The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• SearchCIO released a series of papers on planning an enterprise collaboration strategy, including “Getting Everyone on Board”, “Improving Productivity” and “Tools and Technologies”.
• Paul offers a series of posts on ‘Why SharePoint projects fail’. The key idea: “SharePoint” in an organization shares characteristics with “wicked problems”. “So what is it about SharePoint that makes it such a magnet for a wicked project? Put quite simply, with SharePoint they have taken integration to another level. Microsoft have done their homework and created a product/platform that has a combination of the right kind of capabilities that *together* can be extremely compelling. Each component, judged individually as a point solution would not necessarily compete against dedicated products in the space. But Microsoft long ago learned that a combination of tight integration and the old 80/20 rule usually wins.“
• Sam offers insight into how a pharma company chose and rolled out Jive Clearspace. Key ideas: (1) people were invited to help choose the platform, by actually trying two different systems without any branding, (2) 5-10 people from each department were invited to a training session on “great cases” for using Clearspace, (3) the company developed its own brand for the tool, (4) senior management involvement, specifically with a commitment to blog, and (5) various internal communication approaches to create awareness.
• Virtual collaboration tools can be used in a variety of team leadership roles, from coaching to consulting (across numerous nuances). One practitioner talks about using such tools for crafting a shared vision, implementing the vision, and staying in coordination. “… this blog post has demonstrated how virtual teamwork (even in a multi-tiered hierarchy) can be successfully accomplished for many types of tasks. The key is knowing how to implement technologies (particularly in effective combinations) and to communicate in a way that is appropriate for each type of task. My experience as a coach and consultant shows that virtual team leadership can be effective for ambiguous or concrete tasks, large or small teams, and broad or focused thinking.“
• The Intranet Benchmarking Forum has been thinking about intranets in the year 2015, and offers a list of coming changes, including: “virtual, collaborative work technologies will thrive and improve, including growth in telepresence technologies and web-enabled integrated application suites.“

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Tungle, a service for coordinating meeting times, is now generally available. “You should be able to use your existing calendaring application to coordinate meetings and not have to migrate to another solution. Our first step was to solve the problem for Outlook users – by far, the largest electronic calendar user base. With Tungle, people on Outlook can coordinate meetings with anyone, users on Outlook (with or without Exchange), Google Calendar, Lotus Notes, iCal, Entourage and even people that don’t use an electronic calendar.” Available immediately.
• Mindjet took the wraps off Mindjet Connect, a collaboration add-on for Mindmanager 7.2, the latest edition of its mindmapping software. “ In order to use Mindjet Connect you need to download a new version of MindManager Pro 7 which includes the Mindjet Connect component. Once you have installed the new version of MindManger 7 Pro and have set up your account you can invite your friends and clients to share a workspace that you have set up for them. As the owner of the workspace you can give your colleagues different Access levels as far as being able to edit or read your mind maps. Mindjet refers to these as Author, Owner and Reader. You can in addition to placing mind maps also store Word, PDF, and any other files that you would like to within the workspace.” See also Chuck Frey.
• Atlassian released Version 2.8 of Confluence, its enterprise wiki offering. New features: dynamic menus and simplified screed design, drag-and-drop page re-ordering, and enhanced commenting capabilities, among others. Available immediately.
• Coveo released Coveo G2B for Email, a search application that delivers a unified search result across current and archived email. “By providing IT and Compliance managers with fast, easy access to a 360-degree view of all of their company’s current and archived email data, Coveo G2B for Email provides businesses with a preventative measure from security threats, such as employees walking off with PST files. In doing so, G2B for Email also ensures that businesses are fully prepared to meet today’s most stringent compliance regulations.” Available immediately, in limited release.

Other Noteworthy Insights

• Forrester on Enterprise 2.0: $4.6 billion by 2013. Key conclusions: (1) enterprise 2.0 applications will have to play nicely with legacy applications, (2) business units will drive adoption of Enterprise 2.0 applications, and (3) Enterprise 2.0 companies will struggle to make a profit.