Silence in Virtual Teams … Phil comments on the destructive influence of silence on virtual teams, and what to do about it. “While the old adage says “Silence is golden” it could be eroding trust in your business or on your team. When working with others remotely – whether it’s virtual team members, clients, or vendors – communication is what brings everyone together. Lack of effective and timely communication can quickly destroy working relationships and fill people with doubt and fear.” More (see also my March 2008 post on the same topic).

Cisco Collaboration Platform … Cisco is preparing a new collaboration software platform for enterprise customers. “Cisco Systems is developing a collaboration software platform that will allow enterprises to combine social networking, presence, content and transactional applications in a single interface. The Enterprise Collaboration Platform is scheduled to be announced in early November and should be available in a beta-test form around that time, according to Sheila Jordan, vice president of IT at Cisco. The company is already using elements of it internally. The product will work with software from other major vendors, such as Microsoft’s Exchange and popular CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) packages, though only the top three or four in each category.” More, also ITBusinessEdge. (My big question is how well Cisco will integrate its currently disparate collaboration products and services; will be interesting to see what’s announced.)

Google vs Microsoft for Collaboration … A Google Apps product manager discusses the collaboration war between Google and Microsoft. “Rishi Chandra, a senior product manager for collaboration at Google Apps, recently discussed with eWEEK Microsoft’s cloud computing challenge and Google’s answer to that challenge, noting that Google does not want to put another Office on the Web. Also top-of-mind for Chandra was Google Apps’ future with Google Wave and the effect HTML 5 is going to have on the collaboration market.” More
– sound bite #1: Google releases new features to Google Apps every two weeks; Microsoft takes 4 years.
– sound bite #2: Google will significantly simplify the ability to work with Office files in Google Apps.
– sound bite #3: the HTML 5 specification makes Google Wave incredibly for collaboration efforts.

Author-it and Syrinx Partnership … Author-it and Syrinx announced a partnership, for integration between SharePoint and the Author-it publishing environment. “Designed specifically for Author-it, the Syrinx SharePoint Connector extends Author-it’s standard publishing capabilities by allowing users to deploy content automatically and directly into SharePoint. At the click of a button, content, graphics, links, navigation, and metadata within Author-it are published to a SharePoint list. Sharepoint indexes the information making it natively searchable and browsable as standard items in a page library and in a
web-based format native to a specific SharePoint environment.” More

Other Items
– Lori has a recap post on the SharePoint Best Practices Conference (Washington DC).
– Beware the problems of multi-tasking.