It's not rocket science, it's SharePoint or google docs?

Is it funny how the simple things in life are often the best. I had a classic example of this last week. We were working in a virtual team on a bid for some work - familiar story?

Let me explain how it worked, there was about 5 of us on the bid team, we used sharepoint as the central file storage and it worked like a treat, no emailing with attachments, no multiple versions. All that we used was one simple document in a sharepoint document library. Versions were kept, the document was checked in and checked in out when being modified and alerts were set by the various team members to know when changes had been made.

I was actually offline for most of the working hours during the week doing jury duty and this didn't even present any challenges or stop the progress of the bid. It was with smooth sailing and we delivered the bid well before the closing date.

The collaboration was so easy, all I could think was finally - this is not rocket science, it was SharePoint at its finest.

That said though, I came across this little video - Google Docs in Plain English which explains the collaboration above and also introduces some friendly competition to this space - so stay tuned.

What do SharePoint, Facebook, Myspace and Youtube have in common?

The times they are a changing and I am loving it. I keep saying it but we are truly going in the throws of a revolution that history will truly measure. The internet revolution is alive. By my approximations the public net is only around 10 years young, so its still a young pup. But look whats happening - have you noticed how quickly things are ramping up and how much information we now have at our finger tips.

I was asked a bunch of questions the other day on the Web 2.0 technologies and platforms like wikis, blogs and RSS and how they could be used to advance an organisation's collaboration strategy and it got me thinking more and more about this wave of technology.

I was having a conversation with my sister in law, her uni semester involves doing an online class, taking part in another subject online forum and collaborating for an assignment in another subject on facebook. It really dawned on me what is happening here. We finally have content for the masses by the masses en masse. Ok some of this stuff isn't new, its just that its really catching on. The ability to easily produce and broadcast mass amounts of content has arrived and its social. If you look around on the net you can see its kind of taken off like wildfire. Ok, first there was the deluge of myspace and Youtube. Now facebook is having its time in the sun. And the one close to my heart, good old SharePoint is standing in the shade but I don’t think it will be for long.

As a matter of fact SharePoint isn't far away from hosting a party of its own and being on the A list to a few others shin digs.

SharePoint shares those ingenuus character defining elements that all web 2.0 killer apps share - market share and differentiation!

Size goes without saying, its come from the Microsoft stable so global computing reach is a given.

The differentiation of SharePoint is a little more subtle. There's a whole bunch of collaboration tools out there, but you see this little guy is different. This little guy is designed to sit inside your organisation and is integrated directly into your organisational security and directory and then what this little guy does is it works with the applications most of us already know like Office, Word and Excel.

So the platform is just kind of sitting around waiting to be used for inside the organisation and when everyone starts to cotton onto this - look out, its going to be a keeper.

Reduce information overload and save time and money for your business

We are running SDM Seminar for Knowledge Managers around Enterprise Search and Information Management over the next week or so:

The challenge for Knowledge Managers is to find tools which aid them and encourage employees to share information leading to bottom line cost reductions across the business. Nearly half of all labour costs are now allocated to employees performing so-called ‘Information work’. And so with a typical information worker spending up to a 25% of their time searching for the right information to complete a given task, some organisations could be frittering away their staff costs.

It makes good business sense to make the information access and knowledge management process as productive as possible, and one way in which organisations can reduce the burden associated with information work is to implement an enterprise search and find solution.

The hands-on workshop is designed to:

• provide an avenue for Knowledge Managers to discuss different issues and road-blocks in managing information
• demonstrate how a tailored Information Management solution can reduce your workload
• provide tips and tools on how you can reduce time and increase productivity through tools which help people help themselves including desktop searches and intranet search

When:

SA
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
Microsoft Office
Level 26, 91 King William Street, Adelaide

NSW
Thursday 3 May 2007
Microsoft Office
Level 2, 1 Epping Road North Ryde

VIC
Tuesday 8 May 2007
Microsoft Office
Level 5, 4 Freshwater Place
Southbank