Virtual Collaboration in the Workplace

Cloud Computing Reconsidered

Posted for Sean Kelly

This is the most accurate and fair article that I have read recently that really objectively looks at Cloud Computing.  It acknowledges it as a great platform with a lot of potential, but it also wisely warns about the risks taking with this architecture.  These providers will have you believe they have been doing this for 40+ years.  This article really says it best and outlines the same concerns I have in evaluating risk vs. rewards in moving to cloud platforms.  Basically, I feel it is too soon to get on the cloud bandwagon.

How many of you, costs aside, would honestly be willing to host your business applications and services in a cloud environment today?    Do you also like to sky-dive and bungee-jump?

New Disruptive Collaboration Tool

Posted for Jarmila Alanez

Last Friday was presented the new developer Preview of Google Wave Collaboration tool, in a meeting that Google held for I/O developers. This new product that is expected to be open for all the public by the end of this year has caused commotion to the developers that assisted the meeting and people in general.

The presentation was astonishing in many ways, but especially in what refers with Collaboration and Documents management. After watching the demo and the capabilities of the new Google Wave I can certainly say that this tool is as far the most disruptive technology for collaborations created, not only for the new features it offers, but also because is meant to be open source, which means that if the Wave works as expected, or as shown, many of the Social networking, email, and document management companies out there could get hurt.

New Cloud Computing Wares

Posted for Jay Vekavakayanondha

I found this article, and I think it is the interesting topics which I want to share with everyone in class.  The article is about new cloud computing wares.

Microsoft Bing vs. Google

Posted for Michael Howard

Microsoft has launched its new search engine entitled Microsoft Bing, which will be competing against ‘the giant’ Google.  I understand the need for healthy competition, but Google owns 64% of the market share in terms of search engine sites.  However, Microsoft Bing is innovative, and if it is marketed correctly, they might be able to compete against Google.

Triple Threat - Mind Mapping as an appliance, on your Iphone...and via Twitter

Posted for Sean Kelly

If you think mindmaps are just a prettier way to use Visio, you may soon be in the minority.  Not only has MindMeister been developed for the iPhone (and BlackBerry), they will soon offer a MindMap appliance - one that can sit in house at your company behind your firewall for secure internal use.    Would'nt want to let those precious mind map drawings get exposed.  :)

Virtual Team Checkup

Posted for Sean K.

I recently read an article that really summarized many of the lessons taught from this semester.

It touched on all of the important collaborative points with an emphasis on sorting and categorizing the massive amount of tools available for the right project and team base.  In terms of ‘distributed teams’, we are talking about teams put together from potentially across the world and thus from very different personal, professional, and cultural backgrounds.  The first point talked about the all-knowing importance of communication, but with an additional emphasis on how cultural diversity plays a central role – even if it means formal training in it. 

 

The second point discusses choosing the right tool, but with emphasis on the tool being uniform amongst the team with sufficient training on it so everyone is effective.  Another important discussed the importance of trust amongst the team.  I found it interesting, but also quite true, that one of the best ways to build is trust is engaging in activities outside of the regular project. 

 

Trust then forms from the freedom of team members to ‘be themselves’ and thus form a relationship/bond as people external from a project. The trust can be further supplemented by the good leadership on the team.  It seems leadership on a distributed requires more responsibility on the leader part since he has to lead ‘blindly’.  He doesn’t have the affordance of seeing and talking in person to his team members.  Instead he has to engage team members and ensure aspects of the team are working in the background such as management support, creating a resource and comfort level with sharing information, and working with a team that may not have the expertise and motivation needed for an optimum team.  Many of these may not be in place whether it a virtual or local team, however the virtual leader has to focus his effort much more on relationship building without the affordance of a physical presence.

 

Out of all of these points, the most important thing I took from it was that it was important to align and organize the team upfront before the project even begins.  This involves discussing and agreeing on the communication standards, project vision, goals, tools, and how decisions should be made.  You in essence have to set a distributed working framework that is agreed on by all.  This may take some time upfront, but it will pale in comparison to the time loss by not doing it.   This will greatly reduce problems and project delays later.

