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…
Read the rest of this entry »
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:
- Huge advances - Not a buzzword any more, collaboration will be one of the most important IT concerns for 2008, and has fierce grass-root adoption at the consumer level;
- Confusion - Now that it’s proven as a valid concern, collaboration has been wrapped together with too many other concerns, specially some coming from the communications side, and it’s easy to lose perspective of what is real (collaboration) and what is fodder (the always-hyper-connected workforce, communicating in twenty different channels and modalities at the same time, and at the same time having time to collaborate productively).
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 »
