The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Kelly outlines how a manager can manage employees in remote locations. Key ideas: (1) build a strong team, starting with you; (2) gather the right people; (3) put technology to work; (4) master the art of communication; (5) build a sense of “we”; and (6) manage by results.

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Stewart Mader’s book WikiPatterns has been released by Wiley.
• Deva from ClearContext shares some of the thinking that is going into the upcoming editions of its products. “We already group related threads and other information together automatically. And we let users weight how much different email characteristics impact the prioritization of those messages. What we don’t do a lot of yet is content analysis, but we’re already taking some interesting steps in that direction. More importantly, we’re working on a lot of interesting features to give Outlook users (still just Outlook for now, but we’re listening!) more control about how the client deals with different types of incoming information utilizing the contextual information available.“
• Craig weighs in on the badness of unnecessary interruptions, and disputes the same study that I did. “There are things that enterprises can do to use enterprise attention management principles to improve the effectiveness of information workers, but first the potential champions in an organization must be convinced this is a real issue that can actually be addressed. Exaggerating its effects gets attention in the media, but can discourage those in the executive suite that may be able to help. And once you get executives to buy into a strategy based upon dollar savings rather than quality and speed of decision making and employee retention, you’ll be expected to prove how much you’ve saved in hard dollars later.“
• After 7 years and still no v1.0 release, it looks likely that Chandler is not going to make it. Richard writes “I was a big fan of Chandler when it first started and avidly followed the mailing lists and announcements. I tried it out a few times too, in its early incarnations. I lost interest though when web 2.0 came along and apps like Google Calendar and Zimbra actually delivered working products that did pretty much what Chandler was promising, albeit on a smaller scale.“
• SharePoint 2007 is being used for a lot more than collaboration, and is being treated as an application development platform. “The fact that organizations are using SharePoint to develop mission-critical applications for both intranets and extranets, as evidenced by companies such as Hawaiian Airlines and TV Guide using it to develop their customer-facing Web sites, shows that SharePoint has come a long way from its roots in collaboration. And many SharePoint ISVs believe the innovation engine that SharePoint represents is just now starting to heat up.“
• HyperOffice released the beta of its iPhone connector. “The collaboration tools are built into HyperOffice and operate as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange, the corporate messaging platform that the iPhone does not support. HyperOffice synchronizes the iPhone email client with Microsoft Outlook, giving business users wireless access to secure corporate messaging and collaboration services from work, from home, and while traveling.“
• SmallBusinessComputing reviews three collaboration software tools for small business organizations, including BlueTie, CentralDesktop, and GoToMeeting.

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Some academics have examined the cognitive science theories behind David Allen’s GTD methodology. They have submitted a paper about it.
• Mark outlines why to-do lists often fail and what to do to make them work. He argues that there is still tremendous mileage in the “6 things I have to do tomorrow” approach advocated by Ivy Lee.

Other Noteworthy Insights

• The LiveScribe Pulse will be available in March 2008. LiveScribe presented at DEMO this week.
• Seven tips on becoming a writer.