PaperPort 12 … Nuance released Paperport 12, with new features and SharePoint integration. “PaperPort Professional 12 is able to communicate with the Microsoft SharePoint Services 2003, SharePoint Portal 2003, SharePoint Services 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 document management systems. Now you can get files from these systems, process them as desired, and then save the results by sending the output files back through the Send To Bar. For added convenience, ScanDirect supports scanning to PDF with the results directed to SharePoint.” More

Collaborative Spaces and Departing Members … What’s your strategy for dealing with securing access to your firm’s collaboration spaces when someone leaves? Different tools handle it in different ways, eg, “LiquidPlanner lets you immediately “disconnect” a user from the collaborative workspace if they leave the team, so a former employee can no longer log in to view or modify the team’s project information. This feature makes their account inactive. This disconnection feature eliminates the need to change a login and password as a stop gap measure. The workspace remains secure. The inactive user’s projects and tasks will remain accessible and intact so the rest of the team can access all the data related to their account. Inactive users do not count against the user quota for a LiquidPlanner account. If you disconnect a user from a workspace at any time and then they return to the team, you can simply invite the same person back into the space by “reconnecting” them.” More

Facilitating Technology-Based Collaboration … Mark offers some insights on facilitating human action in collaborative workspaces. “Over the years I have studied, gleaned, imagined, and learned-the-hard-way, a number of facilitation principles for working collaboratively in a technology-mediated environment. One technology environment where facilitation is critical is when teams are tasked with the co-creation of written documents. In this post I want to present facilitation concepts. In Part 2, I will move from concept to application. So what is important in facilitating technology-based collaborative workspaces?” More

Translation in Google Docs … Google added language translation capabilities to Google Docs. “With this feature you can write a doc once, and with a few clicks make it available in any of 42 supported languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croation, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.” More

Slow Down … A good reminder to be careful about where we spend our time and energy. “Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.” More

Other Items
– Instant messaging is the second most popular collaboration tool in Asia Pacific region, after email.
– Some thoughts from Mark about achieving remarkable performance.
– Thoughts about going Google (Apps, that is).