Virtual Collaboration in the Workplace

More corporate events going virtual in 2009

ON24 reports that three of four executives expect to replace In-person events with virtual events in 2009.

"The survey of more than 10,000 enterprise execs asked about planned 2009 use of traditional, in-person events vis-a-vis virtual events such as webinars and virtual shows."  Among the findings were:

• 64% expect to have fewer physical sales kick-off seminars - or none at all.
• 60% expect training, management and other internal events to be down 20% - 50%.
• 76% said their company has already begun using virtual events (53%) or plans to begin using them (23%) to supplement some of their physical events in 2009.

Of course, many businesses are moving virtual to save money, but among other advantages surfaced in these findings were:

• 75% appreciate that there is no travel required.
• 64% like the fact that they can attend the virtual sessions on their own time schedules.
• 58% found it useful to be able to “forward” to their colleagues virtual sessions that they thought would be of interest to them.
• More than one third cited the social networking benefits of virtual events, including the ability to see a list of all attendees in advance (35%); to contact other attendees online throughout the event (40%); and to get information on people (32%) and companies (34%) they meet electronically.

CellFrog --Web 2.0 Conf and Collab tool

CellFrog (http://www.cellfrog.com/) is a conference call and collaboration service which uses Web 2.0 technologies to make conference call organization and management more efficient.  Some of the key features include creating and managing phone conferences, remote collaboration, file management, contact syncing, call recording, and archive search.  The service is not trying to replace web conferencing tools such as WebEx, but it does provide a collaboration dashboard for chatting, file sharing, and user management for support during calls.  There is a cost associated with the services though – approximately 8 cents per minute.  Since they are still in beta testing, they are offering a promotional code (cf08) that you can enter during sign up to receive a $5 credit to try the system out.  I am still skeptical about these pay-per-call companies.  I am not sure that they will be successful since the market is already saturated with these types of companies.  What do you think?

 

Jen M

EtherPad – free real-time text editing

AppJet a company created by former Google employees brings you EtherPad, a free web based collaboration tool for real-time text editing.  EtherPad will probably be best suited for small teams conducting conference calls, code reviews or brainstorming sessions.  The idea first came as an internal need for teams to easily share ideas over the web with little overhead.  AppJet found that existing tools didn’t exactly meet their needs which prompted them to create their tool.  As described in the article the interface is not very appealing but the core functionality is very good.  You do not need to pay or subscribe for the service, you create a workspace and share the generated link, user comments are color coded, one downfall rich text capabilities are currently not available.  It is no surprise that AppJet is targeting Google Doc users who need real-time document collaboration.  This is similar to some of the tools we have seen in class and I believe has good potential.

 

Mario M.

Article    Video Demo

Communication Bar Raised or Shifted?

I for one have experienced how emailing can often disrupt leadership in a virtual team and seen it turn collaboration into an all out calamity fest.  When I read this article I considered numerous possible catalysts which make emailing the last option users should make when doing any sort of team based project.

The author makes notable points on the decaying health and effectiveness of the email as it has progressed over the past couple years.  Do you agree and/or agree that emailing in general has become too sloppy, unorganized, too informal, or even useless? 

Meta data is a very important component of virtual collaboration with respects to the group’s workspace.  Emailing to me has the potential to acquire a decent amount of meta data if it wanted to.  Could re-structuring the e-mail’s meta data requirements improve and possibly help save the supposed decay of e-mail’s nowadays or put it back into the collaboration game?

Mark W.

 The Evolution of Harmful Emailing Habits

Emergent Collaboration: The Reason Why Email Should Not Be Used for Collaboration

Small Business Collaboration Tools

I found an interesting posting that I believe listed some interesting tools for small businesses who are using more and more software tools for collaboration efforts.  You can find the complete article here: Blog Post 
 
This site offers some interesting insights to small business and how they can take advantage of the different tools out there to make for a more collaborative effort by its employees.  I am familiar with Gmail and the Google Calendar but I was wondering what other tools that are listed here have you used and do you think they are effective tools for small businesses?  Do you think they have the capabilities to be used for large businesses too?  If not, why not? 
 
These were the ones the author listed that I was most interested in:
 
Dropbox
Basecamp
iLinc
SimpleEvent  
Jott  
 
Of the 5 listed above, I was most impressed with Dropbox.  It appears to be a very interesting and useful tool.  I really like the file sharing and syncing capabilities. 
 
Has anyone else used these tools?  If not, check them out and let me know what you think about them.  I believe most of them are free to use. 
  
Denis J

Measuring the Value of Collaboration

A post written by David Coleman on a collaborative strategies blog
(CollabStrategiesBlog)  talked about the difficulties of measuring ROI for collaboration tools.  In this blog he suggests that there are 4 major benefits: saving time or money, increasing quality, innovating and/or providing decision support, and easing access to and interactions with SMEs.  Although I would agree with all of these, I was wondering if these were really the only major benefits.  What about buy-in of certain parties?  Or using collaboration to build relationships?  Do all the other ideas actually lead to the major benefits Coleman describes?  Or can they be exclusively achieved?
Jen M.

