Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration & Social Software

In this following link you will find an excellent Gartner report entitled “Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software”. This report introduce the challenges, the strengths and the cautions about several vendors (like BEA, IBM, Microsoft, SocialText, etc.).

http://64.45.25.194/clients/socialtext/quadrant/Socialtext_2513_GartnerM.pdf 

CIO Trainning

In the site of Intel you can find the game of “training” to be a CIO in your company. It is a good simulator; you will fight against viruses, hackers, dummy users, new users without PCs and new requirements will affect your plans. You will have to setup the data center, hire staff and your staff will have stress problems because user’s problems.

Silverlight: Tutorial Videos

Getting Started with Silverlight Tutorial Videos:

http://silverlight.net/Learn/learnvideos.aspx

SharePoint: Tutorial Videos

In this following link, you will find several Tutorial Videos for different profiles (from end users to IT Professionals) and skill levels (Beginners, Intermediates and Advanceds):

http://www.sharepoint-screencasts.com/

You can download them in WMV format.

Learning 2.0: The WritingMatrix Project

 If you are a student or a professor, you need to know this YouTube video… 

Are you blogging this? (Web 2.0 song)

Watch this funny (and ilustrative) video about web 2.0

 

Understanding Web 2.0 (a video explanation)

The next well done video about Web 2.0 explains the concept… enjoy it 

Enterprise 2.0: Disadvantages and challenges for the Administrators.

Web 2.0 is really good for the internauts, but Enterprise 2.0 is different for the business owner. In Internet the rule makers are the people, they have the decision power to rate the better or worse things.

Intranets were designed to communicate content and culture from the employers to the employees. Enterprise Portal evolution suppose a great challenge for the Administrator: First, the Portals started with a “committee of experts” who published “proper” content to all the knowledge workers; now Portal Author could be each worker, with his or her own ideas and vision. The challenge is to align the content of these new tools to the business owner vision to obtain benefits and avoid inadequate uses.

If in the collaborative tools you are going to allow to the employees speak of their work…  Where does start confidential information? Where does start general information?

Some Intranet Administrators allow the workers to have their own personal space, panels of messages including car sales, even photos of their vacations. According to Administrators this stimulates to the workers to lose the “fear” to use collaborative tools, even the knowledge workers feel better with its job, and they love to go to their work center.  

Concluding, before beginning with an implementation of collaborative tools, the companies must establish clearly their use and operation policies. The policies have to mark the tolerance limits, the accepted contents and the Administrators have to classify the information and define the access levels.

Recommendations for Starting Enterprise 2.0 (The Tool)

Enterprise 2.0 has several tools, let me see: IM, e-Mail, Content Server (Files like documents, spreadsheets, videos, images, etc), Wikis, Blogs, RSS, Podcast and so on. But what is the best way for starting in an Enterprise? I believe the last order represent the simplest way to start, let me explain…

The natural evolution in the Enterprises could be… First, we use Instant Messengers with e-mails then we share files through some Content Server (usually Windows shared folders)… after that you need to join partners with files and knowledges (in text way), that’s why the Wikis and the Blogs appear in the Enterprise scenario. You publish to your partners the explanation about of your forms.

Ok, now you need a tool in your labor site for deploys a Wiki (or a Blog)… If you want to compare, I could recommend you this table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software. In my personal opinion Twiki is the best Open Source Software in this category, easy for install, complete information in its site and could transform to Blog or Content Manager and the most mature project.

A Wiki is the easiest tool for knowledge workers, but you need to establish certain “rules” for its operation, examples: The Wiki is for expose the transact procedures to the others employees, for register our depth procedures (manuals, white papers, etc), and for has our personal page”. Because of Wiki is a blank slate.

But your Wiki’ll grow up… and you’ll need to migrate to other technology… and at this point I think you’ll have to adopt a Commercial Wiki…

Another challenge when you want to adopt Enterprise 2.0

The People is another challenge for Enterprise 2.0.

Ok, it’s ironic, because this kind of technology is about people, people relationships, people preferences and people knowledge…

The concept of Web 2.0 is easy, simple, useful… in the internet… but in the enterprise environment is different because of the knowledge workers not always see the advantages.

Younger workers understand it very fast. The situation changes when you explain the concept to people older than 30 yo.Knowledge workers usually use transactional Software: general ledger, payment, inventory, payroll, etc.

Workers don’t to tend to use collaborative software, except e-mail, IM and so on.

That’s why “The People” is another challenge for deploying an Entreprise 2.0 solution in an Enterprise.