The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Matt offers a list of factors to consider when looking for collaboration tools to support people: group size, timeframe, intended activities, geography, and similarity. He calls this his STAGS list.
• Shawn, Mark and Nancy release a new white paper, Building a Collaborative Workplace, which focuses on the human aspects of effective collaboration. “This paper has three parts. We start by briefly exploring what we mean by collaboration and why organisations and individuals should build their collaboration capability. Then, based on that understanding, we lay out a series of steps for developing a collaboration capability. We finish the paper with a simple test of your current collaboration capability.” (PDF, 11 pages). Shawn and Mark are from Anecdote; Nancy from Full Circle Associates.
• Jim offers some thoughts on why SharePoint fails as a social platform within the business. “Getting users to understand and adopt social software can be hard in general, but SharePoint has so many options and options within options that users are literally scared of using it. I saw the glazed-over stare of users time and time again when they attempted to use SharePoint. Generally, users would have a specific idea in mind and would attempt to click around hoping the answer would appear. This resulted in one of two things: they would give up or the very persistent would ask IT to walk them through it.“

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• eTouch announced SamePage 3.5, its enterprise wiki with new international language support. “All of the navigation menus, links and messages can be made available in any language. Large multinational organizations can now provide different language user-interfaces to employees spread across different geographical units. The Internationalized version will be available for both On-Demand as well as On-Premise customers.“
• Clarizen announced that Version 2.1 of its online project management offering is coming. New features: advanced reports, a plug-in for Outlook, improvements in handling attachments, and ProjectMail improvements, among others. Available May 2008.
• Interwoven announced a new version of WorkSite Mobility, for mobile access to Interwoven content from devices with a Web browser. “Interwoven WorkSite Mobility enables users to access client files, collaborate with colleagues, manage email, and share information with clients through their smart phones. Interwoven WorkSite Mobility provides a fluid user experience that helps professionals locate and access the right content quickly for on-the-fly client interactions. Using a Web-based browser across all devices allows firms to maintain proper data hygiene and governance firm wide.” Available June 2008 (hat tip, ITWeek).
• Microsoft and ThreeWill in Alpharetta GA are hosting a seminar on building enterprise applications with SharePoint tomorrow, April 25. “Many of the Microsoft products are being built on the SharePoint platform. Have you looked at doing the same for your enterprise applications or your company’s product? This Microsoft/ThreeWill joint seminar will show examples that highlight the key features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) and Windows SharePoint Services v3. This can help companies build a more robust product or enterprise applications. The seminar will include live demonstrations, resource aids and places starting to take advantage of SharePoint 2007 as an enterprise and product platform to help your business grow.“
• Remember the Milk released MilkSync for BlackBerry, for over-the-air synchronization of tasks from RTM to the BlackBerry task application. See Remember the Milk.
• NewsGator released Version 3.0 of Inbox, its RSS reader add-in for Microsoft Outlook. New features: an updated user interface (more like Outlook 2007), easier ways to find subscription options, and synchronization of flags, among others. Available immediately.

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Learn the skills of being self-motivated: “A self-motivated person achieves their goals without the help of an outside force. From a business standpoint, this quality is crucial. Running a successful work at home career isn’t a piece of cake. You’ll deal with distractions, disappointments, slow periods, and the biggest challenge: being able to work independently. A supervisor stationed in the next office motivates an employee to work.“
• Are you into productivity to survive or achieve? Scott looks at the differences.
• Jeff offers his approach for using a Windows Mobile device for GTD (hat tip, Jeff). “So I set out to create a GTD implementation that used as little outside software or structure as possible. I wanted it to sync, mostly, via Exchange, which meant limiting myself to Contacts, Tasks and Calendar (with one exception). I wanted it to be fast to use on the device, just as glanceable as the paper version, but with even less overhead due to the digital nature of the data. It should be easy to collect, process, decide and do. And I think I pulled it off.” The core idea is to use the priority flag to differentiate between next actions, projects and someday/maybe items.
• Rowan shares his thoughts on work-life balance. Key idea: think up and do the things that are important, and don’t get sucked into giving work your all. “It’s a question of taking yourself and your needs seriously.“
• Eric talks through the power of hiring a coach to assist with changing habits over time. “The role of a good coach is to help you not only do the work but, more important, build sustainable habits. Coaching is not a small investment. It takes time off work for you, the investment in the coach’s fees, and time for follow-up. Even if you find a friend to coach you for free, all of this would be a wasted investment if you did not leave the coaching process having experienced not only what it feels like to truly get “in” to “empty” but also to have learned how to properly use the methodologies and tools along the way. The goal is that at the end of the coaching process you will have experienced the process and developed the skill to repeat the process on your own, perhaps with some occasional follow-up, as needed.“
• If you want to become a better manager of your time, commit to a periodic time audit. Dwayne offers some tips on doing so effectively. Eg, “In a time audit, you can do something similar by identifying your most significant issues and creating a written plan (with targets) to improve them. This gives you something you can track against to help drive improvements. Part of the plan should be to review your progress against the plan at some point in the future.“

Other Noteworthy Insights

• Matthew talks about the downsides of blogging every day.
• Ah yes, I miss out on so many life experiences by working from home.