The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Marsha Egan has declared this week to be the Clean Out Your Inbox Week. “No, it’s not a national holiday. It’s about joining businesses throughout the USA in making their e-mail routines more effective and efficient. Why would you want to do that? Very simple – it can save your company money. In fact, lots of money. We’re not talking hundreds of $$ here, we’re talking thousands of $$. More likely, tens-of-thousands of $$.“
• Registration for the 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston in June is now open.

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Egnyte released on upgraded edition of its online collaboration tool, with new online shared folders that can be accessed via the Web and on the desktop.
• RIM announced a BlackBerry client for Lotus Connections, to give mobile users access to Connections. “Users can enjoy many of the same benefits and functionality found on the desktop version of Lotus Connections directly from their BlackBerry smartphone, including the ability to collaborate on projects with teammates, locate internal subject matter experts by name or topic, as well as effortlessly share information and research to improve decision making.” Available sometime in 2008. (see also ComputerWorld)
• SharpStyle Labs released FeedbackFX, a hosted platform service for gathering feedback on digital artifacts. “FeedbackFX is a software-as-a-service solution that adds content review functionality to any application. In other words, any software can be enhanced or built from scratch to allow its users to exchange comments and opinion on documents, images, videos, and many other types of file formats.“
• Ikordo announced that its meeting scheduling service now works with Google Calendar, and some user interface enhancements to the service are due towards the end of this month. They will also be at DEMO 2008 this week in CA.
• CourseForum Technologies released Version 6.0 of ProjectForum, its workgroup collaboration tool. “ProjectForum is a commercially supported, high quality wiki collaboration server for small and medium workgroups. It runs securely on an organization’s own network, keeping important information safely in-house and protected. Supporting multiple workgroups from a single server, it features full version control, secure authentication options, document management, full branding support and much more.” Available immediately. See also the blog post.
• Info-Tech Research surveyed 258 organizations using SharePoint and discovered that some support requests are taking 6 months to close. “Microsoft’s ongoing support for SharePoint customers is the lowest-ranked aspect of product deployment, the Info-Tech study found, with 23 per cent stating they are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with SharePoint support.“
• Voltage Security announced a file encryption integration with Lotus Quickr, Voltage SecureFile. “Voltage SecureFile for IBM Lotus Quickr offers several key benefits to customers that have deployed the IBM collaboration environment. Specifically, it enables businesses to secure information workflows, protect the integrity of their brand reputation, ensure customer confidence, mitigate potential risk involved in a data breach (by loss or theft), and meet compliance regulations.“

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Time management is energy management.

Other Noteworthy Insights

• Mindjet released an update to MindManager 7 for the Mac to add Leopard support.