All buzzwords outlive their usefulness, and go from mandatory conversational drop-in to snobbish drop-out tag. That almost magical polarity change happens usually shortly after the buzzword in question is mercilessly extended beyond their original scope, until it’s left hanging ‘out there’, with little or no connection to the original meaning. Is that happening with the ‘2.0′ thingy? Read the rest of this entry »
A friend asked the question as she started the process of exploring her requirements for collaboration products, which she will use to support a social networking initiative she is about to get going.
Like many other practitioners before her, Lisa found that when it comes to enterprise collaboration, there is a huge difference between wanting to solve a problem and knowing what specific product features are relevant to your needs. In other words, if you want, say, “to empower collaboration in order to create alignment between highly distributed teams in order to improve the product cycle”, how does MySite functionality help you? If you want “to increase intimacy between partners and internal stakeholders”, is that something a blog, a wiki or a forum will produce? How relevant is a forms server to collaboration? Read the rest of this entry »
Most users of enterprise social networking / collaboration complain about the chasm between common desktop documents and on-line content; let’s face it, most Rich Text Editors (RTE’s) used by Enterprise Collaboration products are anything but “Rich”, and people who learned everything they know about computers through Office don’t get along with Textile either. As a result, RTE’s and/or Textile irritate the heck out of most users.
From what I hear, most collaboration vendors are trying to tackle this problem, some by making the desktop edition even more proprietary (guess who), others by trying to improve RTE’s. Well, there is another vendor, one that doesn’t have a collaboration platform of its own, whose product (Evernote) is quite relevant to this issue…
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I have worked for the last eleven years on collaboration-related endeavors, working for early enabling vendors, exploratory startups and practitioners, and seen the field of collaboration go through a decisive evolution, from fuzzy-warm-feeling-term to widely adopted, hugely transformational product category. A balance after these years has to include:
Here goes a timed perspective, from my eyes and memory, of some of what has happened in these last eleven years. Read the rest of this entry »