About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

Rob serves CIO Professionals with research in the areas of information workplace and collaboration strategy. Rob delivers strategic guidance, helping enterprises define enterprise solutions that drive efficiency and competitive differentiation. His current research focuses on core elements of collaboration strategy, including collaboration platforms, workspaces, and enterprise social strategy.
Rob comes to Forrester with many years of experience in enterprise software consulting, product marketing, product management, and strategy. Most recently, he was director of product management at Microsoft, where he played a strategic role with Duet, a joint initiative brought to market with SAP. Prior to Microsoft, Rob was a senior director of product marketing at Oracle Corporation, where he focused on Oracle's content, collaboration, portal, and business intelligence offerings. He also spent fifteen years in consulting working for Lotus/IBM and other global software services firms with a focus on corporate collaboration.
Rob holds a B.A. in economics from the University of California, Davis.
These data charts contain the full results of Forrester's August 2012 Global SharePoint Usage Online Survey. The results indicate that weak mobile access and social computing features combined with...
Customer Struggles With Social, Cloud, And Mobile Signal A Transition
Microsoft SharePoint is the centerpiece of many enterprises' collaboration and content strategies, but it isn't clear to us that enterprises will continue to invest in SharePoint to provide a broader...

Change Management: The Social Business And Collaboration Playbook
It's often said, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." Nowhere in the world of enterprise IT is this adage more fitting than in social business and collaboration. For two...

Highly Integrated With A Risk Of Lock-In
Microsoft looks to strike three very familiar chords with the release of Office 2013: mobile, social, and cloud. Each has become table stakes for enterprise software, and in order for Microsoft to...

Business Impact: The Social Business And Collaboration Playbook
Like Ponce de Leon searching for the Fountain of Youth, businesses have long searched for the value of collaboration. Skeptics say that the quest, like de Leon's, is a fool's errand. Many argue that...

Policy And Procedures: The Social Business And Collaboration Playbook
A clear social business policy is an essential guide for employees using social and collaboration tools for customer engagement and for internal or partner collaboration. While it takes a...
Skills And Staffing: The Social Business And Collaboration Playbook
All too often, IT approaches staffing for social business and collaboration initiatives as it would other IT-led projects. With a focus on providing the best technical solution possible, the...
The Five Top-Of-Mind Streams And How They Stack Up
In Forrester's first 19-criteria evaluation of activities streams vendors, Forrester identified the five significant players — Neudesic Pulse, Salesforce Chatter, Socialcast by VMware...

There's an old adage that says it takes Microsoft three times to get it right. Its commitment to SharePoint in the cloud is clearly evident in its investment in data centers, a costly retrofitting of...

Early Adopters Outline The Promise And Prerequisites For Success
The days of Microsoft SharePoint being only a locally installed software product are over. Microsoft's commitment to SharePoint in the cloud is evident in its massive data-center investments, its...

Driving A SharePoint-Based Information Workplace Will Challenge C&C Pros
Microsoft SharePoint is poised for broader adoption as an Information Workplace platform. While most use it for content and collaboration (C&C) needs today, the platform's broad, integrated...

Adoption Of SharePoint 2010 — A Serious Application Platform — Is Strong
The stage is set for a big upswing in custom application development on SharePoint. First, SharePoint Server 2010 adoption is very strong, and this version of the product has the strongest features...
SharePoint adoption continues to grow at a rapid pace. According to Forrester's July 2011 Global SharePoint Usage Online Survey, 57% of organizations surveyed have already deployed SharePoint 2010 a...
IBM, Jive, NewsGator, And Telligent Lead A Rapidly Maturing Field
In Forrester's first ever, 62-criteria evaluation of enterprise social platform vendors, we found that IBM, Jive, NewsGator, and Telligent led the pack due to breadth and depth of functionality and...
Office 365 Has Much But Not All Of What Firms Need From A Collaboration Platform
On June 28, 2011, Microsoft launched Office 365 in 40 countries after a massive public beta involving 200,000 organizations from every region. This product encompasses Office Professional Plus and...
Investments in enterprise social technology continue to rise. At the same time, the bet on enterprise social initiatives becomes increasingly strategic. The stakes are high, the risk of failure looms...
The "Social Layer" Ignites The Next Wave Of Social Technology Innovation
Enterprise social technology vendors have begun to actively position their offerings to meet integration requirements, and the term "social layer," which Forrester originally heard from Socialtext...
Implementing SharePoint can be a broad and complex initiative. Given the depth and breadth of the product it's not surprising that SharePoint professional services firms come in all shapes and sizes....

Mainsoft Provides The Crucial Glue For A Multivendor IW Strategy
Amway runs an extremely complex, global business including product development, manufacturing, marketing, and a unique and highly successful distribution system. This complexity means that Amway IT...
A New Duet Drives Critical Integration
Microsoft = knowledge worker software. SAP = business process. Despite extensive effort on the part of each vendor to encroach on the other's turf, this high-level analysis still holds. Hence, the...
The Information Workplace is moving from vision to reality. The best evidence is coming in the form of vendors offering broad, previously disparate functionality packaged together to solve common...
Oracle is not a company that leaps to mind when you think of knowledge workers — certainly, not in the way that IBM/Lotus or Microsoft might. Yet, with the emergence of the Information...
The Vendor Landscape Creates More Opportunity And Complexity
When Forrester introduced the concept of the Information Workplace (IW) in 2006 it was largely a vision of the future. Since then, much has changed. The world economy has suffered a prolonged...
An Empowered Report
In the hyper-competitive online social marketing world two things differentiate the winners from the losers: creativity and client service. When Ogilvy's 360 Digital Influence group looked at...
Three Firms Achieve Tangible Results
Companies depend on innovation to sprint out of the current economic doldrums and to return to profitability and growth. Innovation is a discipline with established best practices, needed skill sets,...