 

I can honestly say that from working on my team this quarter, I have certainly seen the importance of each of these points along the way.  How’s YOUR distributed team doing / done?

 LINK TO ARTICLE: 

A New Kind of Mega-Application

Posted for Mohammed B H.

I really can’t wait to have the chance to try Google’s recent application. It really sounds impressive with so much potential if it really works as they say it would. Just think of all the inconveniences we have dealing with so many different communication and collaboration tools. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and even email, can really take so much of our time, just jumping from one another. Google’s Wave, promises to be one elegant application that combines all the recent trends of social networking and collaboration all in one place.

 

Google is opening the door to developers to build tools that runs with the applications, making it open source. According to Google, however, the public will not get to use the new application until later this year.

Think of Wave as one place that receives and organizes all your “streams” from twitter and facebook and many other applications. However, it does more in regards to simplifying collaboration between lots of people, using many of tools that Google already has.

I’m not going to try to list Wave’s features; I’ll let you find out for yourself:

http://www.cio.com/article/493707/Google_Wave_A_New_Kind_of_Mega_Application

There is also a very informative video from Google’s developer’s conference that talks in details about Wave: http://wave.google.com/

It seems that Google is continuing its strategy of providing better services for free to the public. I’m wondering wither, Wave is going to be a success, or another Gtalk. 

Facebook to Twitter, Tips for Dealing with Phishers

Posted for Farooq M.

I happen to read this intresting article that Two of the Web’s most popular social networks, Facebook and Twitter, made the news last

week when they were hit with phishing scams. Despite the publicity, most Phishers targeting enterprise data are not hooking victims via social networks—at least not yet.

 

Companies are currently spending money on carefully monitoring their brand and trademarks, and they are wary to fully embrace social networking sites. Still, with companies looking to Twitter to reach out to customers, spear phishers may soon have a fantastic weapon to target enterprises.

 

Also in a recent survey conducted by one of the anonymous company believe that 23 percent of employees were trapped by phishers which gained company’s major data/

 

It is all also because of the tiny URL’s these networking sites use and people using them doesn’t know what they are clicking and how they are trapped at the hands of phishers.

 

So, Some suspicion is a good thing but also teaching enterprise people who use them as a mode of communication when they exchange email’s from strangers should be guarded.

 

How do you guys think that what should be more implemented in order to stop phishing or can be minimized?

Collaborative Document Management

Posted for Ajay Y.

Unstructured content, like Documents, emails, audio, video files are integral part of today’s business. These contents are growing exponentially in every organization. The biggest challenge companies face is managing these contents to use them in an efficient way. It is nearly impossible to manage the complexity of creation, review and dissemination of contents to support business growth without a proper collaborative document management system.

 

Below are some of the factors which drives the need for deploying a CDM system in an organization.

 

-Documents scattered around different network file shares, intranets, employee’s personal hard drives?

-Cost of managing, distributing and storing papers is costing high.

-Employees are wasting time every day looking for business documents but unable to find it and hence recreating the documents over and over?

-Are you sure that employees are making informed business decision working from the latest version of a document?

-Unable to manage projects effectively and within time while trying to coordinate people from multiple geographic locations.

-There are no mechanism in place to store, secure, track, review, approve and publish documents.

-To capturing and share organizational knowledge and best practices to unlock the value of content to maximize business performance.

-Are you worried about increased regulatory pressure and compliance mandate to manage your business documents.

-Are you worried about how you would discover and produce key documents and emails to defend your organization in the case of a lawsuit or government investigation?

 

What other challenges which are not covered above drives the need for a collaborative document management system?

How would you prioritize the need for collaborative document management system in an organization?

Webware 100 Winners

Posted for Alcides R.

With all of the collaboration applications available, how do you go about choosing what to use for a project. Do you perform random internet searches? Get suggestions from friends? cnet.com just released their 2009 webware 100 winners. In order to select the winners, cnet asked the general webware community to submit their favorite application; these applications were then reviewed by cnet and made available for general voting. This list should help you narrow downs possible applications for your next project.

 

 

http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2009/winners.html?tag=snav