pricing on Vantage for Skype.

So go ahead and start a Skype chat with a buddy in Santiago, share the latest product news with a colleague in Paris, or send a vacation photo to a friend in Vienna. With the trusted governance the Actiance platform provides, you can be sure you’re keeping the good stuff in while keeping the bad stuff out.

Getting Social

Today’s post comes from Victor Gaxiola, Social Media Subject Matter Expert at Actiance.

Earlier this month the global sales force of Actiance gathered near our Belmont, California Headquarters to learn about recent product enhancements and what to expect in 2013. Energized by the Social Journey of collaboration, unified communications and Social Media that have made Actiance a leader in communications within regulated industries, attendees were encouraged to tweet using hashtag Actiance (#Actiance)

Here are a few samples from the Twitter stream:

As a social company, the tweets relay our collective impressions of the event, speakers and content shared during the 3 days we were together. As you read the stream of tweets, you will discover a team that is enthusiastic, learning from each other and ready for the new year.

In the months to come, you will learn more about what Actiance is doing to meet our customers needs in the social space and providing the solutions they require to facilitate communications internally and externally. To stay abreast of all our updates, we invite you to join follow us on Twitter at @Actiance and join us on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/Actiance

To see all the tweets shared during the conference, we invite you to view our story on Storify. [View the story “The #Actiance Social Journey” on Storify]

Actiance and IBM: Enabling Social Business

Most of the Actiance team is off at Lotusphere this week – and while I expect a few of them will be sneaking away from the show floor early to visit the “Magic Kingdom,” I’ve been left to captain the ‘blogging ship’ as it were.  So, as a nod to the Actiance team at Lotusphere and to longtime Actiance partner, IBM, I wanted to write about some great news for IBM Connections users and Actiance customers.

At the event, Actiance is showcasing the result of a partnership with IBM – Vantage for IBM Connections.

When most people think about what the term “social business” means, they typically don’t think regulatory compliance and eDiscovery.  But, businesses moving into social face increased regulatory compliance requirements.  Add in the requirement that social content needs to be discoverable and suddenly the internal IT team is in over its head trying to make social business work.

That’s why Actiance has partnered with IBM to make it easier for IBM customers to adopt social collaboration tools.  IBM customers can now access Vantage Compliance support for IBM Connections and IBM Sametime through the IBM Passport Advantage (PPA).

Vantage for IBM Connections provides a centralized governance, management, and security policy framework to ensure compliant, discoverable social content (it also allows granular policies to be defined between end users, groups of employees, and even non-employees).

I know the team is excited to showcase our new Vantage for IBM Connections compliance module (available exclusively through IBM) at Lotusphere this year.  We’ve already seen a tremendous amount of interest in the module from customers looking to better enforce corporate use policies and enable collaboration.

If you’re attending Lotusphere this year, please stop by Actiance booth #521 – we’d love to hear about what your organization is doing to enable social business.  If you have questions about Vantage for IBM Connections – let us know in the comments section below – we always enjoy talking social business!