The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Craig shares his take on collaboration in Europe: (1) a great deal of interest in social software, but less doing, (2) SharePoint is happening, but in a more controlled way than in the US, (3) portal consolidation and goverance are hot topics, and (4) there is some interest in virtual worlds in the enterprise.
• Celine offers some ideas on evaluating the efficacy of your digital tools. “Do you use your digital tools for the right reasons? Do your tools have any missing features that would make your work process easier?“
• Catherine on steps to a successful intranet, via the ABCD approach: assess, brainstorm, consolidate, and deliver. Her full report goes into more detail, including questions to ask and further resources to check out.
• Basex outlines how the typical information worker spends their time, and calls out the problem of too many interruptions.



• Culhane & Fahrenkrug Consulting is using SharePoint to manage a large consulting project. “To date, SharePoint has proven to be an effective solution for the Van Andel Institute’s building construction project. It’s provided a lot more capabilities than just document storage. Culhane and Fahrenkrug have used SharePoint’s calendaring function to track contractors’ vacations. They’ve set up alerts so that people know when documents are ready for approval. They’ve used discussion boards for brainstorming, and they’ve used SharePoint to share specifications.“

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Tandberg and HP broadened their telepresence interoperability agreement, with additional plans to co-develop managed telepresence and HD videoconferencing services. Main tenets: “(1) HP will invest in expanding managed services capabilities to support technologies from immersive telepresence solutions to standards-based HD videoconferencing endpoints and video network equipment on the HP Halo Video Exchange Network; (2) HP will continue to develop and offer immersive telepresence solutions; (3) TANDBERG will develop additional telepresence endpoint configurations, including immersive, instant and personal telepresence solutions, and network equipment supporting management capabilities for enhanced end-to-end managed services; and (4) Both companies will jointly promote open industry standards to drive broader multi-vendor, inter-company telepresence interoperability by working co-operatively with other telepresence vendors and Unified Communications providers.“
• Tandberg and Barco announced a tele-collaboration solution with 1080p HD video. “Organizations that scrutinize large amounts of rich data and collaborate in real-time among multiple locations, such as government, oil & gas and automotive sectors, will benefit from the integration of Barco’s multi-windowing display systems with TANDBERG’s high-definition video solutions. Distributed teams can see and react to the complete picture all at once. Remote expertise can immediately be brought in through a common interface from any standards-based video system for live analysis and discussion …. With this tele-collaboration solution, multiple desktop applications and productivity software such as SAP can be integrated with telepresence to deliver complete situational awareness. In addition, the flexibility to resize image windows that contain rich media content allows experts to focus on a particular scenario at any given point in a collaboration session.“
• Projjex released a plethora of updates in its namesake team collaboration service, as well as a pricing revision. New features: increased file size limit, revised user interface, copy-and-paste, and currency selection, among others.
• IBM is showing more interest in the SMB segment for selling collaboration solutions, given the size and possibilities. “Poulley backs up his SMB statistics with IBM collaboration survey results that indicate 60 percent of small to mid-sized companies are considering collaboration software or services as a critical success factor in the near future; three out of four mid size businesses are either implementing or planning to implement new collaboration tools in the next 12 to 18 months; and 70 percent of mid size businesses see workforce effectiveness as critical to their growth and their cost-ability objectives. Collaboration software, in this context, includes such things as portals, e-mail, instant messaging, Web conferencing, virtual teamwork, social networking.“
• IT Solutions Now announced complimentary SharePoint hosting for its Exchange hosting customers. “The new SharePoint site (with 100MB storage) allows customers to collaborate with team members, along with accessing e-mail and calendars from anywhere. Customers also receive integrated antivirus, anti-spam and anti-phishing technologies to stop the latest threats before they impact an organization.“
• Colligo Networks won the Best of TechEd 2008 IT Professional Award for Colligo Contributor Pro, its rich-client for SharePoint. “Colligo Contributor Pro Version 3.0 is client software that increases SharePoint user adoption by providing an intuitive user experience that better integrates SharePoint into the way users work on their desktops. It enables information workers to easily access, modify, and create SharePoint content through familiar desktop interfaces.” Congratulations to Barry and the team.
• PostPath released Version 2 of its High Availability edition of PostPath Server, its email and collaboration offering. “The PostPath Server High Availability Edition v2 is a standards-based, open-systems solution for ensuring real-time business continuity and uninterrupted uptime for a company’s critical email and collaboration applications at a fraction of the cost and complexity of Microsoft Exchange.” Available immediately.

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• The David Allen Company announced that it is hosting the GTD Global Summit in March 2009 in San Francisco. “If the TED conferences are about ideas and inspiration, the GTD Global Summit is about action and implementation. No other event will have this level of practical, how to information to help you further refine your personal GTD strategy, troubleshoot your own implementation, or introduce you to new tools and techniques to take even the most advanced GTD Blackbelt to a whole new level.” Attendance is apparently limited to 500. Thus … GIQ*
• Five productivity challenges from Nicholas … (1) keep a master list, not a “to-do” list, (2) climb the mountain, (3) when you add something, drop something, (4) choose rather than react, and (5) do less to achieve more.

* GIQ, or “Get In Quick”