IM Roadmap

Subtitle:  Fight window proliferation!

If you work in a large enterprise, your chat/EIM client may look a lot like mine – dozens upon dozens of chat windows, each with someone in your team, your internal customers, the support group, and all sorts of other people across your organization.  My chat dock currently has 198 windows for 1:1 (private) conversations, and 21 for group chat channels.   Do I talk (chat) with each of those people, or on each of those channels, everyday?  No, of course not.  But these are the people with whom I have to collaborate over the course of work.  Project team members, functional managers, finance people, procurement, engineers, so on and so forth.

Unless you assiduously close and clean out your chat client throughout the day, these windows accumulate.  If you do close out the windows, you will probably lose the conversation history with them – especially if it’s a 1:1 conversation (and that’s where most of the window proliferation happens).

What could the software developer do about this cunundrum?  Add a button to the chat client that allows the user to quickly scroll through and enter only the channels/windows with unread traffic.    For example, of the above 219 total channels, at any moment in time, there may be 11 or 12 that have unread traffic.  This proposed feature would allow the user to just flip amongst those 11 or 12 channels.

Cheers,
Eric

Update:  I’ve recently be reminded of two things:

As per Eric Sinclair , in MindAlign, at least, this is easily achieved with CTRL-N.  Shame, shame on me.

I should have known that.   I really, -really- should have known/remembered that.  I leave this now-irrelevant post up here as a cautionary tale to myself ….

Admittedly, I’m still partial to persistent, text-based, group chat.  Text is still the most content-rich.  And since I haven’t ranted on it in a while …

• My usual gripes are that you can’t conference with as many people as you can on telephone, or especially on group chat.  So, for group collaboration it’s inferior. Group text chat, in particular, has the advantage of not allowing for “blocking effects” that you can get on video, phone or even in person.
• It doesn’t capture, in a machine searchable way, the contents of a meeting.  So, you have to have a scribe/minute-taker.  So, it’s inferior and more expensive than group chat, news groups and email.
• And ok, yeah, so you can see the other person, and gauge their body language and other non-verbal cues.  If the video is of sufficient resolution and frame-rate.  And yes, research shows that during in-person conversations most communications are non-verbal anyway.  I’ve seen the research and I’ll buy it.   BUT…. what’s the fidelity of that non-verbal comms?  It would be interesting to see a study done on how much non-verbal communications actually gets transmitted faithfully over a video conference link.  There’s got to be some threshold (frame rate, resolution) at which non-verbal cue quality drops off.

For example ….  If video quality is 18 frames per second, resolution is VGA or worse,  and the other person’s face is poorly lit and taking up only 1/4-1/3 of the frame – are you even capturing all the sidelong glances and other expressions that we think we’re getting?

Cheers,
Eric

Recall my earlier musings the use of chat for the remote worker… well …. just to show that that’s not the only dead horse I beat, here’s another, non-chat/IM suggestion for when working from home/remote. Get yourself a mimio whiteboard capture tool. No need to buy the $1000 fancy new ones at retail. You can get an old serial-based model on ebay for $50 and they still work just fine. Put yourself a regular ol’ whiteboard in your home office. Attach the mimio and calibrate it.  Aim a webcam also at the whiteboard. Lasso the whiteboard session in the mimio software with VNC or LiveMeeting, and then “broadcast” your white-boarding session to your colleagues/customers across the net. Oh – and a speaker phone, which I’m assuming most everyone has these days now anyway.

The mimio gives excellent high-resolution fidelity of your drawing, and captures it digitally.  LiveMeeting makes it possible for others to see it in real time. The webcam session, which you’re also broadcasting in parallel, adds an important spatial dimension. You can point to areas on the whiteboard, gesture, etc. and your audience is right there with you.  If you go new/retail, for under $1000 you’ve just built a superb, rich combined collaboration and presentation solution.  If you’re buying this just for yourself, check out eBay.  I’ve seen good, used mimio’s there for under $100.

Cheers,
Eric