The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Forrester thinks that virtual world are going to be big news for collaboration within 5 years, and that organizations should start experimenting now. The Leading Virtually researchers share some of their initial research findings on virtual world collaboration. “We conducted our studies with small groups who were assigned a leader and a managerial task, similar to one managers might face in an organization. Our goal was to get a better understanding of what adding the visual representation of a person with an avatar, allowing for some body language through the avatar, and giving the meeting a “physical” space would do to group perceptions of the meeting and how satisfied they would be with the collaboration process and outcome. Additionally, we wanted to know if the added visual dimensions of virtual worlds affected the way that group members talked with each other and conducted their group task. Our studies also looked at leadership behaviors in the virtual teams to see if specific leader behaviors impacted the groups’ decision-making and satisfaction.“
• If the natural unit of collaboration is the “idea”, what is the natural unit of written collaboration?

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• SiteScape announced that has been acquired by Novell. “SiteScape, the founder of the ICEcore open source collaboration project, brings impressive team workspace and real-time collaboration capabilities to Novell – key components of a broad unified communications and collaboration strategy. The melding of the two firms creates the industry’s clear leader in open, enterprise-strength collaboration and social networking offerings, giving customers powerful, flexible ways to integrate new communications technologies into their environment and drive employee productivity and business innovation.” Mike is skeptical that it will make a difference. See also CRN.
• No Jitter offers a comparison of Microsoft OCS 2007 and Lotus Sametime 8.0.
• OpenText released a Case Management Framework for SharePoint 2007. “Case management refers to a class of applications found in many industries designed to manage caseloads. Enterprises increasingly need a common case management framework to build a variety of applications addressing their needs, including such areas as new drug applications in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry, grant management and immigration admission in government, claims management in financial services and patent management in manufacturing. “

Other Noteworthy Insights

• Ouch … the $54 million laptop.
• Are you feedtigued yet?