IM Roadmap

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

Cornelius Fichtner, over at the PM Prepcast, has a pretty good interview with a Cisco collaboration expert on virtual team best practices.  It’s one of the audio episodes of his PM Prepcast product for people working on sitting for the PMP exam.

• PM Prepcast (High-Res):  http://www.premiumcast.com/vp/50398/16029/
• PM PrepCast (Low-Res):  http://www.premiumcast.com/vp/56318/16029/

Additional commentary and analysis of the best practices in a future IMR article, but it’s definitely worth a listen, especially if you are thinking about getting your PMP.  His training and practice material is good stuff, and very cost-effective.

Cheers,

Eric