Collaboration

Best Practice Report The Enterprise Solutions practice at Avenue A | Razorfish recently published a best practice study on intranet, extranet and employee portal solutions based on research with industry leading organizations. The report provides guidance to managers on how to evolve their intranet, extranet or employee portal to generate greater, more measurable business value from it. Register here for a PDF of the full report Click below for a podcast summary of the report: Part 1 – Executive Summary Part 2 – Trends That Will Change Your Intranet Part 3 – Insights from Intranet Managers Workplace Offerings Enterprise Intranets Solutions (PDF) Sales & Marketing Solutions (PDF) Human Resources Solutions (PDF) Partner Extranets & Portals (PDF)

Enterprise Intranets Solutions (PDF)

Human Resources Solutions (PDF)

Taking social bookmarking behind the firewall opens up new uses, including the following: Providing topical resource lists that can be personalized and shared—creating personal "knowledge management" systems through lists of winning sales proposals, best practice deliverables, etc., around specific topics or work efforts; Extending individual profiles to let others know what content an individual considers important; Facilitating discovery of employees with similar interests or facing similar issues; Offering support to online workgroup activity; Measuring popularity of intranet documents through numbers of tags; and Supplementing enterprise search engines through the emergence of new keywords that are meaningful to employees.

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.

Knowledge management problems in a large organization

Big problem in an organization like ours is getting access and distributing information that exists in one part to other parts. It is amazing how hard it is to first of all find out who is responsible for certain topics. Of course we have lists, who does what, but finding them is not always easy. Some departments publish them on the corporate intranet and with the new Google Search Appliance, we can actually find them. But finding out what their projects entail, the intended output, project plans, drafts, introductions into the subject, is quite simply impossible.

Work in projects is done through mail.

To link to other people’s calendars: In the Calendar tab -> Right click an open space -> New Calendar This brings up a “create new calendar” dialog box Click the “remote” button and Next Click the “WebDav” Button enter the location: https://www.box.net/dav/calendar/persons_name.ics (see the list) If you want to change the name do so in the space provided. You can also change the background color for this calendar’s entries Click Next Click Finish

Portland, Oregon will be host of GOSCON 2006. Portland is Oregon's largest city, and was recently selected as the most livable city in the United States by Forbes magazine and North America's "Best Big City" according to Money magazine.

  Salesforce's new mashups will deliver full componentization of its analytical dashboards - enabling users to create, share, and combine data components. Essentially this means that customers can pick and choose the best analytical components from a variety of vendors; combining them into a single view on their salesforce dashboard. Salesforce is hoping that lots of new components will be created and shared on their AppExchange.

Work organizations increasingly adopt shared electronic databases. However, employees' unwillingness to contribute to shared resources undermines the utility of such technologies. Current research is limited to either a utilitarian or normative perspective. To advance understanding in this area, this study proposes a three-dimensional framework. It includes the utilitarian and normative perspectives as two complementary dimensions in addition to a third collaborative dimension. Based on this framework, the study identifies three key organizational processes and advances an additive model to predict employees' willingness to contribute to shared electronic databases. An empirical test was conducted to assess the model in a large manufacturing organization. The test showed both significant overall effects of the model and significant main effects of each predictor variable. The article will discuss the findings and address both theoretical and practical implications. Key Words: information sharing • collective action • organizational knowledge • knowledge management • collaboration • communities of practice • identification

GPU : a Global Processing Unit   GPU est un client Gnutella qui permet de partager des fichiers et des ressources CPU entre ses utilisateurs. Notre but est de fournir une structure pour permettre le calcul distribué à travers le P2P et de devenir un superordinateur pour des recherches pacifiques et gratuites. Les ressources sont partagées sans privilégier d'utilisateur, tout le monde peut utiliser les ressources d'un autre et doit en fournir si nécessaire. Pour le moment le client permet le partage de musique et quelques calculs simples. Des plugins augmentent les capacités du client et sont compilés de façon à pouvoir exploiter toute la puissance des processeurs récents.