What do users need to/want to synchronize?
The predominant element that users tend to want to share are Calendars! Which is not unusual, since it is human nature to want to either know, or tell others, what is going on. This has the natural expansion of dealing with both a “personal” calendar or diary and a “group” calendar. But wait, there’s more: because as soon as we discover that we can put people on a calendar and schedule events for them, we want to be able to schedule (and manage) physical resources, everything from conference rooms to the corporate airplane.
XC Connect manages this very nicely, allowing users to share their personal calendar with selected users or to participate in selected “group” calendars. To take it a step further, XC Connect enables a permission structure that provides for read-only, read/write, as well as read/write/delete privileges. In other words, you might have visibility into someone else’s calendar, but you may not have the privilege to create or modify their schedule. On the other hand, you might have, as an “administrator” full access to a user’s calendar, allowing you to fully manage another user’s schedule.
The above holds true for managing resources, where selected users might have “read” access to the status of, for example, a conference room, but there is a selected user that actually has control over booking the room itself.
Address Book and Contact sharing is the next most popular, particularly since in many cases, the desktop application is utilized as a mini-CRM tool, or even as a “company address book”.
XC Connect allows the creation of multiple “shared” address books/contact folders providing a lot of flexibility. There is no limit to how many different ones you can create.
The third most popular element that is shared are Tasks… We’ve found that organizations that deal with project management or process related events utilize the shared tasks capability extensively. Customers in the construction industry in particular seem to leverage this feature the most. Legal offices also utilize the Task structure to delegate and track case events.
Again, XC Connect facilitates the ability to manage a complicated task management situation by providing for a flexible permissions model and the ability to create multiple shared task folders with access by desired users.