Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams Report (November 14, 2007)

The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

Less Travel, More Video … An argument for the adoption of more video conferencing in business. “Ten per cent of the industry population is already spending six weeks at 35,000 feet up in the air every year, double the time they were used to spend on air travel five years ago. Next year it could become 12 weeks. What if they could choose to spend some of their travel budget in virtual management? Large companies have subject matter experts and qualified resources located around the world. Videoconferencing allows firms to more easily deploy and manage those globally dispersed resources by allowing impromptu, face-to-face meetings between managers, subordinates, and remote peers.” The Penisula

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

MindManager and SharePoint … Mindjet outlines a way of connecting its Mindmanager product with SharePoint. “Once project related content is captured in Microsoft SharePoint the challenge is often finding the information you need when you need it. Microsoft Office SharePoint and MindManager 7 provide an easy way for managing content. MindManager 7 allows you to create project or business specific process dashboards using maps to intuitively navigate and find information within SharePoint quickly and easily. Navigating in Microsoft SharePoint using MindManager 7 maps enables all team members to be more productive and efficient – faster.” There’s a 1.4MB PDF available. Mindjet

Collanos 1.2.0.1 … Collanos released an update to its collaborative workspace offering. “The technical improvements are solving most problems users encountered in the past, mainly issues related to installation, compatibility on Mac OS X or Windows Vista, as well as computer resource consumption. A new formatting rule for Collanos Names prepares the ground for great new features, such as Collanos Phone and related voice services. They will be rolled out very soon. All these technical improvements lay a solid foundation on which we will be able to build new releases going forward.” Collanos

Judith on Lotus … Judith comments on a recent analyst day with IBM … “IBM is reinventing Lotus into a collaboration platform. There are many exciting initiatives unfolding in Lotus that focus on a true distributed platform. I expect to see some important Software as a Service initiatives come out of the new Lotus. I would like to see IBM move faster into Software as a Service.” The second part I get, but the first sentence — huh? IT Director

Zoho Updates … Raju points to recent updates across the Zoho product line. Zoho

Traction TeamPage 3.8 … Version 3.8 of Traction TeamPage includes new moderation capabilities for content control. “ … some companies have customers who need to police what people are putting on wikis for legal reasons in such fields as competitive intelligence or research and development. The other case for moderation is to save a series of pages that need to be changed over a span a month. The typical wiki environment must be changed page by page and results published as you go.” Available before the end of year. Traction Software, eWeek

GrooveIt v2 … Review of GrooveIt v2, for linking Outlook and Groove. “GrooveIT! for Outlook enables me to upload email and attachments to the appropriate project Groove workspace and reference that material when needed.” Groove Blog

Avaya and iPhone … Avaya announced the pending release of a client for the iPhone. “Users of an iPhone equipped with the one-X client can dial through an Avaya Communication Manager server, and the caller ID on the receiving phone will display the desktop phone number of the caller. Similarly, calls to the desktop phone number can be made to ring on the iPhone, Avaya says. The iPhone also can access work voice-mail.” ComputerWorld NZ

Huddle Review … David reviews Huddle, a project collaboration service. “Last year they decided to put together a lightweight version of the kind of document management and Sharepoint functionality they saw at work in their customers. Their aim was to produce a product that had 90% of the tools that most people need for project control and tracking, but delivered over the web at an affordable price, and on a standard technology.” Blognation

DivShare Projects … DivShare introduced a project-lite application for Facebook users. “The Projects app is really just a private message board in Facebook (one with oddly differing timestamps for the Wall and Files sections). It’s certainly nowhere near robust enough for professional teams to use, but it could be helpful for college students collaborating on school projects to share notes and files and chat asynchronously about their work.” Read/Write Web

Michael Sampson