IM Roadmap

Free Group Chat App Launches To Challenge Campfire Campfire Competitor.   This looks pretty cool.  Good group chat has something surprisingly few and far between for years.  The key questions for enterprises and aspiring-enterprises are around security, nonrepudiation, and scalability.  Can I create a channel that scales to thousands of concurrent chatters?

Cheers,
Eric

An interesting trend of new apps in the consumer social web is that of closed networks.  For example, limiting social networks to certain sub-sets of contacts/friends, or to a fixed maximum number, or giving them a shelf-life.   Enterprise collaboration solutions already support this implicitly, with email distribution lists, persistent group chat channels, etc.  Hopefully we can see this supported in a more integrated and pervasive fashion across the various disparate tools used in the enterprise.

In the meantime, check out:

• Path
• Fast Society
• Facebook’s new Groups feature

Cheers,
Eric

Our good friends over at Google have added a nice bit of Executive-friendly functionality:  the ability to delegate your email account to someone else.   It’s just another step on its path to (hopeful) full enterprise-grade use, but it’s an important one.  Middle- and senior- managers everywhere delegate email and calendar management to assistants.  See the blog entry here.

Cheers,
Eric

HP announced an 8.9″, Windows 7-based tablet today.  Specs and pics available here.  It’s targeted for the enterprise only, and as such will only be sold via their website.  If you’re evaluating it, it’s best to compare it vs. a Windows laptop than against an iPad. 

How it could help improve collaboration?

• Front and back cameras for easy videoconferencing
• Access to the full Windows application portfolio (Win 7 compatibility, etc. notwithstanding).  You don’t need to wait for new collaboration apps to be written for your iPad, Blackberry, whatever.  This is going to be especially important for niche and domain-specific applications, where demand isn’t enough to merit non-mass-market software for an iPad, etc.
• USB and BlueTooth to integrate other outboard tools
• Full HTML browsing
• Supports Flash

In other words – you can start using it to do real work right away, without waiting for developers to jump in, and where it matters:  the enterprise.

Cheers,
Eric

PS, HP’s right that the iPad is mainly just a consumer oriented media-device.  …. I figure that might get some folks wound up, but it’s true.  ;-)

Collaboration Tools, iPad, mobile computing

Interesting use case posted up a couple of weeks ago at CollaborationIdeas (no idea how I missed it earlier – shame on me) – issuing smart phones to students to improve access to not just course content, but to assist peer-to-peer collaboration.  A great idea, not just because it helps the students, but because students are often drivers of innovation.  Innovation usually happens at the messy, ad hoc end of the workflow <-> collaboration spectrum.   Especially disruptive innovation.   I think we could all name a few dot coms and even pre-dot coms that were borne in dorm rooms or graduate labs  :-).  So – never a bad thing to help enable that.

Cheers,
Eric

A good friend recently posited that face-to-face meetings are 1000x more effective than email, and 500x more effective than telephone calls, and wondered aloud if others agreed.  It is a great question – and illustrates both reality and perception.  It’s true – we do usually perceive that face to face meetings are more effective than mediated meetings.  (Mediated = via email, chat, telephone, video conference, etc etc).   In practice, however, we also know that we can’t always do that.  The economy is increasingly global – we all have colleagues, clients, and other stakeholders in far away places, and the work still must get done.  So, how do we reconcile these two realities?  I think we have to ask ourselves several questions:

1. What does “effective” communications mean, and does it mean the same thing in every situation?
2. Why do we feel that way?
3. Is that feeling a true reflection of collaboration efficacy, or just that, only a feeling?
4. As enterprises responsible for delivering value to customers and shareholders, how do we balance the benefit of that “feeling” with the bottom line?

Simply put, it depends on the relationships and the type of collaboration. Collaboration is function of knowledge transfer, division of duties (delegation), and trust. For example, if you already have high-level of trust between people, then things like face-to-face meetings are less important, and the collaboration is more about the other two things. Etc.   I discussed one particularly good example in an earlier post about Apollo 13.

When you think about your organization’s collaboration requirements, think about the situations and use cases the participants will be in.  Survey them, do time-and-motion studies, etc.  Roll these up into a smaller number of general use cases.  Then, assess each of those general use cases on the Knowledge/Delegation/Trust axes.  You’ll find that some technologies and methods will better facilitate trust and rapport than others (ie, video conferencing).  In other cases, trust is either already established by virtue of a long-standing relationship, or moot because laws/regulations establish outside consequences for breaches of trust.  In such cases, you can deploy less expensive technology solutions (email, chat, etc.).

