Facilitating Distributed Meetings … Rachel has pointers about facilitation of distributed meetings, from an Agile perspective. “Gary is a project manager who is being asked to use an Agile approach and at the same time work with a team with members dispersed between different countries. He can see how to run meetings like Daily Scrum and Retrospectives with a co-located team. But how can he help his team have effective meetings when they’re distributed? It’s not just that the team has limited opportunities for face-to-face meetings. There are also language and cultural differences to consider.” More

Collaboration eKit from IBM … IBM is offering a series of white papers on collaboration. “The eKit is a set of materials that look at collaboration from different angles and outline various approaches to tackle challenges. Seven whitepapers cover topics ranging from simplifying business communications to tapping the collaboration intelligence of your business network. Learn how to collaborate better now. Get your eKit today.” More

From Email to SharePoint … An example of how one organization saw email volumes reduce after embracing SharePoint. “So the Division of Child Development embarked on a pilot program last year after participating in a Microsoft SharePoint demonstration presented by DHHS. The division was one of two that took part in the pilot program. Users immediately saw the benefits of tracking a project and contributing to documents housed at a central site. In the process, e-mail use declined. “I would definitely say that e-mail has been reduced…around collaborative efforts,” said Regina Brooks, the division’s business operations manager.” More

Office 2010 … Office 2010 including co-authoring capabilities. “Word 2010, OneNote 2010, and PowerPoint 2010 now include a co-authoring feature, enabling multiple authors to work on the same document at the same time. This is a welcome change from having to use SharePoint, where only one author at a time can check a document out for editing. The addition of co-authoring is really ratcheting Office 2010’s collaboration options.” More

Other Items
– Amazon is taking pre-orders for Snow Leopard.
– Gretchen has some comments on avoid drift (more here).
– Interview with David Gilmour at Oracle about Beehive.