The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Microsoft released tools to help with the adoption of SharePoint in the enterprise: the Internal Buzz Kit, and GEAR Up. “Internal Buzz Kit: this kit provides sample materials and training to help customers kick off SharePoint deployments. It includes demo videos, e-mail scripts, scripted brownbag presentations, posters, training links, a guide on how to hold a training session, information about building online community and encouraging super users, training completion certificates, and guidance on how to run an “internal buzz campaign.” GEAR Up: this online content tool inserts adoption in the context of phases in SharePoint deployments. GEAR Up includes the Internal Buzz Kit, and also points to the SharePoint Server 2007 End User Training Kit released back in December.“
• What makes someone a good collaborator and adopter of social media tools? Chuck and his colleagues think it comes down to … passion. “But, despite our frustration [with the formal things we’ve tried], we now have something like 20-30 good bloggers on the platform. The speak from a personal perspective, about things they care about. They are like lighthouse beacons in the dark, attracting others to the discussion and the engagement that lies behind social media proficiency. And — to an individual — they are all passionate people.“

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Open Text unveiled its Enterprise 2.0 strategy, aimed at helping customers embrace social computing tools. “Open Text is taking its collaboration and Web solutions offerings to a new level, providing 2.0 capabilities — wikis, forums, blogs, tagging, moderation, communities and real-time collaboration — that are persuasive, productive and integrated into business processes, while still respecting compliance initiatives.” Open Text views this strategy as an extension to current ECM initiatives. This element of the strategy sounds very Pillar 7-ish (great!) … “Find Before Search: Intuitively find and deliver information relevant to the user’s then-current context and present that information without the user explicitly searching for the same.“
• Open Text introduced Livelink ECM – Extended Collaboration, which brings Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into the Livelink ECM platform. Key features: sharing expertise and promoting best practices within communities, project workspaces, and real-time collaboration tools. “These collaborative and community-oriented tools co-exist with content in an intuitive environment that encourages people to work together, while capturing critical project information in an underlying ECM framework. Security, access control, and retention policies are strictly enforced using the native security mechanisms already in place, without adding another administrative layer. Empowered workers can quickly and securely form cross-functional project teams, capture shared knowledge, manage processes and meet project deadlines even across geographic and departmental boundaries.“
• A recent survey by EMC found that 47% of respondents said content management offerings today are too hard to implement. “The biggest stumbling block appears to be the difficulty of integrating disparate technology components, according to 37% of those polled. Legacy systems ranked as the second-highest response, or so said 34% of those surveyed.“
• To avoid chaos with SharePoint, proactive planning is essential. Westinghouse Electric is rolling out SharePoint, carefully: “IT managers like Paterline know that SharePoint is not just something you roll out. Once SharePoint is in the enterprise it will grow unabated. Without proper governance, sites with inactive content and without clear ownership could proliferate and sit unattended, and storage requirements could explode and slow the SQL Server databases that sit below SharePoint.” Key areas for focus: governance, adoption strategy, cultural change, and more.
• Interwoven is providing typical ROI numbers for corporate legal departments for the implementation of a tool like Interwoven WorkSite. “With corporate oversight and issues like email management top of mind for every company these days, enterprises are beginning to give legal departments the support they need to be more efficient and productive,” said Susan Emery, Group Manager for WorkSite Product Management at Interwoven. “Based on our own customer ROI studies, Interwoven WorkSite can reduce matter lifecycle time by an average of 40 percent, and reduce litigation response time and effort by up to 90 percent. These are powerful metrics that can arm legal departments with the business case they need to demand better tools.” Two customers–CIT and Newegg.com–are cited.

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• When you are in a meeting, here’s eight ways to demonstrate speaking skills: (1) keep it upbeat, (2) talk to the entire group, (3) reach out and encourage feedback, (4) mirror the tenor of the meeting, (5) don’t be a time hog, (6) check the cliches and rhetoric, (7) when and if necessary, take it offline, and (8) be aware of your body.
• Two productivity tips from Nicholas: (1) when adding something in to your life, take something else out; and (2) get out of the swamp at least once a day.
• The situations you face will never be perfect. Learn to recognize the opportunities that you can make the most of.

Other Noteworthy Insights

• Jim on the IT department: it isn’t going away. “There have been a number of simplistic and naive media and blogosphere articles recently predicting the demise of the corporate IT department, due to the rise of on-demand applications (SaaS) delivered over the web. These predictions are wrong on many levels.“
• Step Two Designs opened the 2008 Intranet Innovations Awards programme. Entries must be in by 16 May 2008. “All intranet teams are encouraged to enter their innovative approaches to the design or delivery intranets. This may be may be an entirely new piece of intranet functionality, or a good idea implemented particularly well.“