Cheers,
Eric

PS, thanks to Mariana for the insightful observation prompting this post.

Read a great post today over at CollaborationIdeas.com, encouraging freelance workers, work-from-homers, and the self-employed to leverage the power of collaboration.   Lorie shared several good ideas, including communicating, groupware, maintaining your workspace, and others.  One of them was to maintain good notes in writing – to help you, your customers (and your partners) to stay on the same page.  This weekend I was reminded of a simple, but really great tool for written collaboration.  No, not chat (this time), but Microsoft OneNote.  OneNote has been around for a few years, but some folks still haven’t used it.  Here are some quick advantages to using OneNote for collaboration:

• Easily create ad-hoc pages and subpages for different topics and sub-topics.
• Ability to easily combine text, graphics and other media in the same page via drag and drop
• In older versions create a private, ad-hoc point-to-point connection with another person.   In new versions, create a group and collaborate online.

Long story short – OneNote is a great way to create a media-rich, shared scratch pad of sorts for that messy (and fun) ideation phase of collaboration.

Cheers,
Eric

1) trying to set up video calling between new netbook* and desktop machine so can call back to family on future business trips.  Mysteriously, both Asus and Philips in their respective included software packages didn’t think to build-in connections to popular video chat/video calling applications (Y!, MSN, skype, etc.).

2) Yahoo Messenger 10 apparently gets confused by cruft left in the Windows registry by earlier versions.  So, if you had an earlier version of Y! messenger that didn’t support video chat, then you upgraded to v10, don’t count on video chat working once the upgrade is complete.

3) Which then reminded me … That GoogleTalk does not support video chat/video calls built-in, and instead forces you to use GMail is absolutely stupid.  I can see why they might want to drive people to GMail – it’s the hub for many of their other apps and features.  However, videochatting from a browser is cumbersome, inconvenient, and unnatural.  Major PITA.  Put it in GoogleTalk guys, come on.  If you must, leave it in GMail too, but really.  Everyone else supports it in the chat client.

4) Went to accept a meeting with comments, forgot and started typing the comments in the Outlook invite before hitting accept.  Type in (lengthy) comments.  Hit “Accept”.  Comments disappear.  Screaming ensues.

More developers need to consider all the ways their target users are going to want to use their software.  What other tools they use that software with, build in the integration.  Their preferred habits – lightweight tools for quick video call sessions, or deeply integrated for a rich, extended collaboration session.   Oh – and, ah, some better bug testing guys.

Cheers,
Eric

* Asus 1201N – really nice one.  Recommended.

Interesting event coming up for folks in the Santa Clara area, hosted by the good folks at TechWeb:  “Use Collaboration to Drive Business Value: Invite HR, Sales and Marketing.”  Agenda includes:

• Business Tools and Technology Decisions: Learn about the latest in social and collaborative applications and communications technologies, and how to deal with complex challenges around integration, performance, security and compliance.
• Community Development and Management: Seasoned practitioners explore both the tactical and strategic elements of community development and management both inside your organization and with your extended network of partners and customers.
• HR Technology Strategies: Discuss how to leverage Enterprise 2.0 – your people – and how to realize business value by building on existing technology foundations to transition into a more connected and aware culture and organization.
• Social CRM: Look at how Enterprise 2.0 enables organizations to accelerate organizational performance by responding to critical customer support, innovation, and sales and marketing opportunities.

November 8-11 in Santa Clara.

Cheers,
Eric

Here’s something that would be useful to help keep track of large numbers of text chat conversations while at the same time allowing you to really focus on one at a time.

1) Exclude Filter: the ability to create chat/IM filters that will capture all conversations from all channels, EXCEPT those explicitly specified.  Today you can select-in channels or select-in or exclude users, but not exclude channels.

and even better …

2) Dynamic Filter: a filter that shows -everything- in its selection criteria, EXCEPT the conversation you’re current in.  IE, let’s say you are chatting with Bob.  All other conversations will be filtered into an “All Content” channel, except those happening right now with Bob.  Later on, if you’re chatting with Betty, Bob’s chats will be captured by the filter but not Betty’s.

Cheers,
Eric