Ever wonder why some collaboration projects take off and become successful but you can’t get your company’s users to use a simple wiki?  Do your discussion forums in Sharepoint go unused?  You did everything right… didn’t you?  Well, the honest truth is that there is no silver bullet to making something popular, but there are a few strategies you can use to deal with the biggest obstacle you face in collaboration which is User Discomfort.  That’s right, it’s not your processes or your technology, it’s not even your management.  The biggest impediment to getting your collaboration project off the ground and making it popular is User Discomfort.  Here’s why … (more…)

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I just read a few interesting posts by Tim Bray and Alex Payne about what to read and how to stay up to date (see below).  Much of what they say I agree with.  The simple problem is that there is just too much stuff out there that is interesting or important on some level.  Combine that with an ever expanding workload, a short attention span, and a fading memory and you have a combination that just can’t work long term.  What’s interesting is that I’ve asked several knowledge workers of one sort or another what their biggest problems are and most respond with something like …

• “too many interruptions”
• “wasting time on nonproductive tasks like email”
• “no ability to focus on key tasks”
• “excessive multitasking”

(more…)

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Anyone else want to run TweetDeck on openSUSE (or any Linux for that matter) but can’t because they don’t use GNOME or KDE?  When I first tried TweetDeck using XFCE everything looked okay but the interface would not respond to any button clicks.  After a quick trip to Google it appears that TweetDeck wants someplace to store your username/password information and it only knows how to use Gnome or KDEs keyring.  I got around this by launching Gnome services on startup.  This can be done by opening the menu Settings -> Sessions and Startup and choosing the Advanced Tab.  Under this tab I selected ‘Launch Gnome services on startup’.

I then wrote the little script below to extract the gnome-keyring process id and pass it to TweetDeck on startup using the (more…)

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These notes came from Joshua Porter’s book Designing for the Social Web.  This is an excellent book and I highly recommend it for people designing software to be used by anyone, not just web software.  These notes will probably have a bias towards Kablink but I think I summarize all the major points of the book.

In essence Joshua advocates finding the objects you collaborate around and the functions that support that collaboration.  Everything else will fall into place if you focus on those two important concepts.  (more…)

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With collaboration and community tools like blogs, wikis, forums, tagging, and rating systems, the enterprise has become filled with collaboration tools that bring people together online and enable productivity. However, the lack of integration in these platforms creates not only Data Silos but Collaboration Silos. Information from one system has to be moved to another system if you want to collaborate and then finding the most relevant copy of the information becomes a nightmare. Where is the latest version? Was it an email attachment? Did I put it in the shared directory? Where are Bob’s comments? These questions and many similar ones are asked every day. What we need is a smart collaboration platform that combines simple actions with relevant information artifacts to produce collaboration spaces that work for you and not the other way around. (more…)

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