Toluu

Sharing at Work

Better business through collaboration and technology

Big Weekend: @CPritchett's MFA show followed by the inaugural #BCMem!November 6 2008

Who's excited?  We're excited!  The amazing Chandler Pritchett is wrapping up preparations for her final art show as a graduate student at this very minute.  If you're in Memphis this weekend please come support her tomorrow afternoon at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis.  If you haven't yet met my better half, now's your chance.  You'll also get to see talented MFA hopefuls Yijun Liao and Robert McCarroll in the same show.

I'm also thrilled to be headed to the first ever BarCamp Memphis this Saturday.  Be on the lookout for talented local business and technology experts ready to share presentations on social media, blogging, business, and any other aspect of technology you want to hear about.  BarCamp's "unconference" format means that the schedule wi

Would you be excited about this network?October 24 2008

We've now got a SharePoint site up and running here at the office.  I'm naturally excited to have a collaboration platform to jump into.  My initial impressions:  It's a middling forum, wiki, and blog all in one.  It's got some upsides though - single sign on should be a huge benefit to adoption.  Profile pics help personalize contributions.  Chew on some screenshots and observations below.

Does a unified search excuse redundant communities?  I hope so!
Once I got local admin access to my own little corner of SharePoint I tossed off a few blogs, forums, and wikis.  I'm rerouting as much of my workflow as possible out of email and our file server and into SharePoint.  My coworkers are going to be getting SharePoint URLs from me in most of our future conversations.  Don't expect file attachments or long e-mail reply chains.  I want to work in public as much

Easier to marginalize email than to kill itOctober 22 2008

Asking your teammates to give up their inboxes is not going to make you many friends.  Today I'm going to outline a way to free your office from the burdens of email misuse without forcing anyone to let go of their Blackberry or GMail security blankets.

Permit me to re-use this old graphic from a previous post. I drew it to illustrate a point about offering multiple avenues to contribute to your knowledge network.  Now it appears I had the key to moving beyond an email-dominated office culture months ago but I just didn't realize it.

I've posted in this space before about the misuse of the medium: Microblogs like Twitter let our quick notes scale to millions of readers. Wikis and forums provide a tighter workflow for collaborative writing and editing. Just putting your words on a web site makes them searchable by people who will never have access to your email corpus.  Despite these misuses of email, it's still the ubiquitous method of digital communication.  Whatever new communications platform you're hoping to deploy,

In-House Enterprise 2.0 Revolution, October EditionOctober 21 2008

This morning's new work group meeting was tremendous fun.  Five of us came together to discover opportunities to improve our organization's internal communication and knowledge sharing strategies.  Below are some highlights from our session. 

Opportunity versus obligation
It's painfully easy to turn people off when you demo a new web tool to them.  In the back of the room, one of your coworkers is thinking  "Oh great, another new site for me to type stuff into in order to keep my boss off my back".  Be aware of the potential for negative responses before your next demo.  Take a cue from Kevin Jones and inspire positive responses: explain whya new communication tool is going to help rather than merely describing how to use it.

Feedback is inevitable, but...
We're getting lots of bottom-up feedback in our organization.  Regular e-mails from the vice presidents get individual responses.  Focus groups provide opinions on selected issues from a cross-section of our community.  What we're n

FriendFeed is now two quick hops away from the enterprise micro-blogging grailOctober 16 2008

FriendFeed added a real-time view to its lifestreaming service last night.  It's only a few features away from being a killer enterprise microblogging service that could render startups like Yammer irrelevant:

Picture this: - A FriendFeed room for your company.  Set access to "invite only" if needed.  Switch to the live streaming view.

And twitter-style @replies to individual users and direct messages to individual users.  Those last two features - available on Twitter today - are all it would take to push FriendFeed over the hump in the enterprise market.  I sure hope I can get something like moving this at my workplace soon.

Twitter replies to @dpritchett

This amped-up FriendFeed will of course have to overcome the usual "but I don't want a 3rd party vendor hosting my company's precious secrets!" complaint that all SaaS vendors face, but it can work... and soon!