Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams Report (October 31, 2007)

The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

Social Productivity … “Social Productivity is different than social networking or social bookmarking: it’s about getting work done outside the team of like-minded people you work with everyday. With social productivity, an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in on it. These could be people you work with a lot, people you’ve never worked with or even people outside your company. Now all of a sudden your idea has been developed openly by all sorts of people who bring their own, valuable perspective. You can evolve those ideas into all sorts of collaborative or locked content but thanks to the social whetstone, your original idea is much stronger now.” Very similar concept to collaboration auto-discovery. JiveTalks

Fragmented Communication Tools … Analysis of the potential ROI of a UC environment. “A survey of enterprise and contact center employees about their workflows has found that enterprise of 1,000 employees could lose nearly $13 million a year in lost productivity and avoidable expenses — all because of fragmented communications.” ConnectIT

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

Vendors Don’t Understand Collaboration … The VP for Global Technology Solutions at Goldman Sachs says that vendors don’t understand the needs of end users for collaboration tools. Russell Shaw

Enterprise 2.0 = Inevitable … Speakers at Interop New York 2007 said that Web 2.0 technologies were “inevitable” in the enterprise. User-driven mashups are seen as a key force. NetworkWorld

SharePoint Failure … 7 reasons why SharePoint fails: (1) assuming SharePoint will solve the problems of the shared drive (“500 GBs of mismanaged and poorly categorized files on a network drive is still 500 GBs of mismanaged and poorly categorized files in SharePoint; except now with a more expensive hosting and management cost. “), (2) failure to establish the operational premise of the portal, (4) allowing individual team sites or projects to define, control, or influence portal taxonomy, (5) lack of end user acceptance, training and support, and more. Portalogiks

Enterprise Hosting for Atlassian … Atlassian announced Enterprise Hosting options for Confluence and JIRA. “You might be asking yourself, what does Enterprise Hosting give me that isn’t already included in Confluence Hosted? The answer is enterprise-level control. Confluence Hosted is perfect for smaller organizations who want to use the world’s greatest wiki and who don’t need additional customisation. However, some customers require things like integration with their internal applications, custom plugins, or simply outgrow what they’re using and need something more.” Atlassian

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

Taskpaper 1.0 … Taskpaper 1.0, a GTD-application for Mac users, is out. “TaskPaper’s interface is simple and to the point, as is the structure of a TaskPaper file itself. You have projects, shown underlined and in bold, and under those projects you have tasks which, in turn, can have sub-tasks (as shown in the screenshot above). These tasks exist by themselves; there’s no any way to link a task to another, or set a due date. TaskPaper’s strength is that it lets you focus on crossing out those tasks instead of building a self-referential web of unfinished business which separates you from the cold, harsh reality of all the work you need to do.” TUAW

Naming Something Gives You the Power Back … “It’s another version of the freedom that comes from clarifying and renegotiating your agreements with yourself. But because you need to know what those agreements are before they can be renegotiated, you must group them as such. Naming something we’re involved in lessens its grip on us. If I’m feeling negative, when I realize it and call it “negativity” I instantly have greater freedom of choice about what to do with or about it. When I’m just in it, and haven’t called it what it is, I allow its control.” The Huffington Post

Michael Sampson