Three Cs of the Intranet … To describe why you need an intranet, consider this one: connect, communicate, and collaborate. This is a far-cry from “publish”, however … and points to the intranet becoming a place for work rather than a place for reference. And finally, it sounds a lot like Lotus’s “communicate, collaborate and coordinate” from the 1990s. More

Trends in Facilitation … Viv reviews the main trends in facilitation that she and others are seeing, and sounds a fairly big warning: “Collectively we recognise the challenges of the current financial crisis, the pace of change, the complexity of the worlds we operate in and the challenge of sustainability. We also recognise that facilitators need to respond with doing our core work (enabling participation, allowing wisdom to emerge and encouraging partnerships and collaboration) as well as growing and developing ourselves. In various ways we fear that the current climate will enable the nay-sayers and control freaks to reclaim many of the advances made in facilitation over the last decades. I guess it’s up to all of us to be aware of this and respond appropriately.” More

Microsoft Research Social Desktop … Robin reviews the Social Desktop prototype from Microsoft Research. “The service would essentially be capable of providing you with a secure unique ID for all the files and folders on your desktop, enabling users to share, comment on, tag and search files like photos and videos via a dedicated web page powered by .NET. Think of this as social URLs that link to files which could easily be pushed to third-party services like Twitter or Digg but also Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger without the need for you to copy, move or upload anything. Furthermore, social interaction around the files would be visible from inside the Windows desktop OS, blurring the line between the desktop and the web even more.” More

Key Trends at the 2009 Small Business Summit … Laurie shares the key trends from a recent Summit: (1) catch the social networking wave, (2) demand solutions that do more for less, (3) find fresh technology alternatives more appealing, (4) favor software-as-a-service vs buy and install, (5) going for non-Microsoft technology — think Mac, and (6) innovate beyond what you can anticipate. More

ROI of Being Social … Recent MIT research points to the value of social interaction: “MIT research shows that 40% of creative teams productivity is directly explained by the amount of communication they have with others to discover, gather, and internalise information. In other MIT studies, research shows that employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7% more productive than their colleagues. Furthermore, those with the most cohesive face-to-face networks are 30% more productive.” More

Other Reading
– Is SharePoint taking over the Intranet?
– Want a Mac Netbook? Hack an HP Mini 1000.
– Matthew Cornell on do, don’t do, and stop doing lists.