The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Dave Snowdon’s take on rolling out social software in the enterprise: (a) provide basic HTML training, (b) roll out the new tools by working one-by-one with key opinion leaders and senior executives, (c) use blog-storms linked to initial wiki use to get people engaged, and (d) allow experimentation and change.
• Stephen points to an argument that teams in organizations are the wrong model for work organization, and that teams as an organizing construct is the wrong approach for the challenges being faced today. “So says Ken Thompson the author of ‘Bioteams‘. Ken’s book provides a convincing argument that to survive and thrive in to-days rapidly changing environment, teams need to mimic the structure of nature’s most successful designs. For example those found in beehives, anthills, and viruses. This book is a fascinating read for anyone curious about what its going to take to move teams and organizations into the hyper-linked, knowledge economy of the mid-21st century.“

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Bill reviews and comments on some of the recent posts from the QuickBase Team Collaboration Blog. Recent posts focus on the evolution and maturity of software-as-a-service, “platform-as-a-service”, and customizing online applications.
• There’s a new edition of Desktop iCalendar out, for taking Google Calendars to a local machine for editing offline and synchronization.
• Socialtext released Version 2.20 of its Socialtext enterprise wiki, with 40% better performance, easier image and file uploading, simpler linking, and more. Available immediately.
• Andrew argues that with the recession in the US, Enterprise 2.0 tools are a great investment, for three reasons: (1) the tools are cheap compared to alternatives, (2) the upfront configuration requirements are fairly lightweight, and (3) in slow economic times, people often have more time to devote to learning more about doing their work better.
• ThinkFree released a new edition of its web office suite, with new mobile device access capabilities, online and offline synchronization tools, and a lower price point. “In addition to offline support, the new office program also includes 1 GB of free online storage for your documents, a new web word processor called “Note,” which can function as a blogging tool, and, finally, perhaps most importantly, a mobile version of ThinkFree, which will allow you to not only view, but also edit, your online documents from any Java-based PDA or smartphone.“
• Quest Software released Quest MessageStats and Quest Active Roles Server, add-on products for Office Communications Server 2007. The former provides reporting tools (IM, conferencing and voice calling usage), and the latter deals with keeping information in Active Directory up-to-date for OCS users. “Quest Active Roles Server now includes rules and workflow controls that format and monitor changes to personal information in Active Directory. This ensures that unified communications applications can work effectively. It is important because if Office Communications Server 2007 tries to make a call based off an incorrect phone number in Active Directory, the call will fail. Active Roles Server is also able to provision and de-provision Office Communications Server users, which makes rolling out unified communications faster and less error-prone.“
• SharePointWorks released the eRESULT for Hummingbird enterprise search connector, for linking SharePoint and Hummingbird. “eRESULT for Hummingbird is the only connector solution that ensures truly secure SharePoint Search of Hummingbird and PCDocs through user and group level security mapping, in addition to real time security trimming. eRESULT for Hummingbird is also the only connector solution that provides true incremental crawling to minimize impact to the client’s servers.“

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Ways to stay organized: (a) make it a daily habit, (b) make it a way of life, (c) have a system for aging materials and information in your environment, (d) end each day with a clean desk, and (e) create a system for the long term.
• Brad released a new edition of Achieve-IT! Desktop, for goal planning and management. It is available in beta today, for Windows 2000, XP and Vista. Brad’s next bunch of work is focused on getting the product to work on Windows mobile devices.
• Scott looks at the utility of using weekly and daily to-do lists for pacing work and making progress on important things over the long term. “The principle behind the WD To-Do List method is simple: (a) at the end of the week, write a list containing everything you want to get accomplished; and (b) at the end of the day, write a list containing what parts of that weekly list you want to be finished tomorrow.” The key then becomes the daily task list: “The point of the weekly list is to serve as the starting point for writing daily lists. After you’ve broken off the chunk you want to handle tomorrow, the other tasks in the week shouldn’t be on your mind. You can pretend they don’t exist, as if the only tasks in the world were the ones tomorrow.“

Other Noteworthy Insights

• Jon interviewed Phil Libin of Evernote about the evolution of the Evernote software and service. Evernote “wants to guarantee that you’ll have effective near-term use of operational memorabilia — key documents, and in particular photos from which it finds, extracts, and indexes text. The idea with this photo feature is that you can take pictures of receipts, wine labels, magazine pages, or event posters, dump the pictures into EverNote, and then find the photos by searching for the text in them. EverNote’s secret sauce here is its ability to find text not only in high-res scans, but also in “crappy cellphone photos taken at an angle.”” (hat tip, Peter)