The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Wikis Reduce Email … Jordan chimes in with further evidence that an enterprise wiki reduces email traffic. “As I look at our own Traction corpus of over 130,000 pages, comments and attachments (add edits and label/tag changes and the number potential notifications is much higher), I shudder at the possibility of all these items come across my desk via e-mail. From a more empirical perspective, we participated in the DOD CIO sponsored program to determine the benefits of and model for using enterprise blog and wiki technology for program teams. The benefits outlined include a 50% reduction in time spent on electronic communication and a 75% reduction in status reporting process.” Traction Software
• “What Motivates Participation?” … McKinsey survey over 500 German employees on their use of collaboration technologies are work, and asked why the participated. Primary motivations: reputation building, team spirit, and community identification. Collaboration 2.0, McKinsey Quarterly
• Steps to Making Telecommuting Easy … SunGard Higher Education follows some great principles for making telecommuting easy for its staff: (1) managers telecommute too, so they know what it involves; (2) travel policies are respectful of weekends and people’s energy/recovery needs, and (3) employees meet up in person twice a year, among others. WebWorkerDaily

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Microsoft Acquires Parlano … Parlano announced that it is being acquired by Microsoft, and to that I add my hearty “congratulations”. This is a great move. The deal is expected to close in 4Q2007. “After the deal closes, Microsoft will add the group chat functionality to Office Communications Server and Office Communicator, and plans to offer group chat as part of the standard client access license for Office Communications Server 2007 Software Assurance customers. Current Parlano customers, many of whom already use Microsoft unified communications software, will have increased access to the breadth of Microsoft unified communications software.” Parlano, Nick Fera, Jeff Schultz
• New Attensa RSS Readers … Attensa released new RSS readers for Windows, Mac and Microsoft Outlook users. A key feature is the included attention analysis, for automatically trying to figure out what is of most interest to users. “Attensa’s unique AttentionStream Learning Engine observes and learns from the user’s feed and article reading behaviors and works on the principle that past and present actions predict future behavior. Deep analytics of article content are matched to a personalization system that automatically prioritizes and recommends new articles that will be of interest to the reader.” Available immediately, at no charge. Attensa
• Zoho Start … Zoho released its first foray into providing an integrated UI for its various online applications. Key features: an integrated login page for all applications, a “My Documents” section that consolidates documents from across the Zoho suite, a common user interface for sharing, tagging and exporting documents, and more. Available immediately. Zoho

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• What are you About? … It applies to businesses, and it applies to individual professionals: who is your target market? What is your value-add? “While all the above organisations would gladly accept money from people outside their target markets, they don’t actively seek them. By focusing in on a few groups, they can tweak their service and products and become more and more efficient in delivering them. You save time because you get faster which makes you more profitable.” Make It Happen
• Accept Responsibility … What are you blaming others or circumstances for, that you should take personal responsibility for? “But the good news is that once you accept responsibility, you can change the result. Why? Because your behavior as a leader is 100 percent under your control. Changing the result is as simple—or as hard—as changing your behavior.” Michael Hyatt

Other Noteworthy Insights

• Vista = Game Over? … Stuart wonders: “There can be nothing beyond Vista it has reached the end of its development path. Like Apple where they restarted with OSX and jumped to a modern operating system you can’t hide the fact that Vista is a remodel that has happened just one too many times. The Apple shift of Intel is just proving this.” Unbound Spiral
• YourCall for Palm OS … Iambic released Version 2.01 of YourCall for Palm OS, which adds calendar lookup and next action capturing capabilities for when a call is in progress. “YourCall provides a comprehensive selection of call management actions that can be taken in all three areas — before, during and after. It is a great tool for helping Treo owners, whether casual users or business professionals, proactively handle all aspects of the mobile communications process.” iambic