News from Sep 25, 2008

Michael Sampson is vendor independent and vendor neutral. His mission is to help organizations succeed with collaboration endeavors. His presentation has parts of his white paper, The 7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity: The Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Analysis, available on his website.

How SharePoint fares with Michael Sampson's evaluation:

• Shared access to team data: (passes standards for) separate team space, many types of digital objects, ability for many people to access,"segregated."

• Location Independence: In order to pass it would need connection in the office, out of the office, and on a mobile device. SharePoint works in a web browser (works), Microsoft Outlook (problems with syncing), Microsoft Groove 2007, Windows Mobile 6 (doesn't automatically sync outlook calendars and tasks from SharePoint). There are ways around the problems, but they aren't practical for users.

• A solution: Colligo Contributer allows offline SharePoint collaboration. It lets users know of SharePoint syncing errors, to avoid conflicts that SharePoint makes it difficult to discover.

• Realtime Joint Viewing: Synchronous sharing, passing of control, etc - fails on its own but does work if you have other services.

• Exchange can not see SharePoint calendars, so you can't do free-busy searches of SharePoint. This makes SharePoint calendars somewhat useless. However, you can create all calendars in outlook and invite sharepoint to use it through email. This is a bit backwards.

• Social Engagement Tools: To pass it would need to share "the implicit", instant messaging, presence & availability, and blogging. This would also work if you have OCS, but without it doesn't work.

• Enterprise location independence of Task Lists: You can't get a single task list that is separate? Can work to some extent if you have CQWP and MOSS 2007.

• Collaboration auto discovery - discovery of capability, "who else can help?", deduced expertise of people, correlated interest between sites. Doesn't work.

• Summary: Not a mature collaboration platform, would require much additional work, collaboration is only one of the six parts of SharePoint 2007, so you may be satisfied by other things it does.

Carmine discussed a number of issues around measurements with web 2.0 use in a knowledge management implementation. It seemed to be much more of an all around guide to web 2.0 KM than being specifically about measurement. Unfortunately, although he included a few measurements in the presentation, he didn't focus on how to measure. Also, his presentation was outdated with old figures and references to sites, pages, and products that no longer exist.

See Carmine's bio: http://www.prescientdigital.com/about-us/team/carmine-porco-vice-president.

Here are some notes from the presentation:

The power of groups:

• collective guesses are closer than individual guesses.
• Google uses collective intelligence in the page rank

Web evolution: web 1.0 -> web 2.0

• publishing -> participation
• CMS -> wiki
• taxonomy -> folksonomy

Sun Microsystems Community Equity - tracks and rewards employees for collaboration

Webnext - Their portal is supposed to be 90% what an employee cares about, 10% ideas that the organization is pushing down.

Generate data from simple surveys at the end of blog posts, etc.: Did this help? yes / no

Creating a blog at ehobbies.com doubled the conversion rate (from 2% to 4%). (Note: the blog doesn't seem to exist anymore though from my quick search)

Carmine says not to use a wiki as a Content Management System because there is no control, etc. He does say you can use a wiki with teams with time limits. (Note: I argue that you can have controls on wiki's, and in my practice deploying wiki's on intranets I haven't seen the pandemonium that Carmine says exists. I think they can work, at least for a limited group, as an editable knowledge base.)

He mentioned that some people won't go to your company (work for?) if you ban Facebook. He discussed how some companies are using facebook or requiring employees to log on for a certain amount of time.

He showed globalincidentmap.com - "a global incident map showing terrorist acts and other suspicious events"

He suggests using an executive blog that combines posts from various executives including the CEO.