A New Twist on Marketing?

I am not IT savvy, I am just  an average and  humble user, so what I have been doing is researching about new trends and tools  related to what I know, which is marketing.  I have found that the marketing campaign process has become rapidly a good example of virtual  collaborative work. A piece of advertising can be designed  in London, approved in a  company headquartered in New York and distributed by an  e- marketing service in California.

In times of crisis the first thing that is cut from large companies budgets is the advertising and marketing expense.  Therefore, media agencies, are now looking for more and more efficient ways to promote products and services and using the boom of the social networks, creating  expeditious  ways to reach the humongous market of the cyber-surfers. You tube has become the new Diva in marketing  media, but  I wonder how effective is this way of advertising. Is it only a way to be  seen by many people and create branding? (Branding is used as a way to justify an ineffective promotional campaign). Big marketing consultants are trying to push their clients to experiment  with ads placed next to online videos in Youtube.  However the impossibility to measure the Return of Investment of the social network marketing campaign makes some companies take their time when it comes to decide for replacing the traditional media for the new video sites. Here's an article in Business Week that talks about the new trends.

 

BusinessWeek Article

 

In my  research about what is hot in virtual collaboration and marketing, I found that DePaul has an incredible sample of the new marketing on You tube.

DePaul YouTube Example

 

I found this a new an exiting way to reach the market of young people interested in the new Digital Cinema techniques, and also it is a way to create Marketing in a collaborative way, the videos used in the site were created by various students and they were put together to create this innovative way to do marketing.

 

Esther QG

Collaboration as Green?

I read a Cisco blog that talked about its initiative be green. It acknowledges the need to adopt green IT living as an approach to generate a new work and communication model. This model identifies that there are three ways in which technologies can help companies make the shift toward fulfilling needs. In becoming more green they pinpoint reducing travel, enable teleworking and reduce commuting, and how to make use of office space will achieve this goal. It goes further to state that all three of these involve an “intelligent deployment” of collaborative communication and all can reduce carbon emissions. Their initiative in becoming green naturally moved their communication model to collaborative tools usage. They also outline the below impact of using its Cisco WebEx:

How much CO2 can you save with WebEx?

• Use WebEx instead of flying from New York to London for a team meeting. Save 2,690 pounds of carbon dioxide.

• Enable two salespeople to give a presentation via WebEx rather than traveling from Chicago to Silicon Valley. Save 4,696 pounds of carbon dioxide.

• Train 12 employees using WebEx instead of flying them to San Francisco from Dallas. Save 22,377 pounds of carbon dioxide.

I know we have been discussing the various types of collaborative tools, but this puts a different spin on why to use collaboration tools. Does anyone out there currently use this form of communication due to=2 0a company’s initiative to reducing its carbon footprint?

Cisco Blog Post

Grace A.

Loopt, The Social Compass

 A few months ago I found an application for the iphone that allowed social tracking in urban areas and allowed you to find out what other people like you are doing. At a restaurant and looking for a concert to see later that night? Check out on your phone and see where people like you with similar interests are right now. The system uses science and theories gathered by biologist researching herd of wild animals, and applies these theories to a social tracking application that taps into GPS and Yelp that shows where your social herd is at that point in time.

 Unfortunately I was not able to find the original product described above, but while I was attempting to find the beta project that was started in San Francisco, I found a handful of other products that have been developed that attempt to accomplish the same goal. Loopt is one of these productions:

 http://www.macworld.com/article/136738/2008/11/loopt.html

 Loopt allows users to see what their friends are doing, and also taps into Yelp to find reviews of similar destinations others enjoyed. While Loopt does not use herding research to track people and events, it still connects you with other people and destinations that fit your profile.

 When I told other people about the GPS/Herding product initially, some people did not like the idea of being tracked on GPS. Obviously you could sign out of the system and go incognito, but I understand that concern.

 Personally I think that it would be neat, to be able to tap into a web and find your weekend fun herd. But could this be useful in a business sphere or the creative industry to share information and ideas? Or will it just remain as a fun weekend toy to be used to find the next hot club. 

 Imagining the future of a system such as Loopt that scans a database of ideas rather than an evening destination. In the Open Source community, this could be very exciting to be able to find people near by that published ideas similar to yours. I could also image how this could turn a bit creepy by having some random person just show up and say 'I found you on Loopt, want to collaborate?'

What do you think? Is the world ready for the future of GPS herding collaboration technologies?

Jason VM

Meetsee Simplifies Collaboration for Small Businesses

While I was browsing the Internet and reading some articles about Virtual Collaboration, I found an interesting article talking about a website called “Meetsee”.
Meetsee is a website that provides you with a complete personal virtual office. You can create your own office, communicate with your colleagues, friends and your co-workers through chat, webcam and audio conferencing. You can host virtual meetings, distribute and share documents with others, collaborate with them, and much more.

I think the life will be much easier with these virtual technologies that we see every day. After I read this article, I was wondering if this virtual collaboration will have a big  impact on whether people will start working more from home or not? What do you think?

Sultan A.

MeetSee   Full Article