Stu Downes

My friend and colleague Steve Richards is sharing his listening to as an rss feed here.  Well worth a look, well listen really!  Thanks Steve.

Interesting quotes from CIO.com coverage:

“About half of IT decision makers at companies with 1,000 employees or more expect to implement a formal collaboration technology strategy in 2008″

“Of 1,017 IT decision makers in North America and Europe surveyed, 15 percent identified implementing a collaboration strategy as a “critical priority” and 34 percent deemed it a “priority.” A third, 33 percent, said collaboration “was not a priority” while 17 percent it was “not on our agenda” altogether.”

“The most common choice for the 215 IT department decision makers (at organizations with 1,000 or more employees) looking for collaboration software maker was Microsoft, at 55 percent, followed distantly by 13 percent who said “others” and 9 percent for IBM. Google registered at 0 percent with this group”

more than 70 percent would invest in messaging software while 68 percent expressed interest in “real-time collaboration software.” In addition, 28 percent will invest in social software, including technologies such as wikis, RSS and blogs.

I haven’t read the full report but these summaries in themselves are very interesting. The move to social tools is very interesting, but perhaps much of this is due to capabilities being packaged into popular collaboration platforms?

Link to Forrester report : Enterprise Collaboration: As hot as ever in 2008.

Technorati Tags: Forrester, Collaboration, 2008, cio.com

I’ve added a two new feeds:

My twitters (status updates, what I’m doing and microposts from twitter)

My shared items (best reads from other blogs)

They complement the unchanged feeds for:

Full articles

Comments [the wordpress template I'm using also has feeds for comments in each article]

I’m also trying to make some of the text colours on the website more pleasing to the eye … but its a big CSS file so please be patient!

When attending a recent non-work training course a trainer used a great description of a path of learning from unconsciously incompetent, to consciously incompetent, to consciously competent and finally achieving unconscious competence.  I loved the image this journey impressed on me and wondered about how this was true for collaboration.

This isn’t a simple journey for any of us as there are many inputs which influence our journey to unconscious collaboration.  I think the key ones are:

- personal behaviour and psychology

- encouraged behaviour and rules

- tools

- training

I’m interested in the journey to unconscious collaboration and how we can provide the correct tools, guidance and training to the correct people within our customer environments.  I’m going to shut up there as I’m interested in reaction to this idea…

Arrived today via Microsoft Connections.  Here was the email:

We are delighted to announce the immediate availability of the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool.

The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool is a set of free models of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) which allow you to explore the necessary infrastructure based on usage requirements. This tool uses the System Center Capacity Planner 2007 (SCCP) as an engine to provide for data collection, visualization, simulation and report writing. The tool can be used in pre-sales and feasibility study of a deployment project to give you a rough estimate of hardware requirements.

Please go to Microsoft Connect to obtain your copy and please tell us what you find so we can improve the relevance and acuracy of the tool.

You can find the Connect Program here: https://connect.microsoft.com/programdetails.aspx?ProgramDetailsID=1602

Mike Gotta has an excellent list of software suppliers here.  The list includes:

• Blogs
• Wikis
• Social Bookmarking
• Enterprise RSS
• Social Network and Community sites

As many regular readers will be aware I’m now a tablet PC junkie.  My main meeting note tool is now OneNote.  In most meetings there will be actions, either for me personally or my team.  Here is how I record my meeting notes and actions.

Take copious notes

I try to take a lot of notes during a meeting.  I always use 2 screens, one for slides / web meeting spaces etc. and the second is my tablet in writing mode.  I always create new notes in the unfiled notes area of OneNote.  The only information I type will be a title, the attendees and some keywords (so that search will be effective), so here for example is the start of a meeting between myself and a new team member earlier this week:

Recording Actions

The next thing to consider is how to record actions, both for myself and for others.  For this I right click and circle the action, then click the to-do icon in OneNote.  Giving this effect:

Migrating actions to Lotus Notes

Now I have a reference point for all actions and all meeting notes in one place, unfiled.  Next I need to file my meeting notes and collect my actions to my single task collection bucket, in my case this is To Do lists in Lotus Notes.

In OneNote I have a NoteBook for each month and then a folder for each day.  As I go through my unfiled meeting notes I scan them for actions.  Any actions which are unchecked I can read and then quickly enter into Notes to-do.  Those with Outlook will find this happens automatically, although I’ve never tested whether it migrates my handwritten notes across to Outlook so it may be that the mail client isn’t a differential in the way I work here.

Once in a to-do Item I check the action as complete in OneNote and move the meeting Notes into the appropriate day / month.  This method of working allows me to record an immense amount of reference information from meetings and effectively manage tasks and actions both for me and others.

I’d love an API which grabs my tasks in OneNote and auto-populates them into Notes reading my handwriting and placing that into the todo name.  I can but dream, for now I haven’t found one. 

