The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• 7 out of 10 information workers feel overwhelmed by information. “The survey of 650 white collar and knowledge workers found that employees across virtually every industry are affected by information overload, but that the problem is particularly acute in the legal profession  with almost eight in ten legal professionals saying they are increasingly overloaded with information.” Mark Hurst, author of the excellent Bit Literacy, reminds us to “let the bits go“.
• Seeing other people in your work environment will slow down your own work. Key takeaway: you need personal space. “Welsh conducted a number of experiments that showed people slowing down on their work, when other people were in the same room, doing completely different tasks. He’s hoping to show employers that in some job situations where speed and accuracy is important, the employee should have more personal, solitary space to get their work done.“
• Jessica proposes a heuristic for determining whether you really need face time, or if you can get the same work done without travel. She proposes 11 decision factors or questions to work through.

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Zoho added Docx support, a thesaurus, sharing groups and more to its Zoho Writer service.
• DreamFactory released DoX, a hosted service for sharing documents. “From a single unified view, DoX allows users to access and share documents regardless of where they are stored. DoX enables the effortless movement of documents and folders via simple drag and drop between the desktop and virtual file systems, including Salesforce.com and Amazon S3. DreamFactory is an early mover in integrating with Amazon S3, which provides highly scalable, reliable, fast and inexpensive virtual storage.“
• EMC acquired Pi Corporation, for its personal information management technology. “… Pi Corporation, a privately-held developer of software and provider of services for personal information management. With approximately 100 engineers located in the U.S., Canada and India, Pi develops software and online services to enable individuals to control how they find, access, share and protect their increasing volumes of digital information. Pi is in the process of beta testing its first products.“
• Todd outlines the benefits of integrating SharePoint with Outlook 2007.
• Google added chatback to GoogleTalk, so that visitors to a web site can click and be connected with the site owner. “When they visit your site, they’ll see a badge like the one on the right showing your online status (available, busy, offline) and, if you’re available, they can just click and start chatting. Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don’t need to download anything. It opens in a new window so they can keep chatting with you even if they browse to other pages.“
• More on Google Apps Team Edition. And I’ve been thinking about this too: given how team edition works, it is almost essential that IT departments track whether it is being used by people from their organization.
• Amicus, a hosting company, upgraded to Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0. “Amicus Envoy with Zimbra Inside is a single platform for email, calendaring, contacts, instant messaging, and versioned rich format document collaboration, management and storage. With delegated access to every portion of the application, and syncing and mobility features that deliver this platform to wherever you are and whatever software you prefer. This isn’t just a collaboration suite, this is your comprehensive workspace in the cloud.“
• EditGrid announced its February 2008 Release, with new features for analytics, mashups, and a template library, among others. “One last new feature is our Template Library. Some of you have asked what the difference is between our templates and spreadsheets and now, you can see the difference. When you create a new spreadsheet, you can choose to create a blank spreadsheet or one from our template library. Currently, we have made available 30+ initial templates for you to choose from. If you have a template that you want to share with the community, you can submit it through our template library browser.“
• Jason reviews Tungle, a cross-organizational meeting scheduling service. “Tungle is a downloadable application that looks very much like an IM program. The application reads your calendar and shares your availability with your Tungle peers. One benefit of Tungle is that it doesn’t change or alter your Exchange calendar, just reads it for the purpose of allowing you to share your free/busy data. Tungle also allows you to see your contact’s free/busy data within Outlook, sans having to fire up the Tungle client.“
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 does not support in-place upgrades of Exchange 2007. Ed from IBM writes, “OK, let me get this straight. We have to uninstall server applications, upgrade the server OS, and then reinstall those applications. Is there a way to roll back the server upgrade and go back to previous state?“
• Open-Xchange announced a “lifeline” migration offer to Zimbra customers in light of Microsoft’s play for Yahoo. “Zimbra customers can either contact an Open-Xchange Business Partner or directly fax the Open-Xchange Competitive Upgrade form to Open-Xchange together with a copy of their last two years groupware invoice and Open-Xchange will offer a two year subscription to an equivalent Open-Xchange product for 50% of the cost of their invoice.“

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Craig’s recipe for increasing success in your life and business: take it four weeks at a time. “With my clients I have discovered the ‘four week’ approach to be the most successful strategy in helping them re-invent themselves and create results over the long term. The irony being that by not focusing on forever we are more likely to create forever results. Clever huh? What I love about working with people in smaller installments is that the time frame is short enough to stay mentally focused and emotionally committed (crucial), but also long enough to actually see some real results (crucial). And when we see those results we also see a new peak in excitement, enthusiasm and momentum.“
• Four ways to handle fear: (1) feel the fear and do it anyway, (2) see it as learning, (3) embrace challenge not comfort, and (4) don’t blame your circumstances.

Other Noteworthy Insights

• EverNote is planning new editions of its notebook client for Mac, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Android devices.