Virtual Team Collaboration with Web Conferencing

January 23, 2011 — Bruce McGraw

 

A few months ago, a colleague of mine attended an on-line class on using Photoshop to edit portraits. The presentation was informal and had some technical problems, but the content was good and she signed up for a series of on-line classes by this vendor. So, why am I telling you this? The small start-up company that hosted the training made a big impact, improved their credibility and perhaps signed-up customers for their fee-based services, too.

There are many – hundreds – of software products that support Web conferencing. David Woolley provides an almost overwhelming list, annotated with brief comments on many of these in Web Conferencing – Online Meetings & Presentations . In the interest of full disclosure, Cognitive Technologies Inc., (the company I work for), has successfully used and really loves GoToMeeting and GoToTraining from Citrix Systems.

We have talked several times on this blog about the importance of collaboration for project teams – especially virtual teams. (See:  Collaboration Tools for Virtual Project Teams and Project Management Collaboration and Communication Tools.) Web conferencing can be part of this facilitated collaboration. Web conferencing offers support for team meetings, training, customer meetings, program reviews and informal team discussions.

When organizations need to decide on which Web conferencing software best supports their organization, technically trained project managers may be asked to participate in making that cost/benefit decision. Here are some questions to ask about your company’s specific Web conferencing needs in order to select the best service now and support for the future.

Some questions to ask:

  1. Do you need a hosted or on-premise solution – this decision affects performance, cost and security? (The line is blurring between these now with the “cloud” concept)
  2. Do you need the ability to send and receive video (video conferencing) from all sites or only from a central sending site (web casting)?
  3. Do you want to be able to record meetings and training presentations?
  4. What are the maximum number of people routinely attending meetings?
  5. Do you need mainly 1-to-many ability or do you want more collaborative, many to many sessions?
  6. How much can you spend?
  7. Do you need audio as a phone call-in and/or VoIP?
  8. How easy is setup and using the software? Will you have technicians available as needed or will managers and attendees need to handle setup and troubleshooting?
  9. Do you need to support multiple operating systems – Windows, Mac, and Linux?
  10. Do you need to integrate with existing tools and documents such as Outlook, Office, databases?
  11. Do you need the ability to hold ad hoc meetings?
  12. Do you need registration for the sessions with email notices?

In a June 2010 report by Ted Schadler of Forrester Research called “The Forrester Wave™:  Web Conferencing, Q2 2010”, he compared the industry leaders in supported conferencing including Adobe Connect, IBM Sametime, Microsoft OCS, Cisco WebEx, Citrix GoToMeeting, IBM’s Lotus Live and Microsoft’s Live Meeting. A link at the end of this post provides excerpts from the report, provided by Adobe.

In addition to core capabilities that most conferencing tools provide, Mr. Schadler recommends you also evaluate tools considering:

  • Quality user experience
  • Predictable costs
  • Support for smart devices including mobile phones (And now tablets – I just used GoToMeeting on an iPad and it was great!)
  • Easy integration with other collaboration tools such as email or a stored document
  • Integration with existing VoIP for audioconferences

Have you had successful or poor experiences with video conferences and conference-supporting software? What happened?

LINK: The Forrester Wave™: Web Conferencing, Q2 2010
http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/pdfs/wave-web-conferencing-q2-2010.pdf

Webinar: 5 Strategies for Leading Diverse, Distributed Teams to Success, Citrix and Forrester
http://learn.gotomeeting.com/forms/012511-NA-G2MC-PM-WBR-SM?ID=701000000005XBk

Posted in Collaboration, Communication, Virtual team. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

SharePoint 2010 – It’s not just about the technology

January 7, 2011 — Bruce McGraw

 

I have spoken in the past about Microsoft SharePoint® and its support for collaborative development and information sharing. This week I have talked to many organizations who wish to start transitioning from previous SharePoint servers(2003 and 2007) to a more updated SharePoint (2007 or 2010).  I applaud these companies as they will find several new or enhanced features that really focus on improving the user’s experience. However, to achieve the most benefit for developers, project teams and users, it will require planning, design and development from both IT staff and knowledge management (KM) professionals.  Yes, there are skilled people who actually understand the organizing and management of content into knowledge bases!

Suggestions from KM World
KMWorld has given a lot of thought to transitional activities from the knowledge management perspective including a series of articles called The Reality including this topic list. I found “The Reality Series 8 on An ECM manager’s view” to be enlightening. Here are some thoughts and observations from that article:

  • “Train users on how to administrate sites before they need to manage them”
  • Encourage everyone to seek SharePoint training. Get management support for training time and classes. Microsoft offers several downloadable classes at a fairly low cost as well as classroom training – not to mention books and internal brownbag seminars.
  • Let users keep track of their own My Site details and index on a community search page.
  • Take advantage of the information you can glean from usage reports to understand what users are doing and what information they search for. Apply that knowledge to create better-labeled and indexed files.
  • Work with users to create meaningful knowledge organization using the expanded SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata Services.

More About Metadata
Metadata – data about data – helps users find the information they need quickly and more completely than just searching titles. Common wisdom of Microsoft’s SharePoint developers in the past was that people would not take the time or have the ability to add content tags that facilitate and enrich search results. Based on conclusions from observing users in the world of social media however, it is apparent that individuals will provide meaningful labels says Pat Miller, development lead for the Enterprise Metadata / Taxonomy features in SharePoint 2010. 

