The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• How are you going to ensure that the people factors of Enterprise 2.0 are adequately taken into account in 2008? Todd has some pointers, including “When a person created a collaborative environment for the first time, did you follow up with some type of “Welcome Neighbor” basket like top ten uses of a Sharepoint, five tips to increase adoption of your environment, next training classes or people like you did x. Clearly, you don’t need to do this for someone creating their fifth environment but it’s a great idea for first timers.“

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Cisco announced that is WebEx PCNow remote access tool now supports connectivity to and from Apple Macs. “WebEx PCNow is the first remote-access solution to support both PC-to-PC and phone-to-PC access. This new version now also provides cross-platform support including PC-to-Mac, Mac-to-PC and Mac-to-Mac. Designed to deliver the same experience as working on one’s own computer, WebEx PCNow provides an easy-to-use, highly secure connection from any computer via any Internet connection delivering the capability to do desktop searches, find contacts, use the calendar, work on documents and send and receive e-mail.“
• The Cisco WebEx Connect platform will include the eTouch SamePage wiki for content generation and collaboration between users.
• Atlassian announced that EditGrid will plug-in to Confluence Hosted, providing a completely online spreadsheet within the Confluence environment. “The EditGrid Plugin for Confluence allows for real-time collaboration of spreadsheets within Confluence Hosted or Confluence Enterprise Hosting. With EditGrid, users can create or insert spreadsheets into Confluence pages. They can also edit the spreadsheet collaboratively. The resulting spreadsheet is saved as an attachment within the Confluence pages in Microsoft Excel format, allowing Confluence to manage the revision history.“
• Cisco’s TelePresence offerings enable organizations to be more green and socially responsible, by reducing the amount of travel required for meetings. “That is rare rhetoric for a networking equipment company, but Cisco has a return on investment (ROI) proposition behind the goodwill. Unified communications applications can help cut out commutes and reduce miscommunication, and TelePresence might even reduce the need for long-distance travel and a whole host of related costs, not to mention the CO2 such trips pump into the atmosphere.“
• Mike posts on the history of presence, and includes some thoughts about where to from here? “ … the new perspective on presence is that it’s more social and should not be so strongly tied to communication tools for contact purposes. If you look at what’s going on in the consumer space and in social networking – the notion of a lifestream (like the Facebook news feed) and Twitter is a much more relevant model for think about a next generation “presence” framework in a broader sense. Presence is a stream not a static thing that flips once in a while when the system detects an event. We need to step away from presence as being fundamentally owned by UC and think of how it is used in a much more social context.“
• Notes users will be able to get Notes mail on Apple iPhone and iPod Touch devices. “IBM plans a formal announcement of the Lotus Notes e-mail package for Apple’s portable devices at its Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla., next week. The software, which requires use of IBM’s Domino e-mail server program, will be free for users who already have a Lotus Web-access license and start at $39 per year for new users.“

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Four tips on how to overcome procrastination: (1) chunk down — create smaller “projects”, (2) take energetic credit for completion, (3) create a time use plan, and (4) resist the lure of the trivial.
• Are you able to just get on with it and get it done, or do you add a whole stream of other conditions and expectations to the work that you do?
• How can you apply the principles of standardized cleanup from Lean to your office? “Applying 5S to this collection of stuff means making decisions about all that information and figuring out what to do with it. Whether you choose to actually use it for something, archive it for the future, or toss it, you’re finally assessing your work and analyzing your needs. And this analysis will give you greater clarity about what you need on a daily basis to move forward with your responsibilities.“

Other Noteworthy Insights

• John ordered a Mac. “I must say the transition hasn’t been too difficult. The first thing you notice is how much faster the Mac is for doing all sorts of things. Coming out of sleep is so instantaneous that it seems like it was on all the time. The user interface takes a little getting use to, but it doesn’t look as bad as moving to Vista. Transferring files is much faster. Upgrading to Firefox 3 beta at the same time has made web browsing much faster than before. I am using ChronoSync for synchronizing backups and Vienna for RSS reader. I haven’t decided yet between MS Office for Mac, Apple’s iWork or NeoOffice (Open Office). This is my first blog using my new Mac.“