The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• BusinessWeek recently looked at the use of virtual worlds for business purposes, including collaboration. IBM for one is finding good success: “As unproven as these new digitized worlds may be, IBM is adopting virtual world technologies with gusto. The company has begun a mentoring program that encourages people who are retired or are about to retire to share knowledge with newer employees. Many in the program are using virtual worlds to meet, mentor, and make presentations. Globally, IBM is finding that virtual worlds are starting to help bridge culture and distance. IBM’s Hamilton says virtual worlds actually make employees want to start working relationships with one another.“
• Key ideas for leading in virtual situations: clear communication, provide a central database for team documents and knowledge, let go of the reins and allow employees to be productive, and more.
• Julian has a new white paper on how a government agency can use Web 2.0 tools. “In order to use Web 2.0 technologies externally it may be necessary to affect culture change internally. It is not uncommon for people who have spent much of their professional careers using traditional methods of taxonomy, records keeping and information management, to be cautious of, or resistant to approaches which are inherently messier and less ordered.“

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• NetMarketing released Version 4.0.7 of GlobeMeeting, its web conferencing service. A revised UI is on offer, and “We have, amongst other things, added a PowerPoint presentation manager to facilitate the preparation and to assure its broadcasting in order to be independent of a participant’s PC environment.“
• AvePoint offers Compliance Archiver for SharePoint 2007, which enables retention of SharePoint content for compliance purposes. “Compliance Archiver allows you to manage this content with complete confidence, storing records and audit data, enforcing retention policies, and assuring that regulatory policies are being followed. Compliance Archiver also allows advanced searching across archived content for legal discovery, audit, and review.” Can also be used for archiving old SharePoint sites off the production environment.
• Everyone.net and Box.net announced a partnership to offer Box.net online storage services to Everyone.net email customers.
• SteelCloud released SteelWorks Mobile, an appliance that offers BlackBerry server capabilities to small businesses. “The SteelWorks Mobile offering is designed to be plug-and-play, which is especially important considering that it can take anywhere from 4 to five hours, or even up to a day, to get BES installed and up and running, even with a relatively experienced system administrator doing it.“
• Bamboo Solutions offers the List Rollup Web Part (currently at Version 3.1), for creating a consolidated view of multiple lists across multiple sites. “The List Rollup Web Part consolidates various SharePoint list items from multiple sites and areas into a single real-time DataView with the ability to filter and sort information as needed. You can define which lists and views are included as well as apply CAML filtering as needed. You can also select a master list for all selected lists to conform to for content and formatting. Save templates for re-use or modification in creating other rolled up views based on the same list data.“

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Charlie offers a range of planning worksheets and ideas about productivity. Eg, see his General Theory of Productivity, A Special Theory of Productivity (about time and task management systems — planning, execution, and evaluation), and the productivity heatmapping idea (about getting to know when you are at your peak productivity capacity, and playing to that).
• Willpower is a limited commodity, and needs to be strengthened by ongoing use. “The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.“
• Matt releases another of his IdeaLab posts, with lots of great ideas: on giving gifts, some funny sayings, where to put your energy in business (on products, not services), 2×2 matrixes, and more.
• The National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization offers 8 time management tips for the chronically disorganized: (1) plan tomorrow today, (3) put priority tasks early in the week, (4) work on hard tasks during your peak times, and more. Note that it’s a one-page PDF.