Stu Downes

Microsoft has announced pre-registration for a collaborative workspace where anyone can share documents, upload directly from office applications, and synchronise calendars and task lists.  Peter has some coverage of this, also here, and the product page is here.

For small businesses and even some enterprise collaboration activities this tool will be adopted by information workers.  It would appear to be based on either Windows SharePoint Services or Office SharePoint Server and the FAQ’s state that users can control access to a document level.

This is a move in the right direction from Microsoft to fill the gap between no collaboration and the for free/for fee office live small business and office online offerings.  It will also be interesting to hear and read about user reaction in the blogs when the service is more widely available.

A collaborative effort (see press release here) has resulted in IdeaJam.  The aim of the site is simple.  Ideas are suggested then the community promote or demote ideas resulting in a wisdom of crowds ranking of ideas.  The solution has been developed on, by and for the Lotus collaborative community.  Due for formal launch on November 20th now is your chance for a sneak preview.

I actually see this application being very very powerful within enterprise settings so I’ll be interested to hear more about its commercial availability…

I’ve been thinking recently about effective collaboration, the move from email and how some projects in the same organisation with the same tools manage collaboration better than others.

I came up with this very basic diagram, so what am I trying to say?

Personal Willingness : Without personal buy in to collaborate beyond email effective collaboration is limited to email, and for some things that will work fine but the bigger the team collaborating on a project the less effective the collaboration.

Team Willingness : If the team won’t adopt your ground-rules on collaboration, and I always like projects which start with some ground-rulesr to guide people, then you are again doomed to less effective collaboration.  If the team, and the people within the team, are willing to embrace the ground-rulesr and utilise the available tools then you are 90% there.

Enterprise Culture : You’ll note I gave this a small blob.  My experience is that if the team and the individuals are willing then irrespective of the corporate culture you’ll see a pocket of excellence in terms of collaboration from projects adopting collaborative working practices.

Enterprise technology : I thought about the wording here and left it as enterprise technology.  However what I really mean is anything that the team adopts to perform their work.  That could be an enterprise tool or it could be a SaaS which one the the team expensed.  I do however feel that we need to give a strong value to the technology and accept that although the early stages require personal and team willingness to collaborate the further you move along the effective collaboration arrow the more you are relying on technology.

My opinion is thus that with personal and team willingness to collaborate the negative effect of any corporate culture is neutralised.  With positive promotion of collaboration by enterprise cultures then you’ll generally see a more healthy mix of technologies available to the teams and individuals.  I’d be interested in readers thoughts and experiences.