The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• A new book on virtual teams, The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams (Wiley) is now out.
• Dennis outlines questions to ask before replacing email in the enterprise: (1) how are people using email now? (“In my opinion, there is no substitute for sitting down individually with a range of selected email users and walking through with each a sample of their own email, checklist in hand, to gain a profile of individual users’ usage, reasons for usage, and the relationships of that usage to the overall success — or failure — of the task or function being supported. Special attention should be paid to having those interviewed describe the different groups that are involved in emailing.“), (2) what groups, inside and outside the organization, are using email?, (3) what processes and systems are currently mail-enabled, (4) what would be involved in moving people, processes and systems to more collaborative work environments?, and (5) what types of costs are involved in moving away from email? (hat tip, James)
• Motor City Connect outlines how it moved from a Yahoo Group to CollectiveX for group coordination. “Motor City Connect started as a small group getting together for lunch and to trade referrals. We chose Yahoo Groups to help us stay connected in-between our lunches. Before too long, a couple hundred of our closest friends had joined us online. The Yahoo message traffic became overwhelming! We were starting to scare away some of our best people and our events were getting lost in the shuffle. We moved to the Collective X platform a month ago—and like an old house plant that gets repotted, Motor City Connect blossomed! Our email traffic went from 200+ a week down to 5 targeted messages. Our membership has bloomed—nearly 50% in less than a month. Our calendar is full of vibrant events. Attendance is up at face-to-face meeting. And the profiles section is helping us to learn new things about each other. Most importantly, participation levels are also on the rise. Cx’s threaded discussion forums, homepage summaries and weekly what’s new blasts help members find relevant conversations—turning our lurkers into active participants.“

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Vignette released the Vignette Community Services add-on for its Web content management platform. “Vignette Community Services includes tools which can help firms offer ratings, reviews, tagging and other functionality on their sites. The vendor is also providing content moderation tools – an essential feature for any firm which wants to allow user-generated content on its site. Community Applications, meanwhile is all about collaborative functionality – think along the lines of blogs, wikis, forums and so on.” See the Vignette Press Release.
• MindMeister released Version 2.0 of its online mind mapping service, with a variety of new features: task information on ideas, attachments on ideas, and more. The Team Edition also received some updates (branded login page, custom subdomains, and more).

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Jason points to a white paper on productivity, and calls out the ideas in the white paper on taking good notes during calls, meetings, and … life.
• David Allen’s GTD system isn’t about managing time, but rather about managing the “stuff” you need to capture and think through in order to use time effectively. “GTD is about freeing your mind from all of the things that can be kept in a trusted system so that your thinking is unfettered by the noise, allowing for a singleness of purpose that enables the “flow” state that the author of the Lifehacks piece refers to.“
• Scott’s view on what’s needed to make a good workplace: “It almost doesn’t matter what one’s doing at the moment that makes them happy, it’s what they imagine will happen next, and it’s whether their life is on a trajectory toward improving, or on a trajectory toward not improving. Those are the two things that matter.“