The People Part of Working with People You Can’t Be With

• Six ideas about working on projects with people you can’t be with: (1) build trust in the person and grow that trust with clear expectations, (2) manage results, not activity, (3) schedule regular communication, (4) create communication that saves time — not kills it, (5) create standards that build a cohesive culture, and (6) define the rules of responsiveness.

The Technology Trends of Working with People You Can’t Be With

• Novell renamed the ICEcore product “Kablink”, in an attempt to convey more excitement and energy. It also announced new end-user workflow capabilities. “With the Kablink release, workflow capability is being added to the ICEcore collaboration features. A business user can now create a business workflow for a process — be it approval, development or otherwise and attach that workflow to the business objects.” Kablink is the open source product that is the basis for the commercial Novell Teaming + Conferencing product. On the face of it, I don’t really see the point of such a re-branding.
• Forrester is concerned about the downsides of SharePoint, especially the application development capabilities. “(A)s many shops are discovering, SharePoint is also a development platform that people both inside and outside of IT use to create intranets, outward-facing portals, electronic forms, workflows, and even dashboards. The promise of SharePoint: Your organization will be able to create and deploy collaboration applications faster and give businesspeople productive new tools. The pitfalls: SharePoint can add new unplanned demands as your teams fill the product’s gaps in application life-cycle management and enterprise integration and as they create policies to prevent a new chaos of usergenerated applications.” See also InfoWorld and PCWorld. Valid concerns indeed, and Forrester isn’t the only analyst firm saying to exercise caution. But SharePoint isn’t alone in facing these concerns; Notes shops have had to deal with this for a long time.
• EMC announced plans to add Web 2.0 ideas and capabilities to Documentum 6.5, the next edition of its document management platform. “ … new features such as tagging, ranking, groups, Twitter-like messaging, and a vastly improved user interface [are] on the way. And the company says even more Web 2.0 features, such as wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, and social networking are coming in 2009. It’s pitching the improvements as a way for companies to tap into the innovative spirit of the Web 2.0 world without giving up control over security and workflow.” Will be interesting to see how EMC straddles the strict compliance mandates that many of its customers operate under, with the more freewheeling nature of 2.0.
• Sybase added iPhone 3G support to iAnywhere, enabling users to get access to Notes Mail and Microsoft Exchange from the iPhone. “Sybase noted that it plans to add more components for push email, contacts, corporate directories and calendars in the future.“