In his post on the Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog, Pat introduces us to the background and capabilities of Enterprise Metadata Management supported by SharePoint 2010. This new focus and capability will provide your organization with noticeable – and measurable – productivity improvement,  because it uses organization-specific taxonomies to expand information search and make results more relevant to user’s needs.

Here are the take-aways I hope you use when transitioning to SharePoint 2010:

  • Create a rich taxonomy that includes descriptive terms and labels – different names for the same term. Involve users and KM professionals in selecting term groupings and families – terms that inherit values through a hierarchy.
  • Find out what data, information and knowledge activities your users do now – including social media interactions – and make them easier.
  • Work with KM professionals to train users in adding taxonomy-based tags to documents, work products and media files.
  • Give users tools and permission to edit local taxonomies for their projects.
  • Take advantage of new capabilities to accommodate multiple languages and homographs (to quote Pat Miller, this means: “a word that is spelt the same, but has a different meaning. You should be able to have a hierarchy that has “Paris” existing in both France and Texas. To keep things a bit more sane for the user, we don’t allow homographs to have the same parent.”
  • Schedule routine maintenance of the organization’s taxonomy.

Bottom line – don’t upgrade and still use SharePoint out of the box!  Use the opportunity to do a “SharePoint Makeover” that ensures your collaboration portal will work for your users. (I will discuss my ideas on that in another post).

How is it going with your transition to a newer version of SharePoint? Have you tried creating and using Metadata Management?  Or improving the navigation for users?  Please let us know with a comment.

Posted in Best Practice, Collaboration, Requirements, Technology. Tags: , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Project Management Collaboration and Communication Tools

July 16, 2010 — Bruce McGraw

It seems I cannot go anywhere these days without seeing people talking on cell phones, texting, taking phone pictures and sharing them – sometimes many of these at once. People want to use every free minute to communicate with someone. And, before you ask; yes, this is the pot calling the kettle black. I am wired and I stay in contact with clients, team members and family 24/7.   And it is not just being a PM that requires this connectivity.

At work, I appreciate and recommend tools like SharePoint to facilitate collaboration and communication (see Collaboration tools for virtual project teams). However, as the capabilities of these tools continue to expand, the line between our personal and work lives blurs.

Dean Halstead, Microsoft Collaboration Architect for U.S. Federal Government Sales Team presenting to the Gov 2.0 summit in 2009 offered this list of commonly used content sharing capabilities that may crossover between project life and home life:

  • Blogs with collaborative comment capabilities
  • Video and multimedia sharing
  • Podcasting
  • Social networking
  • Syndicated web feeds (RSS)
  • Mashups
  • Social bookmarks and news
  • Microblogging
  • Cloud Tagging

(Note: If you are like me, some of the words are new and I had to look them up on the internet – you should too)

Many organizations wrestle with the desire to use some of these tools to improve communication on projects while trying to control privacy, confidentiality and make the best use of time available. Privacy is often handled through firewalls or intranets that provided a barrier to web-based tools for communication. However, advances in tool capability now allow intranets to offer these communication and collaboration tools inside the organization or project.

SharePoint, for example, offers tools for video sharing through its interactive media manager and podcast kit — available as free downloads. Mashups – combining content from multiple sources – can be created from SharePoint’s Business Data Catalogue connector, XML Mashup, Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer. And, the SharePoint Community Kit (another free download) supports social bookmarking and sharing news. Not to mention instant messaging. How much real-time information is too much? (You might enjoy reading Daniel Tenner’s perspective on this from Technology, “The questionable value of the real-time web”)

There is more …
In 2009, Google announced the release of Google Wave. Initially by invitation only, the software is now available to anyone. Described by CNET as "the e-mail of the future," Google Wave blends e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, and potentially connections to the world of social networking. According to Google, a wave helps make communication better by integrating formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Because a wave is shared within a group, members can reply anywhere in a message, edit content and add participants to the discussion at any point in the process. A playback feature lets newcomers rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

Google Wave is an attempt to "combine conversation-type communication and collaboration-type communication. As summarized by Mashable, Google Wave offers innovative features one could imagine using to improve communication and collaboration on projects including:

  • Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.
  • Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.
  • Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

Also take a look at all the new Instant messaging products (I think they still classify as that!).  One that I have used is Trillian Astra from Cerulean Studios.  It brings together IM (from multiple sources), Video chat, Audio chat, Social Networks (like Myspace and Facebook), Twitter, Skype and email.  It is kind of a one stop communicator.

And, even Microsoft’s communicator now lets you go beyond IM and do VOIP calls or even integrate calendar and Net meetings.

Deciding which tools and capabilities will facilitate communication and collaboration on your project
Before jumping on any new technology bandwagon, remember that new processes require training and distract staff from ongoing tasks. As project manager, you need to do a realistic cost/benefit analysis before you commit that delineates who will use the technology, how they can use it within the context of the project, and understand what – if any – communication or collaboration technologies could be lost in the transition.

Like every new technique or technology that comes along, we must decide which tools to incorporate and what processes to use to “improve” our team collaboration.  Those that never try new technology will turn around one day to find they are still typing status reports on a typewriter!

 

Posted in Collaboration, management, Technology, Tools. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »
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