Group items tagged

simply because people work together to meet objectives and reach goals, doesn't mean they are collaborating

efficiency

'Collaboration' thrives on difference, insight and spontaneity, rather than structural harmony

GroupDrive Collaboration Suite GroupDrive is a business-class file and document collaboration product. Businesses can use GroupDrive to securely collaborate over the Internet without the inherent problems of emailing attachments. Because your files are stored in a central location, users always have the most current version of a document. The GroupDrive Server provides secure file storage and backup for your important business files and documents. With easy file sharing and real-time document collaboration, GroupDrive gives your team a secure private business network that lets you work at the speed of business. The GroupDrive Collaboration Suite consists of 3 components: GroupDrive Server - a secure WebDAV server for storing and collaborating on files. GroupDrive uses WebDAV over SSL. GroupDrive Client - Virtual drive connection to the GroupDrive server enables users access and save files from within any Windows application. GroupDrive Web Interface - A simple and intuitive interface that allows users to store and collaborate on documents from any machine with a web browser and Internet access.

One of the biggest problems of wikidom today is not WikiSpam but the tendency to redraw fundamental parts of communication from the main online community platform ("stage") to BackStage systems. The point of this page is to show why BackStageCommunication is used (it must offer advantages to individuals, otherwise they wouldn't do it) and how this may harm online-communities. But note that there is a difference between PrivateCommunication? and BackStageCommunication and that there may be situations where these are unavoidable.

The result is an egregious lack of productivity that may cost the U.S. economy $588 billion a year, according to a report by Basex, which has tabbed information overload as the "Problem of the Year" for 2008.

With e-mail as the biggest offender, Basex said users can save time by not e-mailing someone, and then following up with a phone call or an instant message two seconds later

Basex also said users must not combine multiple topics or requests in a single e-mail; make sure the subject clearly reflects the topic and urgency of the message; read their e-mails before sending to make sure they make sense; and will not hit reply-all unless necessary or reply with one-word e-mails such as "thanks.

Corporate Wikis reviewed: Confluence, JotSpot, WetPaint, Socialtext by Troy Angrignon on Mon 10 Jul 2006 06:30 AM PDT  |  Permanent Link  |  Cosmos Wikis are on the rise in corporations. And it's about time. One of the principles of Web 2.0 is that your user community can generate content that is better, faster, and probably easier to read than you can as a vendor. One way to enable them to contribute would be to build a wiki and let them flesh it out. Some good examples are coming up in this article: "Corporate wikis breaking out all over: MSDN Wiki" by Dion Hinchcliffe. (He has another great post as well called "Exploiting the Power of Enterprise Wikis") Quote of the day: "Not leveraging the contributions of a company's most impassioned and enthusiastic customers is starting to be seen as a significand oversight in many business circles." It appears in the article that eBay is using Wikis to better communicate between their users, partners, and suppliers. Now MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) is using their pages to improve the quality of their developer documentation with the MSDN Wiki. THAT is a great usage. Your users often know your product better than your engineers and product managers because they have to live with it day to day. And guess what? If they tell the truth about some part of your product being broken - that's a GOOD thing.

Atlassian's Confluence is the best of them so far. Pros: the overall design is clean, it has advanced management tools, good security, and simple attachments.Its email function has to pick mail up from a POP box which makes it a little bit less ad-hoc but still functional. And most importantly, it also has great tools for moving pages around. Cons: Text editing, like with most apps these days is a bit dodgy, and pasting in blocks of text from Word is likely to cause problems. The pricing model is reasonable but for some reason (possibly because they're from Australia), they still don't have a directly hosted option so you have to use somebody like Contegix or deploy it on your own box. This seems to be a big and obvious oversight on their part these days. Also, their pricing model doesn't encourage small deployments right off the bat. I think this is the one that we'll use more of internally at the company where I work. Summary: The best of the enterprise wikis today, and one of the best options for scalability.

WetPaint is a newcomer that is doing some interesting stuff and that might be a better bet than JotSpot. Pros: The design is beautiful, the tool is very easy to use, the text editor is one of the best I have seen. Cons: I'm not clear on their entierprise suitability and it's not really their target market. It didn't appear that they had much in the way of administration tools, granular security, or any way to integrate into a back-end authentication system. Summary: I met one of the WetPaint guys at Gnomedex but he didn't seem to know the product very well. Hopefully next time, they'll put somebody more knowledgeable at their booth who knows the product in more detail. I think they're worth watching to see what they do in the next few months.