The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Wachovia is embracing Enterprise 2.0 tools to connect its 100,000 employees. SharePoint plays a prominent role. “Wachovia is giving its Gen Y workers a role in helping its Enterprise 2.0 makeover succeed. Younger employees are assigned to teach senior staffers about the benefits of using collaborative networks. Wachovia’s Enterprise 2.0 project is also reducing travel expenditures at a time when transportation costs are soaring. With online collaboration tools, such as one-to-one video conferencing, in place, employees can spend less time on the road meeting with colleagues.“
• The CIA talked about its use of wiki technology for intelligence at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. “There is a strong push to really adopt usage across the analyst community, not so much mandating use, but making non-use difficult. Material is organised topically not organisationally as you would if you were Google searching. If an article exists on the Unclassified Intellipedia, and higher classified material exists, links to title-matched pieces are in the Unclassified article. Don spoke of the idea of “teaching search and teaching people” to find things. Smart.” Even the “old” people at the CIA are embracing the tool: “Blowing apart the “these are for young people” argument, Don made it very plain that this is not a generational issue. Intellipedia’s top contributor is a 61-year-old analyst with 40 years of intelligence community experience. Newcomers of any age are mentored into use by experienced users (what a great idea!). There has been a massive shift inside the CIA. As an example, there is massively reduced use of PowerPoint as people produce pages usable as a presentation on the Intellipedia platform!“
• Roland wonders whether virtual worlds need to become “boring and uneventful”, because that would signal ubiquitous usage.
• Next time you are in a video conference, watch out for the lettuce. Or worse.

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• IBM announced Version 2.0 of Lotus Connections, its social networking tool for the enterprise, adding friending, tagging, and connections. “In the profiles section of Connections 2.0, users can click a button to add colleagues to their profile lists, the business equivalent of “friending” new coworkers and one of many new capabilities for the second iteration of the software. Whereas version 1.0 of the platform offered a “reports to” chain, version 2.0 shows implicit relationships with colleagues and the ability to use people-tagging capabilities to find folks.“
• ThoughtFarmer announced Version 3.0 of ThoughtFarmer Intranet, its wiki-based intranet platform, with new multilingual capabilities. “ThoughtFarmer Intranet 3.0 Multilingual includes several features to make it easy to work across multiple languages, including: Automatic detection of the intranet user’s browser language; Localizable interface that can be set for groups of users; Intelligent fallback to the user’s secondary language preference if the desired content is not available in the preferred language; Easy language toggling between all available versions of the content; Multilingual search; and Support for all UTF-8 compliant languages, including French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean.” Available July 7.
• Microsoft’s Office Labs group is testing a prototype of an internal social network, called TownSquare. “TownSquare is fueled by enterprise news feeds that use Web services to query SharePoint for public information, such as promotions and company anniversaries, about an employee. TownSquare also notifies users when a document or file is modified. Users can customize their feeds and monitor who is receiving information about them …. Like Facebook, TownSquare also includes a photos of users and allows them to note when they are away from their workstations, such as at a meeting or in the cafeteria for coffee.“
• AvePoint introduced the DocAve Lotus Notes Migrator, for migration of content from Lotus Notes applications to SharePoint. “With DocAve Lotus Notes Migrator, administrators can easily perform seamless, full-fidelity content migration to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services version 3. It supports selective migrations and allows for the co-existence of multiple platforms as businesses move content incrementally into SharePoint.” Note that it doesn’t deal with application logic. Available immediately.
• Blue Whale announced BlueWhaleMail, an ad-sponsored mobile email service. “The BlueWhaleMail service will initially be available for Nokia Series 60 and most of the current Sony Ericsson feature phones. Blue Whale Systems is developing the application for other platforms such as Samsung and Windows Mobile devices, but declined to comment on when these may be available. Users will need to install the application onto their mobile phone and configure it with their specific email addresses, something Blue Whale insists is a very simple task. The service is free to use but includes a banner ad at the top of the message viewer.“
• Transmedia announced an update to Glide, its Web-based file sharing and collaboration suite. “Glide is a Web-based set of applications that allows Windows, Linux, Solaris and Apple PCs to share data with each other and with phones and PDAs. It’s not actually an operating system, but it makes a pretty good fist of looking like one as it sits on your desktop, with a full set of office applications including presentations, spreadsheet, word processing and email, along with a media player and widgets. “

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• Did you complete something big … then take a break to celebrate!
• Give up the idea that ideas are scarce: go looking for them.
• Are we losing the ability to think deeply? “When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.” And on page 4, there’s this: “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.“

Other Noteworthy Insights

• Congratulations to Chan on going independent and opening KnowledgeCue, a SharePoint consultancy firm here in New Zealand. “For those in the wider community who may need help to overcome the first hurdles of adopting SharePoint, you now have the option of engaging with me directly. My main goal of being vendor neutral is that I will be able to provide you with impartial advice on what you as a customer, who is adopting SharePoint, should look for when embarking on a SharePoint project.” See KnowledgeCue.