Project Standard improvements are very uninspiring basically it is focussed on the following areas: Easy to get started Great looking reports Connected to your business, eg integrate with accounting system Enterprise Project Management seems more driven around issues with previous product: Resolve existing pain points Scale up to programmes, shared...
In some recent discussions I have been introduced to the concept of “productive friction”, which is an effect that’s created when team members with a diverse background get together. It happens for example when people from different cultures or academic disciplines or companies work together to solve a problem and it increases the level of innovation. John Hagel describes it in his book The Only Sustainable Edge and in his Article in the Harvard Business Review.
This recent article in Newsweek describes the effect, and gives some practical and simple advice on how to take advantage of it in your projects:
What they found was that the most successful teams did two things right. First, they attracted a mixture of experienced people and those who were newcomers to whichever field they were in. That’s not surprising–the need for fresh blood has long been recognized as an important ingredient in success. The second criterion, though, was far less obvious. What successful teams had in common was at least a few experienced members who had never collaborated with each other. “People have a tendency to want to work with their friends–people they’ve worked with before,” says Luis Amaral, a physicist at Northwestern …
Only a few minutes ago I posted about developments in VOIP and Sametime integration, then we get the Microsoft Live Meeting 2005 add-in:
Live Meeting Add-in for Outlook
With the Live Meeting Add-in for Outlook, you can:
- Schedule a Live Meeting from Outlook
- Identify individual meeting participants as attendees or presenters
- Send separate invitations for attendees and for presenters
- Specify default meeting options and override those defaults for specific meetings
Live Meeting Add-in for Office Collaboration
With the Office Collaboration Add-in, you can start a Meet Now meeting directly from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, or Project. The document appears in an application sharing session.Live Meeting Add-in for Instant Messaging
If the recipient also has the Live Meeting Add-in Pack installed, you can start a Live Meeting from Windows Messenger or from MSN Messenger.
Ed Brill has an interesting post indicating that Microsoft and IBM are on the same track with respect to integrating an IP Soft Phone and the Instant Messaging and presence client. I am looking forward to it!
IBM is teaming with Avaya to help make businesses more agile, responsive, and productive through the seamless integration of audio and collaboration tools. This integration will introduce “click-to-call” capabilities, enabling businesses using IBM(R) Lotus Notes(R) and Domino(R) and IBM Lotus(R) Sametime(R) to instantly place a telephone call to an instant messaging or email contact while remaining in their inbox or instant messaging client. By selecting multiple names, users will be able to “click-to-conference” for faster decision making and problem solving. IBM will also be integrating audio conferencing provided by Avaya Meeting Exchange with Lotus’ Web conferencing solutions, giving Web conference participants a visual indication of who is speaking and the ability to dial out to new participants, mute lines and control volume, among other capabilities.
As I understand it IBM are releasing an API for integration some time soon, and this announcement is of one partner who is implementing that API, but I may be wrong.
and IBM’s vision for its equivalent Office System using OpenOffice.org as the client. I am also interested in tracking integration between Microsoft Office and Domino/Workplace. Stu is my guru in this area. I am off to Redmond next week for 3 days on the Office System v12 and meeting some of the Product Managers on Friday so it will be interesting to compare.
WinOE or “workflow for windows”, is probably the must important capability for business announced so far for the longhorn wave:
The Windows orchestration (WinOE) code, built from the ground up by Microsoft’s BizTalk team, is a set of high level XML schemas, .NET classes, application programming interfaces (APIs) and workflow components that will allow Visual Studio 2005 developers create business processes and human-to-human workflow processes.
Microsoft will also have an add-on service available for the Longhorn client and server version of Windows in 2006 and 2007 and will make its fleet of applications including Office 12 and the next Sharepoint Portal Server “WinOE-aware,” several sources said.
I am desperately waiting to me able to blog at work! I find it very frustratng that most of the technical blogs posts I want to post I am unable to, because they can only be released under NDA and even more frustrating that other people at work can not work with me in the collaborative, community building fashion that blogs enable. We use Notes at work for email, document sharing, discussions etc and are deploying WebSphere as our collaboration portal, so the news that WorkPlace will include blog support is encouraging. It seems very primitive at this stage, but its a start.
Michael Sampson writes a great blog on collaboration, its really a daily must check feed on new announcements in the industry and saves me a lot of time. Sometimes he provides some great content himself, such as his 7 pillars framework which is a nice – technology focussed -framework for collaboration.
In his most recent post he discusses OneNote shared sessions which I would really like to try if it worked across firewalls more easily, however for now I will have to settle for this review.
Chris Pratley from Microsoft is one of the designers of OneNote and he has also written an excellent description of how the OneNote team use the feature and this post has an excellent set of comments.
For a bit of fun Eric Macks kids Amy and Wendy did a pod cast on OneNote shared sessions which Eric blogs about.
This is a re-post of my original article, modified to reflect clarifications that I received from the author, which were very much appreciated. In fact the author spent some time developing a response which he kindly sent to me rather than posting as a comment. However having read the comments, I still thought that a slightly modified article had something useful to say so I made these updates and reposted.
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Nic just blogged on an interesting article published by IBM titled “Opening minds: Cultural change with the introduction of open-source collaboration methods”.
It’s message centred around the concept that there are two cultural models, the Traditional Approach and the Open-Source Approach. I mistakenly thought that the traditional approach was described by the classic book “The Mythical man Month”, the Open Source approach by Linus. However the author has pointed out to me that only certain elements of the approach described in the Mythical Man Month are actualy being referred to in the article. The following table from the article describes the key differences:
|
Traditional Approach |
Open-Source Approach |
|
Brooks’ Law |
Linus’ Law |
|
Hierarchy |
Network |
|
Experts |
Peers |
|
Teams |
Communities |
|
Cathedral |
Bazaar |
|
Perfection |
Improvement |
|
Construction |
Evolution |
…
Microsoft research have published the presentations from their Social Computing Symposium 2005, here is a taster,
Speaker Session: Social Metadata and Tagging
David Weinberger: From Trees to Tags (presentation)
Matt MacLaurin: Tesla, Tagging for the DeskTop (presentation)Speaker Session: Global Social
Anne Kirah: When culture meets technology and when technology meets culture (presentation)
Genevieve Bell: Global SocialSpeakers: From the Labs
MSR: Shelly Farnham and Marc Smith (presentation)
Intel: Ken Anderson and Eric Paulous (presentation)
IBM: Wendy Kellogg (presentation)Amy Bruckman: What is “Community” Anyway? Cognitive Science Helps Provide an Answer (presentation)
Paul Resneck: Bonds and Identity: Navigating the Tension Between Attachment to Topic and Attachment to People in Online Conversation Spaces
Randy Farmer: Thirty Years of Social Computing: Are we finally ready to scale? (presentation)
David McDonald: Community Through Pictures (presentation)
Fernanda Vi