The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Four new case studies of wikis at work: Motorola in Norway (documentation for quality standards), Frankfurt Airport (cross-organizational knowledge sharing), BTicino (a sales force community of practice), and Société Française de Radiotéléphone (for sharing of knowledge between customer service representatives).
• Drake University is looking for a new email system for its students. Although no decision has been made, Zimbra appears to be the leading contender.
• With all the new services we have for communication and interaction, some people are starting to ask for ways to bring it all back to one place. See my 2005 white paper, Why Closed Doesn’t Work for Collaborative Workspaces: Three Reasons Why Openness is Required.

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Textensor launched A.nnotate.com, an online document review service. “A.nnotate lets users attach notes to precise places in the text of PDF, Word documents and web pages online. It is easy to use and operates in a web browser: the user simply highlights text and writes a note. All notes, documents and tags are added to their personal searchable index making it simple to get back to the right place. Uploaded documents are initially private, but can be shared by emailing a link. This lets several users comment on the same online copy of the document and add replies to each others notes. It acts like a shared online version of Word or PDF comments but avoids the usual problems of emailing documents back and forth and having to merge comments from different people.” Available immediately.
• IBM released Quickr 8.1, a collaborative workspace offering. New features: Outlook integration, Lotus Connections integration, and an improved user interface, among others.
• Summary of points on a Notes vs. SharePoint evaluation at one firm: (a) although the comparison should really be Quickr vs SharePoint, the firm looks at it as Notes vs SharePoint; it’s not hard to web-enable Notes applications, it just takes time; and the reason for migrating comes down to an expected lower total cost of ownership with SharePoint rather than Notes over the coming years.
• Sue from the Butler Group comments on the acquisition of Tower by HP, arguing that it’s about competing better with IBM. “IBM, HP’s biggest competitor, also has the products required to build an information management stack. Oracle is another vendor that has moved in this direction through its acquisition of Stellent, which left HP as one of the only major product area vendors without an ECM capability, which put the company at a disadvantage.” Unlike others, there is no mention of competing with or complementing SharePoint.
• Xoopit released a new social media aggregator for Gmail, that integrates information from various social networking tools into Gmail. “Launched in private beta March 31, the Xoopit technology is an indexing platform that combs through the glut of files, photos and videos floating in users’ Gmail cloud and lets users post the content on other social networks and blogs to share with their friends. The software imports media from photo- and video-sharing networks such as YouTube, Flickr, Kodak, Shutterfly and Picasa.” See also eWeek and the Xoopit Blog.
• NextMail released a push-to-talk messaging service for Sprint Nextel Direct Connect. “With NextMail, you set up Direct Connect numbers mapped to e-mail addresses. When you DC that number, it is translated into an e-mail message with the voice message stored as an audio file. The GPS location data can also be included in the message, and there are a variety of options for returning the message.“

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• In an age where people read less, Nicholas suggests a focus on value (“I’ve been trying to make my books simpler and smaller; higher value per word.“) rather than length.
• Be wary of getting more and more stuff. Paul shares some thoughts.
• Haven’t had enough sleep? Mark has ideas: take a short walk, lower the temperature, work standing, go somewhere else, get sunlight, take a short nap, and more.