Collaboration at 3M … BusinessWeek looks at how 3M forged a culture of collaboration. Key points:
– 3M created the organizational systems and culture to encourage and support collaboration.
– 3M has a database of technical reports, that can be used to demonstrate expertise and connect people.
– Regular face-to-face events provide a foundation for collaboration, eg, TechForums.
– Employees are expected to collaborate, eg, go beyond their own lab and work with others.

“Don’t underestimate the value of physical proximity. When 3M’s Post-it Note team wanted to accelerate product development, it had the team’s marketing, financial, and other nonmembers move into the same building with the tech folks. If different functions have to be housed in different buildings, pay for a shuttle service that makes it easy for employees in different departments to visit each other.“

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Cisco and Vsys … Cisco and Vsys announced a partnership, for enabling Cisco’s UC offerings to run as a service. “The goal of this collaboration is to help organizations overcome adoption barriers of information technology (IT) business solutions by offering Cisco Unified Communications as a service. Enabled by Cisco technology, Vsys provides unified IP telephony, unified messaging, unified personal communication, unified voice and Web collaboration, and unified mobile convergence to companies through a monthly rent on a per-user basis. With this model, companies avoid upfront investments, deploy solutions developed by highly trained experts, and avoid the costs and challenges associated with operating the systems and solutions.” Target market is Latin American companies. More

Box.net and Fuze … Box.net announced a partnership with Fuze Meeting, so users can collaborate in real-time on a document in Box using Fuze. “The effort aims to integrate real-time online meeting and collaboration directly from within the Box.net service. Users can share screenshots and more with real time video presentations giving individuals the opportunity to come together, as well as the ability to review and comment.” More

Snow Leopard at Work … Jason looks at the adoption of Macs in the enterprise, with new enterprise-friendly capabilities in Snow Leopard. Net-net: no change. “On September 1, TechRepublic polled its 90-member panel of U.S. IT executives and asked, “Does the release of Snow Leopard make your IT department more likely to adopt more Mac OS X machines?” The jury, made up of the first 12 respondents, unanimously voted “no” in a 12-0 decision.” More

ColumbiaSoft Document Management … ColumbiaSoft released a new version of its document management software, with Windows 7 compatibility. “ColumbiaSoft today announced it will launch a new version of its application, Document Locator, which works with Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 to offer customers enhanced security, as well as innovative user interface features and reliability improvements. Document Locator is a paperless document management software system for businesses that is tightly-integrated with Microsoft operating systems and applications, making it easy for people to manage, store, control, and share documents and information.” Document Locator also integrates with Outlook. More

Oracle of Collaboration: Enable the Humans … Billy from Oracle is writing a series about achieving collaboration; requirement #4 is to “enable the humans”. “This week we continue the series investigating requirement #4 where we change gears a bit and move from our previous automation focus and consider the humans. After all it is we-the-meat that actually create and use information. It is the meat part of life which can transmogrify data to information to knowledge to action. So our topic is how and why human revisions of information, annotations to and classifications of information must be enabled and preserved.” More

Other Items
– Dachis Group acquired Headshift, a social technology consulting firm (at which a number of my friends work — well done guys!)
– Thinc Projects (management consulting firm) has adopted Aconex for online collaboration tools.
– Eric asks, What’s the worst email inbox you’ve ever seen?
– RIM acquired Torch Mobile, in order to improve web browsing on BlackBerry devices.