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June 2004 Archives
Here is a good article at a site by a company called "the other media" in London. The article is about taxonomy and does a reasonable job explain why you need one: "Why you need your very own taxonomy"
I have used all these tools and can attest to their usefulness. Early in my companies history we tried to use Groove, but because two people used Macs, we had to change to Sharepoint for collaboration. Lately I have been using the 3.0 beta and find it much more useable that Groove v2.5. I have always liked Sharepoint. It is easy to configure and has lots of functionality. With a little work you can change the presentation layer to make it meet your requirements. I have just started to use Socialtext, so I con't have a considered opinion yet.
Hugh points to an interesting article in Inc. Magazine (PDF) about collaborative tools like Groove, Sharepoint and SocialText.
Comments on this Entry:
[Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]
Apple adds so many clever features. Video conferencing, audio conferencing, stuff that will really help you do your work. Why do I do windows?
There will be a lot to like about Apple's next operating system, OS X 10.4, aka "Tiger", when it comes out sometime next year. In his keynote today at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs said Apple will be moving the bar further ahead of Microsoft. The only hardware announcement was several new displays -- as usual, great industrial design at reasonably affordable prices. I'm very tempted by the new 20-inch model that will be on sale next month. But this gathering is for software developers, and the bulk of the talk was about the operating system. There's plenty of interesting stuff here. The best feature for average users will be the built-in search, something MIcrosoft is also working to improve in its next OS, called Longhorn. Assuming it works as advertised, what Apple calls "Spotlight" make much shorter work of a common woe for computer users: finding what's on our hard disk. The ability to hold video conferences with up to four people at once, and audio with up to 10, is another nice upcoming feature. The multimedia folks at Apple have been busy. Jobs spent a fair amount of time talking about the native inclusion of RSS into an upcoming version of the Safari browers, and a "personal clipping" service. There's a special search function just for RSS; I'm not clear on whether it's searching via one of the main RSS search engines, whether Apple will write its own or whether it's only searching your designated feeds. More on that later. I was dazzled by a real advance in scripting: Automator, an application that will make it much easier for regular folks to wire together various functions from various appliations. Great stuff. There's lots more, of course, but the main thing to remember is that this product could be as much as a year (or more) away. Apple's announcements today, so far ahead of the actual release of the software, are designed to get the software developers excited enough to build of these features natively in their own applications. I hope they do.
[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
Extract from an interview by Nicholas Fraser with Umberto Eco in The Sunday Times (1/10/95):
I wondered whether he browsed the Internet for pleasure. Did he believe Utopia was at hand? "I browse for some hours a week only," he says. "The problem - it's a delightful one, really - is that you never know what you can find. There's too much of everything. In the end the abundance of information can paralyse, just like the excess of food, sleep or love. A man in America has put photographs of his colon on the Internet, and I think this is remarkable - just imagine using cyberspace to exhibit your insides in public. The future of education will consist in telling people how to select or reject information. I'm beginning to teach my students the art of decimation. How do you know something will be useful any more? How do you acquire enough information about information? This is better than the old Big Brother problem we had under communism, about whether you were being brainwashed or not, but I suppose it's a serious one, too."
Christian Buckley nicely disects Microsoft's strategy for collaboration in a long post in The Samaritan-Web Project. Microsoft is in fact poised to dominate this area and you can discern their emerging vision by looking at the assembly of collaborative applications available now. Web parts are used to augment the functionality of Sharepoint technologies and Microsoft Project; You can create a collaborative workspace to create new documents from with Word and Excel; Sharepoint includes a presense indicator through messanger; and LiveMeeting while siting outside the suite, fits in well with the functionality of the other apps. VoIP will be a critical requirement, but they already understand how to imbed Voice into applications, it is a small step to incorporate VoIP into the opreating system.
Read Capitalizing on Collaboration, it offers a good view into Microsoft's strategy.
Sometimes it is hard to articulate a business requirement. This is one that I feel every day and I don't currently have an answer for. Many of us work entirely on our computers and coordinate our time and our meetings electronically. The tools for doing this are extraordinarily poor. Robin Good and Stowe Boyd both explore the require shift in software that allows us to coordinate our business meetings and worklife. I would like to see advances here as well!
"In short order, we may witness a wholesale shift in many of the givens that represent the conventional notion of how we coordinate through software. Consider these examples: a) The current approach to coordinating meetings — generally involving individuals looking...
[Robin Good's Latest News]
"What you can do, or dream you can, begin it,
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!"
Like James Farmer, I have been looking for a Wiki application for some time to build use to create a community of social entrepreneurs. I want the ability to collaboratively write a site rather than being the sole author. Ths post then, is understandable within that context. I find the elearning weblog always points me to content I can use, and this is no expection: a link to "incorporated subversion" where James Farmer has built a useful list of links to wiki applications with a brief textual review. Very helpful!
James Farmer is on a wiki run: What do I want in a wiki?, choosing a wiki, and more wikis. Good resources to bookmark.
[elearnspace]
For the past week I have neglected my blog, which is not my habit. There are times, however, when work intrudes on the activities we like to do. I am very lucky, I have my own business, called Coherence Group and I am doing very well right now! the economy has come back and I am busy with two KM implementations and leadership and management training. The work is great!