Other nice tools in OneNote

Audio recording is great.  Brilliant for conferences…I do need to invest in a USB microphone though as the X60 tablet microphone picks up my pen movement as I scribble notes.  I haven’t played with Audio/Video recording but that could be very useful also.

The other thing I like in OneNote is the ability to use a range of tags.  So I can log questions for a speaker to raise at the end, log items which I will blog about.

Closing thoughts

How do you use OneNote?  Do you use somthing else?  How do you manage the collection of your tasks?  I’d be interested to learn via comments or posts on your blogs.

A quick post here just to say that the Sametime 8 Client which I’ve been using for a few days now is much quicker than the 7.5.1 client.  The improved screen capture / annotation tool is also nice to see [make note to test on extended monitors], personally I use SnagIT but for most this functionality will be very useful.

Following on from my last post I’d like to spend some time discussing meetings.  Meetings for me make up a high proportion of my working day. 

My Meetings

They are a combination of:

• meetings with people I’m working with on collaborative solutions
• team meetings or 1-to-1 meetings with team members
• meetings informing colleagues in other teams about what we are doing
• meetings with colleagues about new business or business expansion
• meetings with customers

In terms of the type of meetings I’d estimate the following split:

• 50% audio conference
• 40% web conference
• 9% face to face meeting
• 1% video conference [likely to rise]

In terms of geography my meetings are probably split in the following proportions:

• 25% UK
• 3% EMEA
• 20% India
• 50% North America
• 2% Australia

Those last percentages are a little finger in the air as many calls are cross region.

Ensuring meetings are productive

Due to my role I have to assess the benefit I will gain, or the other attendees will gain from my attendance.  I also have to prioritise meetings and as such run a form of triage rather than first come first serve.  So when I am planning a meeting or receiving an invite I like to supply the following information:

• Aims of the meeting
• Agenda
• Supporting information and documents
• The web conference to be available 15 minutes before to allow people to join without delaying the start of the meeting.

When running meetings I try to use the following rules:

• Follow the agenda.
• Include quiet participants and actively ask for their input.
• Allow discussion and debate [but ensure this doesn't impact the meeting schedule]
• Regularly summarise actions
• Take notes and record actions in OneNote
• Use web meetings whenever possible especially when discussing documents
• Always remember the disadvantaged participant.  If you run a physical meeting and have people remotely dialled in your should allow those people to control the meeting.  The spider phone on the table is too easily forgotten!
• Close with actions against each participant and get their acknowledgement.
• Final round the table is important.

How I use OneNote

I think this will be my next post….

Web meeting tools

Another post …

Its the time of year to reflect so I hope to find time to write several posts which show how I collaborate.  I hope this will help others and also hope to read how you work also.  I thought I’d start with a table showing the tools I use in the order I think I use them.  In this post I have concentrated on the top 5 technologies but will definitely post information about how I collaborate within meetings in more detail:

Position	Collaboration Tool	My Views on that tool
1	Email	Email remains the only truly federated communication tool for inter-enterprise, intra-enterprise and personal communication facilitating collaboration.
2	Instant Messaging	Presence for me is the most important feature which instant message solutions provide.  IM for me is the tool I’d lose last, you could take email first provided the federation issue is overcome.  I hope in 5 years communication between enterprises with IM will be as simple as email is today.
3	Audio and Web Conferences	The bane of all our lives!  However I do see a great improvement in the electronic conference rooms but dream of the day we can all join a call and web meeting on time   I’ll talk more about meetings in a future post.  Without them I certainly couldn’t share information or attain information in the global world we all work in.
4	Team Rooms	Team rooms are my publishing mechanism for documents ready to leave my machine for review and collaborate with documents.  I don’t find I use team rooms for calendar functionality, planning or task management for me it is purely a text/document collaboration tool with discussion capability.
5	Wikis	Why 5th, why team rooms above?  Well wikis for me are an excellent tool when used for the correct purpose.  The problem I find with wikis is that normally when you are co-creating a document there is a defined format for your deliverable.  If the format you are required to deliver isn’t a wiki then in most cases I just find the wiki adds too much work at the end in terms of copy and paste and trying to move the free flowing hyper-linked wiki into a fixed flowing document.  If however you can use the wiki itself as the deliverable then I can find no better tool to use.

One I’ve missed here is my blog.  Now funnily I don’t treat my posts as collaboration, that may sound strange but in reality I feel the real power of this blog is the community of contacts it enables, and with those contacts I do collaborate but generally using other methods.  Don’t get me wrong I treat blogs as an important collaboration platform and I treat the blogs I read as tools to collaborate but this blog is my voice, it generates comments and then I collaborate through other channels.  This reflects another point, we all think of collaboration slightly differently and that is one reason I love working in this field, it is the diversity of people, views and technologies.