The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Four keys to effective distributed teams: use a shared information repository, get together with others on the team whenever possible, appoint someone at the “glue person”, and schedule an annual face-to-face planning meeting.

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Version 4.0 of Citrix GoToMeeting will add Mac meeting hosting support, and voice over IP. Major cool.
• The Nielsen Norman Group released its Intranet Information Architecture report, with 1,193 pages of analysis and insight. There is also the Intranet Design Annual 2008 report, which highlights the 10 winning intranets in its study.
• PCWorld has a review of TimeBridge, for scheduling meetings with people across different organizations. “TimeBridge lets a meeting organizer operate almost in “fire and forget” mode–after you enter the initial information in TimeBridge, the service takes care of the rest. For fast access you can even create or drag and drop a TimeBridge bookmark into your browser to quickly click and begin the simple scheduling process.“
• NewsGator announced that its line of consumer RSS products are all now free. “The list of free applications includes NewsGator Inbox, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and NewsGator Go for Windows Mobile, Blackberry/Java, iPhone and HTML mobile applications, as well as NewsGator Online, the company said. All include free synchronization across the Web, desktop and mobile devices.” See also ComputerWorld.
• Scalix introduced Version 11.3 of its namesake email and calendaring platform for Linux. New features: Outlook 2007 support, CalDAV-enabled, and more. See also NetworkWorld.
• SharePoint has “evolved” from a lot of different pieces over time. Joining Dots has a diagram.

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Dave shares his picture of an ideal day, based on the premise of saying “no” to the urgent, unimportant things. “The only way to address a scarcity of time is to stop doing some things, to free up time for others. When I got sick eighteen months ago I learned, of necessity, how to stop doing some things. I gave myself time to heal, to do what was important instead of what was most urgent. I learned to just say ‘no’ to urgent, unimportant things. I have to learn to do that again.” (hat tip, Steve)
• Zap the 10 worst energy sinks right out of your life: lack of sleep, sugar, coffee, lack of exercise, and more.
• Be messy, be less productive.
• How to fail at working out the greatness within you: don’t work on the important problems.