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Sharing at Work

Better business through collaboration and technology


Multiply the spread of your ideas with free syndication toolsYesterday
Sharing at Work posts automatically appear on my LinkedIn profile

Sharing at Work posts now automatically appear on my LinkedIn profile

Your organization generates a ton of ideas every day. Many of them disappear into a void, never to be heard from again.   It doesn’t have to be this way!  With the right planning and judicious use of free web-based content syndication tools you can give every idea that you create its best chance to spread. Here’s a quick three-step plan.

Step 1: Do all of your work on the web.

Step 2: Only use web tools that generate news feeds detailing your activity.

Step 3: Remix and distribute your news feeds all across the Internet.

Do all of your work on the web

We’ve covered this before.  Most of our work is needlessly private.  Start pushing your thoughts and your workflow through public channels and you’re inviting billions of smart people to read along with you and help create things that you could never make on your own.   Your company won’t want to do everything online, so you have my blessing to dial step one back a notch and do all of your work using internal web tools like microblogs and document management systems.

Only use web tools that generate news feeds

Proud to guest post to LouisGray.comNovember 19

I’m excited to share a milestone in the development of this site: A guest post on Louis Gray’s excellent tech news blog!  Since Louis is a heavy user of FriendFeed and a big proponent of using guest posts to broaden the perspective and appeal of his blog I had good hopes for submitting my ideas to his site.  As much as I like to use FriendFeed (and perhaps tell my wife about it a bit too often) I thought this list of FriendFeed power user tips might be more appropriate for a venue other than this blog.

I hope you enjoy Louis’s site and the many contributing authors to the LG blog.

sharingatwork?i=PwHyn sharingatwork?i=VIZAN
Streamline your team’s updates with microblogsNovember 18

Our new SharePoint site is coming in handy for status updates.  Yesterday afternoon I kicked off an ETL? data load for a teammate.  It ran long and eventually failed so I had to fix it this morning.  In the meantime we fired off a few emails back and forth with about four people included thanks to Reply All.  Fixing the problem took about two hours and so I emailed folks a link to my issue tracking thread on SharePoint rather than continuously broadcasting my status.

How does this help?
By offloading status updates to a web service we’re achieving several benefits.  First, the information is public.  Interested parties who weren’t in on the initial emails can see this issue log without having to ask for a copy of the email chain.  Second, the information is now searchable and persistent.  I’ll be able to bring it back up in four months if I need it, even though my inbox has turned over three times by then due to a small mailbox quota.  Third, we’re removing some load from the email system.  Each status update doesn’t need to be directed to five different inboxes now.  I only have to send the really important emails now, like the ones saying “this is going to take longer than expected, I’ll call you when it

Ten - wait, Eleven - reasons to switch to WordPressNovember 17

I finally worked up the nerve to switch this site from Blogger to WordPress last week and it’s been a pretty good experience thus far.  Here are a few good things that have come out of the change:

  1. Excellent free WP layouts are everywhere.  I chose the Structure theme for now because I’d seen it around and it was clean and simple.  I’m going to try and keep things less cluttered here than they were on Blogspot.
  2. Huge library of plugins to extend blog functionality.  The WordPress plugin directory has 3300 plugins available right now to enhance and customize the blogging experience.  In many cases installation only takes a few clicks.
  3. Hands-free search engine optimization.  The nifty All-in-One SEO pack is cramming each page with relevant meta tags and alt tags and all of the other things that make for better search engine results. This plugin helps Google do a better job of finding all of my posts and presenting them as relevant search results.  This process is aided by automated XML sitemap generation (another plugin
Weekend workflow wanderingsNovember 16

Friday morning I attended an entertaining project management summit between a few folks from my IT solutions group and two business-related teams.  We discovered that each team has a different set of paperwork that they’re accustomed to filling out.  There were a few versioning errors (i.e. two different versions of the same handout floating around the meeting) and a lot of “we’ll update that and send it back to you”.  Everyone in the meeting was intelligent and motivated but as usual I can’t help but worry that we’re hurting ourselves by exchanging MS Office documents in a convoluted Reply All workflow. 

E-mail continues to shape my workflow

I attended the meeting as a junior member / technical consult for the IT team.  When the PMs on the business side start updating their functionals and sending them back to my team are they going to remember to include me on the mail?  Will the documents be stored in a place where I can see them?  Are they going to be indexed and searchable?  If three years of history are any indication, we’ll have our documents stored in the respective teams’ network file folders without a strong link between them.

I spent a lot of the meeting mulling the idea of interrupting with an “HEY LETS PUT ALL OF THIS ON SHAREPOINT!  I’LL PUT THE SPECS ON A FORUM OR WIKI AND EMAIL YOU ALL THE LINK!” o