Articles about Messaging and Collaboration

Those of you who simply want to chat with your Facebook friends can now access Messenger through its own dedicated site. The interface is similar to that of the Android, iOS and Windows Phone mobile apps, and there is even support for desktop notifications, so you won't miss any of your friends' important messages.

However, because you have to access Messenger through a site, you have to keep a tab open in your favorite browser. But if you're using a Mac you can also try this new unofficial OS X app, which effectively turns the site into a dedicated client.

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Today Facebook launches a new standalone website for its Messenger service. The separate interface means that it is now possible to chat with your Facebook contacts without having to visit the main Facebook website where you might run the risk of whiling away too much time reading through your timeline as well.

On mobile devices, Facebook has moved users to a dedicated Messenger app rather than allowing them to chat within the main app. By bringing the web-based version of the social network's chat tool in line with the iOS, Windows Phone and Android versions, Facebook has made chatting a distinct feature that can now be conducted completely separately in its own tab.

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There is no end in sight for the Windows Phone app-gap. While lots of major titles have made their way to Store over the years, the platform has seen a number of high-profile offerings disappear altogether. Some developers are backing out, while others are getting in the way of third-party clients being made available to users. It's a sad state of affairs.

While NBC has released updates for both the Android and iOS versions of the app, Today is listed as no longer available in Windows Phone Store. Meanwhile, 6snap will no longer be available to users because Snapchat has a problem with third-party clients.

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Largely due to the exposés in the media following Edward Snowden's NSA revelations, there is now great interest in security and privacy. From this sprang a new breed of report -- transparency reports detailing the number of data requests legal and governmental agencies made about a particular service.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple are among the companies who have released transparency reports, and the latest name on the list is Snapchat. As with other similar reports there is a limit to what they are able to reveal, but it does show that various agencies had an interest in no fewer than 666 Snapchat accounts.

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Late last year, Google introduced support for multiple email providers in Gmail for Android, welcoming users of Outlook.com, Yahoo Mail and other such services to manage all their accounts using its app. There are plenty of folks who are not just Gmail or Google Apps users, after all. However, the app wasn't properly designed to handle all the extra accounts that users would set up.

The problem? Users had to switch between accounts every time they received new emails or wanted to reply to a message. Now, Google is finally correcting this by giving Gmail for Android a much-needed unified inbox.

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Following a four-day long security breach back in February, chat and collaboration tool Slack is finally getting two-factor authentication. Last month, the encrypted central user database was accessed by hackers although there is no indication that hashed passwords were decrypted.

Slack insists that no payment information was seen by hackers, and while the breach is far from good news, there is a silver lining: it has forced the company to look harder at security. Starting today, two-factor authentication is available which locks down accounts via the Android, iOS and Windows Phone apps.

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AnyMeeting is making it easier for anyone to create and join a conference call, as today the company launches a new conferencing service which does not require setting up any account or using any special software.

To set up a conference call you only have to create a new email, add everyone you want to talk to as recipients and then cc [email protected].

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http://youtu.be/MM5yX33mewI

Wiper is a messaging service which offers an interesting privacy and security-centric option. It lets users delete their conversations, on-demand, from the other users' smartphones as well as Wiper's servers. I took a look at what it can do in a previous article, which you can check out here.

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Compared to other Google products, Contacts feels like an afterthought. Since its introduction, it has received little attention, as the search giant focused on its more prominent and more promising services. Do you remember the last time an update was announced? I sure don't. It's still as ugly, awkward to use and slow as you've always remembered it to be.

But not for long. Google has announced that Contacts will finally get its much-needed revamp, showcasing the improvements via a preview that's available now. The new Contacts features some pretty big changes, starting with a look that feels modern enough for a Google product unveiled in 2015.

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As the manager of a small business or an entrepreneur just starting out, you should always be on the lookout for anything that can improve your productivity, time management, organization, and ultimately make day to day tasks easier to manage.

It can be hard enough trying to run things in the office without also having to worry about your online presence. But like it or not, today’s business needs an online presence in order to ultimately succeed, or at least remain competitive.

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It's rare these days to rely on just one service -- you find yourself using Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and more which means information and messages are coming at you from many different angles.

This can lead to information overload as well as security worries. With its new secure platform San Francisco-based Ekko is launching a way to streamline all of your communications and protect your privacy.

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People in the UK really love Apple products. OK, to be more precise, people in the UK with email accounts love Apple products.

More than half of all email in the UK (54 percent) is opened on an Apple device, says SendGrid, an email delivery platform. The total number of opened emails on iPads and iPhones has increased by 18 percent and five percent respectively.

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There are lots of solutions to help collaboration and sharing of information within the workplace. However, it isn't always easy to exchange information if it's stored in different apps.

Collaboration platform Incentive is addressing this by adding seamless integration with Microsoft SharePoint, allowing users to search, visualize and collaborate on files natively within Incentive.

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It is fair to say that Windows Phone still needs quite a few major titles in Store before the so-called app-gap can be considered a thing of the past. Take cloud storage services for example. You can embrace OneDrive if you want to stick with Microsoft services, or, as an alternative, use Box. But neither Dropbox nor Google Drive are an option. Both are hugely popular services, and their availability can be a deal-breaker for prospective Windows Phone users.

The good news is that at least Dropbox's availability on Windows Phone is no longer an issue, as the cloud storage service just launched its app in Store. It's undeniably a major win for the tiled smartphone operating system, which has consistently been criticized for lacking an official Dropbox client.

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Wherever you are in the world, it's quite likely that your government wants to monitor your communication, be it online or via phone. Following the tragic events in France, politicians have voiced a desire for greater snooping powers. UK Prime Minister David Cameron has suggested that he would ban encrypted messaging tools if he wins the next election.

He has said that he would move to block the use of methods of communication that could not be intercepted and read by security services. With tools such as iMessage, WhatsApp and Snap Chat providing encrypted messaging options, could their days be numbered? Or is this an idiotic and unworkable way of looking at things?

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