FEATURE EDITORIAL

Conversations About Collaboration

My life has been especially full of conversations about collaboration in the past two weeks, with visits to three Australian cities and two New Zealand ones. This has led to slipped deadlines for writing Collaboration Newswire, much to my chagrin (not to mention that of my long-suffering editor Stephanie!). In stark contrast to the previous editions of Collaboration Newswire, I want to reflect on these recent conversations about collaboration and share the highlights.

In Australia I presented two analyst briefings on Microsoft SharePoint 2007, looking at SharePoint from a business perspective, as well as delving into some of the technical considerations. The people at the briefings who worked at firms that already had SharePoint were unanimous in saying that their biggest issue in getting the most from SharePoint was the lack of skilled people available to assist. They said it was either "impossible" to find people who knew how to make SharePoint sing and dance, or they had gone to extraordinary lengths to recruit staff. Given the ramp up time involved in learning SharePoint, it's not a problem that can be fixed with a week at a training course either. If you are looking at SharePoint, have you factored this shortage into your risk assessment? If you already have SharePoint, I would like to hear how you dealt with this issue.

After completing the two analyst briefings on SharePoint, I talked to a group of High School teachers about using technology to support virtual teams. In one of the Australian states, the curriculum for Year 12 students taking IT is focused on virtual teams and using technology to support virtual team work, which I think is wonderful! It's an issue that all of these students are going to face as they transition from school to the work place, and having a frame of reference about being collaborative and using Web sites to support virtual team work is one I did not have when I joined the work force. The biggest issue the teachers faced was how to simulate the conditions of virtual team work in a classroom when all of the students could see each other, and the second biggest issue was how to find a low-cost (free is good!) virtual team technology platform that would adequately demonstrate all of the capabilities needed. Are there any vendors out there willing to introduce High School pricing plans?

Before leaving Australia, I met with a group of knowledge management professionals, and we talked about knowledge management, collaboration tools and approaches, SharePoint and other related areas. One person in the room had a great question to stimulate conversation about the hallmarks of effective collaboration: "Tell me about the best collaboration you have been involved in?" It lifted the focus from a tools-orientation, and got people talking about the good and the bad collaborations, which they had been involved with. As an intensely human activity, "collaboration" flourishes under certain conditions, and the more we can understand the conditions that work for us and the people we are involved with, the more we can be effective in choosing and embracing tools to support our collaborative efforts. Is this a question you can use in your conversations this week?

Back in New Zealand the following week, I attended (and spoke at) a conference on Information Management. There were a good number of case studies on how people were using document management tools for managing documents and capturing and retaining business records, as well as an insightful case study on the use of SharePoint for team collaboration. In regards to the latter, the presenter talked about how SharePoint enabled teams to quickly create and customize libraries and lists for storing information of joint interest to the people on the team. All I could think of was that Lotus Notes has enabled teams to do this for 15 years, but organizations have either not embraced these capabilities, or have embraced them and have become disillusioned about the viral growth of diverging Notes databases. And given that many CIOs profess a dislike of these "custom Notes applications", what's going to stop CIOs from hammering down on custom SharePoint applications? What's the difference this time, or isn't there one? What's happening in your organization about this?

The final conversation about collaboration was during a meeting with another group of knowledge management professionals. Although the topic was about creating a culture that was conducive to knowledge sharing, I commented during the discussion that many of the points applied equally to "creating a culture conducive to collaboration". As people, there are a set of actions and activities that we can take and make in reference to others, and these can be examined from a number of perspectives — the impact of knowledge sharing and the impact on collaboration. "Good" actions and activities — really listening to others, giving feedback on ideas while validating the individual, keeping others informed about the status of our work and projects — help create the conditions in which knowledge sharing and collaboration can flourish. What is good for one is good for the other. Let's not get so siloed in our thinking about collaboration that we fail to notice others in our organization that share related and complementary work interests.

Finally, although I work thousands of miles away from most of you, I am but an email away, and look forward to hearing from you regarding the conversations about collaboration that you are having … and any thoughts you have on the above.

Michael Sampson

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

Virtual Teams Resource Book

A new book on virtual teams, The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams (Wiley) is now out. According to the book description, "The Handbook of High Performance Virtual Teams: A Toolkit for Collaborating Across Boundaries is an essential resource for leaders, virtual team members, and work group leaders. The editors provide a proven framework based on five principles for working collaboratively across boundaries of time, space, and culture. Written by experts in the field, the contributors offer practical suggestions and tools for virtual teams who need to assess their current level of effectiveness and develop strategies for improvement. This important resource also contains an array of illustrative cases, as well as practical tools for designing, implementing, and maintaining effective virtual work." The book can be purchased through Amazon.

Vignette Launches New Community Products

Earlier this month, Vignette released the Vignette Community Services add-on for its Web content management platform. "Vignette Community Services includes tools which can help firms offer ratings, reviews, tagging and other functionality on their sites. The vendor is also providing content moderation tools - an essential feature for any firm, which wants to allow user-generated content on its site. Community Applications, meanwhile is all about collaborative functionality – think along the lines of blogs, wikis, forums and so on."

Business Social Software Solutions

Socialtext announced last week Socialtext 3.0 — a new edition of its enterprise wiki software. According to the company, new capabilities include: Socialtext Dashboard ("personalized and customizable dashboards of internal and external social software activity. The social news feed of your colleague's activity in wikis and beyond aids attention management.") and Socialtext People ("social networking adapted for the enterprise. Throughout the Socialtext wiki, Profiles are made visible so at any time you can pivot to the people behind the content. Profiles and a user directory make it easy for colleagues to introduce themselves and discover implicit and explicit expertise. People can subscribe to the activity of colleagues. Groupings enable users to declare interest and expertise on their profile and other users profiles, making group forming as simple as adding a tag."). The two new enhancements to Socialtext are currently in Beta. Socialtext also announced four core Solution Areas for its wiki platform: Business Social Networks, Collaborative Intelligence, Flexible Client Collaboration and Participatory Knowledgebase.

We welcome your ideas and your news for Collaboration Newswire's News & Trends in Collaboration. Let us know what you think by sending your comments to editorial@messagingnews.com. Written or compiled by Michael Sampson. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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