The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Outcome controls and behavior controls are two formal ways to increase the level of control in virtual teams. Often, both are needed to ensure project goodness.
• Ravi is investigating how leaders of virtual teams should think about how to deal with cultural challenges, and what that means. He looks at informal controls for team members.

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Joel outlines a 7 year history of SharePoint.
• Basex thinks that information overload is the key problem to be dealt with in 2008. They are running a survey to collect data about how people are solving information overload.
• IBM released OmniFind Personal Email Search, a free add-on tool for smart search within Lotus Notes email databases. Available immediately, and for free.
• Microsoft released the Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint, a free resource for planning and commissioning an extranet based on SharePoint. “The Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint helps enhance security by creating each collaboration site as a SharePoint site collection. This ensures that teams using one collaboration site will not be able to view documents on another site, unless they are explicitly given access. In addition, the toolkit puts all external users in ADAM (Microsoft’s lightweight directory service), rather than in the organization’s primary internal directory.“

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Congratulations to Jason Womack on being #81 in the top 100 list of advisors and consultants on personal development for 2007.
• Planning and working your plan is key to effective action in 2008. Jim outlines 6 ideas for business planning this year.
• Thinking is hard work, which is probably why so few people do it.
• Run effective meetings, whether they are announcement, status update or brainstorming in ethos. Chris has ideas, and related to that, how different tools can help increase effectiveness.
• Reflect more, not less, because the benefits are tremendous. Eg, you can learn from your mistakes, it gives perspective, and more.

Other Noteworthy Insights

• The LiveScribe pen will be released on January 29, in conjunction with the DEMO conference.