The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• When Teams Fail … Edward writes about failure in corporate teams. Much has changed in the last 30 years: “Women and minorities have joined the workforce in large and growing numbers, and globalization has expanded the demographics of companies even further, turning the upper ranks of multinational corporations into seats of highly diverse managerial talent from developed countries and emerging economies alike. Thanks to the explosion of communications and information technologies, tasks have become much more “distributed”; many people no longer work in a traditional office, or even for a company with a local presence. And work is predominantly done by project teams, which might comprise workers separated by thousands of miles and by five or 10 time zones. Indeed, the very organization of the corporation has changed: It’s flat and highly networked, with accountability spread far and wide and to every level.” The concept of “virtual distance” is introduced. strategy+business
• Don’t Rely on Email Alone … “In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, e-mail can be emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone. … Still, if we rely solely on e-mail at work, the absence of a channel for the brain’s emotional circuitry carries risks. In an article to be published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin Byron, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication.” NYTimes

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Upcoming from Oracle … Ken’s read the tea leaves, and thinks that Oracle is about to announce a new collaboration offering. “Hmmm… A rumored new internal release (with a cute codename, no less!) and presentations playing up Oracle’s stand on enterprise collaboration. The crystal ball says to stand by for more announcements from the company to keep them in the ring with the other major players in the enterprise platform world.” Webinar Blog
• Mindquarry = Closed … Stephan announced that Mindquarry has ceased commercial operations. However, “This is perhaps the end of the Mindquarry company as we know it today. This is not yet the end of the Mindquarry product and it’s community.” Mindquarry
• Colligo Contributor 2.2 … Colligo released Version 2.2 of Contributor, its rich client for SharePoint. New features: check in / check out, new user configuration options, and view level selection (“ … a terrific new capability that allows users to select a list of content for sync which can change dynamically depending on how the view is defined. For example, let’s suppose a project manager frequently travels and wants to be sure that they have all pending documents from a specific project available offline so they can edit and approve them while traveling. They would first create a view on the SharePoint site called, say, “project X pending”. When creating the view, filters would be set to select documents with metadata values that equal “Project X” and “Pending” … Now, whenever a new document that meets these filters is uploaded or modified in the document library, it will be automatically included in the view and, hence, synchronized to Colligo Contributor during the next sync cycle. Likewise, documents that no longer meet the criteria (for example documents that are moved from “pending” to “approved”) will not continue to be sync’d.““), among others. Colligo, and also Colligo Connections