Productivity Apps - News, Features, and Slideshows

Why successfully integrating SaaS apps and data with your existing on-premise software and systems is crucial to cloud maturity.

Now that the holidays are over, reality has set in and you probably have a resolution or two to live up to. If any of your resolutions are along the lines of "be more efficient at work" or "find ways to boost productivity," you're in luck. These apps will help you meet and even exceed your work-related resolutions in 2014.

Microsoft announced today that it has mostly wrapped up its acquisition of the Internet communications company Skype. The $8.5 billion deal has received approval from the major regulators, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Union, although a few holdouts remain--Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and Taiwan--which are expected to fall into line shortly.

The Cloud is falling! The Cloud is falling! No, seriously. It keeps falling. If it's not Google Docs or Gmail, it's Microsoft's Office 365, Hotmail, and SkyDrive. The issues encountered over the past week or so - and the sporadic-but-too-frequent-to-ignore outages before that -- raise serious questions about just how dependable Cloud-based services really are.

Comcast subscribers will soon have the option to place video calls through their television, thanks to a partnership with VoIP provider Skype announced on Tuesday. Customers will need additional equipment to use the new feature.

Google Docs is becoming a more robust cloud-based productivity suite, and the addition of uploading, storing and viewing videos is a boon for sharing corporate presentations and the like. It's also a slick way to skirt your company's firewall on streaming video sites such as YouTube.

Pandora and Rosetta Stone have embraced social business tools and the Cloud to cut costs, increase productivity and improve collaboration. Learn how these two companies overcame security concerns, gained executive buy-in and more.