The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Zero Email Friday … Intel is implementing an email free day once a week as a trial with 150 engineers. “In our new pilot, we encourage the members of an organic group to focus each Friday on direct conversation – face to face or by telephone – for interpersonal communication within the group. Processing email from other groups is OK; sending email within the group is also OK – when it is necessary. But as much as possible, they will try to walk across the aisle or pick up the phone. While this may seem a small thing, experiments done in other companies showed a great impact once people started exploring communication with the human voice.” IT@Intel

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Atlassian Confluence 2.6 … Atlassian released Version 2.6 of Confluence, its enterprise wiki software. “Confluence 2.6 includes a new theme with a fresh look and feel, created in response to customers’ interest in something friendlier for new users. Several new social features in 2.6 emphasize community, such as author photos that are now appended to comments and dashboard recent updates. Other new features include default content for spaces, template labels, official MySQL 5.0 support, PDF export of images and the default bundling of the social bookmarking plugin.” Atlassian
• Adobe Acquired Virtual Ubiquity … Adobe acquired Virtual Ubiquity, for its online document authoring service. “ Buzzword, an online word processor, enables individuals to work together to create high quality, page perfect documents. The collaboration capabilities in Buzzword enable multiple authors to edit and comment on documents from anywhere, at anytime, while document creators can set permissions that virtually eliminate version control chaos. The founders of Virtual Ubiquity will be joining Adobe. With extensive background in the development of Lotus Notes and eRoom, the Virtual Ubiquity team developed a rich, collaborative authoring environment for the next generation of work. ” TechNews, ZDNet

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• On Concentration … Ideas for students on how to concentrate better. Good insights for us all. University of Kent
• Cut Back … “A fine colleague of mine just resigned from several boards … and cut back on work hours. His doctor warned that stress has spiked his blood pressure to life threatening levels. Have you seen it happen?” Brain Based Business
• Projects, Not Goals … Anne outlines how she uses projects rather than goals for moving ahead. There’s some counter-standard counsel in her method, eg, to focus on action, not results, where Anne says: “But there are many problems with focusing overly much on results rather than on the action and the process. For one, you’re more likely to achieve your goals if you engage in problem-solving and planning rather than on visualizing the outcome. For another, you can’t predict the future with any certainty. If you fixate on one particular outcome you might neglect other, better possibilities. And focusing on results only can take you away from enjoyment of the present and the process. So I think relatively more about action and enjoyment and relatively less about exactly what I’m going to get.” Anne Truitt Zelenka
• Write It and Remember … “When we take notes, though, something happens. As we’re writing, we create spatial relations between the various bits of information we are recording. Spatial tasks are handled by another part of the brain, and the act of linking the verbal information with the spatial relationship seems to filter out the less relevant or important information.” Ian’s Messy Desk