EtherPad History … EtherPad, a collaborative document authoring service, added a document history visualization capability, for looking back and how a document changed over time. “EtherPad keeps track of all your typing in realtime. At any time during the course of typing a document on EtherPad, you can click on the “Time-Slider” button that will play an animation of your document to see how it evolved over time. The tool also features a timeline where you can click into any stage of the document and see the evolution from that point.” More

Future of Email at Cisco … Cisco is thinking about how email will evolve over time, given its acquisition of PostPath. Eg, “At the Heart of Future Collaboration. Email has been the central form of communication for over a decade and the bulk of corporate data is still stored in email. Yet, email today exists in a silo. Email communications are not readily shared across content collaboration platforms. In its next evolution, email will remain at the heart of communication but it will be tightly integrated with a variety of collaboration approaches. For example, any email content can be shared through any social networking mechanism with a single click. Conversely, social networking content can be immediately published for a pre-defined email community. Email integrated with social collaboration becomes a tool for both ad-hoc and process-driven workflow, from brainstorming to supply chain management to project monitoring to community interaction. And companies can feel comfortable endorsing these new modes of collaboration because communications and sharing of content can be managed by secure policies and appropriate control of access rights.” More

Mobophiles for SharePoint … Mobophiles released Mobolize, an offline caching solution for SharePoint. “Mobolize is at work even when you are connected to the network. For remote offices or limited connectivity, you still access the cached copy, with the data synchronized as necessary. Data is automatically synchronized in the background — you can’t tell if you are working offline or online. Working within your Internet Explorer browser, you have full access to your SharePoint site when you are offline. This includes all web parts, libraries, lists, calendars, wikis and discussions. You also still have the ability to open documents in MS Office and upload new ones to your document library.” More

Gartner on 10 Enterprise Architecture Pitfalls … Gartner analysts weigh in on the 10 common pitfalls of enterprise architecture. Eg, “3. Not Engaging the Business People: When IT and business goals are not aligned, resultant problems include non-technical people trying to make technical decisions while enterprise architects become too reactionary and tactical in response to projects. To overcome this, Gartner recommends that enterprise architects get involved in the development of the business context and engage jointly with other employees in the business architecture.” Net-net across all 10 pitfalls: pay more attention to the business and human factors. More

Meeting Productivity … General rule: hold more shorter meetings, to keep people marching in the same direction. “The secret to productivity in virtual meetings is: short meetings. That means short meetings, shorter meetings and even shortest meetings.” More

Cloud Computing for Mobile Lawyers … Christopher writes about cloud-based services to support lawyers that are constantly on the go. “Having client data in the cloud means there is no need to carry sensitive client files on a laptop, which thieves easily can steal. It also helps to avoid the inadvisable but common practice of e-mailing client data back and forth to the office or the client without encryption. Instead, the data is stored on a secure server system and accessed over the Internet via an encrypted connection.” More

Other Items
– Review comments on Team Apart, a web meeting service (free for four people).
– Notify Corporation added support for Apple iPhone OS 3.0 and 3GS, in NotifyLink, its wireless messaging offering.
– 10 free apps for Mac, including Dropbox, Skitch, TweetDeck, and more.
– MessagingWire.com offers regular news on messaging, UC, cloud computing, and more.
– New features in O3Spaces Workplace 3.0, for easier document collaboration.