Online shared intelligence

What are the basic elements of Enterprise Collaboration?

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 »

Evernote: new collaboration modality emerging or just note taking?

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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