WWPYCBW … “Working with People You Can’t Be With”

Contents at a Glance
– The benefit of UC is latency reduction
– Traction User Group 2008
– Virtual Global released TeamLeader

The Benefit of UC
The benefit of unified communications tools is in the reduction of human contact latency, in speeding up the ability to connect the right people.

“. With increasing process automation, real-time contacts to people are also being initiated by automated business applications, in addition to traditional person-to-person contacts. Either way, the challenge is to make contact with a recipient without any unneccssary delays or wasted effort.“

Analysis
Oh great, so now were all going to be findable in nanosecond intervals, and everything is going to become so highly coordinated that we’ll never get time to talk. Michael’s take: UC’s benefit is for people, whereby they can overcome the fragmentation of their communication systems.

Traction User Group 2008
Traction Software is hosting its third annual user group meeting (and the one for 2008) in Chesapeake MD from October 6 to 8.

“The conference agenda starts on Monday morning at 10:30AM with a “What’s New” session driven by us to inform you about past and future product changes and to discuss your feedback or ideas. However, the heart of the TUG meeting comes right from customers.

We encourage as many customers (or even prospective customers and Team Page5 users) as possible to deliver a 10-20 minute presentationof their use case, feedback, key learning points, theories or constructive feedback.“

Analysis
Traction customers and prospects … get those flight bookings made. I haven’t yet written up my conversation with Traction from earlier in the year, but it’s a good platform for enterprise collaboration. Go and learn more!

Virtual Global released TeamLeader
Virtual Global released TeamLeader, a Web service for holding remote team members accountable.

“In recent years, managers have encountered a slew of productivity challenges with dispersed team members who are more prone to “free ride”. TeamLeader gives managers an easier way to interactively manage large teams and complex tasks, while boosting employee productivity and efficiency. Using TeamLeader, managers can assign work, and report on who’s doing what, what’s late, and quickly approaching deadlines. This puts managers in closer touch with their teams, even if they are scattered around the world.“

Analysis
I’m sorry, but to me this flies the face of the essential key to remote teams — trust and results-based work. If a manager has to resort to such draconian measures to check up on remote team members, either (a) the manager is a control freak and needs to find a traditional in-person team to manager, or (b) the team members are not trustworthy and need to work under the hammer of a nearby supervisor.