The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Ken’s book, BioTeams, is out!

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Microsoft released some updates to Office Live Workspace, including a new activity pane, the ability to add multiple documents to a workspace in one go, permalinks to documents, and a new way to invite others to a shared workspace.
• David has looked at the new Google Sites and says bring back JotSpot: “After 16 months the recent release of Google Sites was disappointing on many levels. There is no API, where there was one in JotSpot (before Google bought it). JotSpot was built as a wiki application environment (another that we know of that includes collaboration functions is GroveSite). I realize that Google had to re-write much of JotSpot over the last 16 months (at least we hope that is what they were doing) to make it fit with the Google architecture, but in the re-write they not only lost a lot of functionality, but many of the functions that are available either don’t work or don’t meet the usual Google intuitive UI standards.“
• Calgoo added synchronization with 30Boxes. “30 Boxes is now fully integrated into the Calgoo product line so 30 Boxes users can sync and share calendars with Outlook and Google Calendar users. 30 Boxes support includes event summary, description, time, location, tags, and attendees.“

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Comapping is a web-based mindmapping service.
• Informal learning is a major source of knowledge transfer and innovation, but in most firms it is left to chance.
• Next time you have to give a lecture or a conference presentation, remember that you can go deep or wide, but not both (usually). “The key, then, is to set realistic goals, and if you decide that you need to go deep then you have to seriously consider reducing the scope. Sometimes, in life as in presentations, you just have to make a choice about what’s important, and let go of the rest (at least for the time being).“
• Nicholas has 6 questions to ask when you can’t make a decision.
• … he also outlines how to know if your time management approach is failing. Eg, “you never have time to think”.