The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Macquarie University is getting cold feet on using Gmail as its email infrastructure for staff, due to unbudgeted data transmission costs. The IT services director is wondering whether an onsite solution would be more cost effective.
• Daptiv announced a global partnership program, whereby partners help customers achieve success with the Daptiv service. “Daptiv offers three types of solution partnerships to fit the needs of systems integrators, resellers and consulting firms, and provides access to training, sales leads, revenue sharing, as well as the Daptiv platform itself, to bring substantial value to partner offerings.“
• Ross Mayfield (Socialtext) reflects on the enterprise wiki, including social software in the enterprise (and replacing email), the four core scenarios that customers are using wikis for (collaborative intelligence, participatory knowledge base, client collaboration, and social networking), interacting with CIOs and the IT department, and the consumerization of IT and its impact within the enterprise.
• Nortel and TANDBERG announced an alliance to deliver a fully-managed telepresence service globally. “Through a new, non-exclusive global agreement announced at VoiceCon Orlando 2008, Nortel and TANDBERG will jointly deliver fully-managed telepresence and high-definition (HD) video conferencing solutions to enterprises worldwide. These solutions will be offered through service providers or direct from Nortel. Nortel Telepresence Services with TANDBERG’s enterprise-wide telepresence portfolio including Experia can help businesses save millions in travel costs and carbon emissions annually.“
• TANDBERG licensed audio and video codecs from Microsoft, to enable a higher-quality integration between Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and TANDBERG’s video systems. “TANDBERG currently provides an extensive range of support for quality video and audio codecs. This licensing agreement provides TANDBERG the ability to mix RT Video codec users with other standards-based high-definition over H.264 users. Now, high-quality video and audio can be delivered between the Office Communications Server 2007 environment and other standards-based videoconferencing solutions.“
• Microsoft released the External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint. “This toolkit helps you easily deploy a SharePoint-based external collaboration environment for your organization. Once the toolkit is in place, end users can quickly create a new collaboration sites (using a SharePoint site collection) and add internal and external users to that site. Both these process can be workflow enabled so that an administrator must approve both site and user creation.“
• Sam Laurence and Dennis Howlett talk about the difference between online communities and enterprise internal collaboration tools. Sam on collaboration in the enterprise, “It’s a mess.” Sam on Jive Clearspace, “We give visibility into what’s going on.“

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• If you want the world to stop so you can get off, perhaps you should. Racing to nowhere is a bad idea. Laura has directions on how to re-find the path for you.
• Sometimes a visual way of presenting ideas is needed, but a mind map isn’t the way to go. Try the Universal Organizer. “It’s a very simple tool that helps you organize your thoughts or material by topic and by priority, giving structure and order to your paper through your natural thought process. Its intuitive structure encourages you to expound on your ideas, and then helps you present your thoughts in an organized and logical manner. You can organize your paper in a matter of minutes, and you see your progress as you write.” See the PDF (276KB, 2 pages) (hat tip, Mark)
• Try the Focus Frame when you are struggling to break a large project into smaller chunks.

Other Noteworthy Insights

• Omniscope, for visual data integration and analysis.