Collaborative Tools
Now and in a Web 2.0 World
Michael Inguillo / Matthew Schwartz
Internet Services Center - CSC
What is collaboration?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary says: "To work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort"
The traits of a formal process for collaboration:
- A common environment is established for all parties
- Begins and maintains an iterative progression
- Separate roles for separate contributors
What is collaboration?
Benefits to creating a formal way of collaborating:
- Brings order to a confusing or messy process
- Documents the steps along the way
- Focuses the work of many people into one product
- Ideal for RAD/JAD efforts
- RAD is a methodology for compressing the analysis, design, build, and test phases into a series of short, iterative development cycles. This has a number of distinct advantages over the traditional sequential development model. RAD projects are typically staffed with small integrated teams comprised of developers, end users, and IT technical resources. Small teams, combined with short, iterative development cycles optimizes speed, unity of vision and purpose, effective informal communication and simple project management.
- Joint Application Design, or JAD, is a process originally developed for designing a computer-based system. It brings together business area people (users) and IT (Information Technology) professionals in a highly focused workshop. The advantages of JAD include a dramatic shortening of the time it takes to complete a project. It also improves the quality of the final product by focusing on the up-front portion of the development lifecycle, thus reducing the likelihood of errors that are expensive to correct later on
Bringing the process online adds more benefits
Portability
- Access all the work wherever you are
Online tools help establish an effective toolset for collaborative authoring. Rather than using individual authoring tools like a word processor or spreadsheet and then emailing it about, new Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 tools do a better job of harvesting collective intelligence.
Wider Audiences
- Virtual Presence: Bring others from various locations to the same desktop
- Information can be immediately shared with other like-minded users or projects
Adaptive
- New tools can easily be added while less effective ones can be removed
Widespread use at EPA
- Email - write, send and receive electronic messages
- Calendar - appointment scheduling, tasking, meetings.
- Teleconferences - audio only meeting using the phone systems
- Video conferencing
Lotus Quickplace
Lotus Quickplace - publish, share, and track all information relevant to a project (such as files, notes, and schedules) with other members of your team.
- Email - access to Lotus' mail
- Lotus Notes Calender - appointment scheduling, tasking, meetings.
- wiki-like means for creating project web pages
- threaded discussions
- document library for projects
- partial integration with Lotus Sametime
Available at http://intranet.epa.gov/quickplace/
Lotus Quickplace Welcome Screen
Lotus Quickplace Discussions
Lotus Quickplace Calendar
Lotus Sametime
Lotus Sametime - allows you to find your coworkers online and send them instant messages. You can also start instant meetings that include
- multi-user chat and whiteboard features
- share all or portions of your desktop
- remote control of another person's desktop/application
- polling
- meetings can be recorded
- file transfers
- capability for both audio and video in a session
Available at http://intranet.epa.gov/sametime/
Lotus Products Overall
Benefits
- Highly scalable, enterprise ready applications
- Secure
- Intended to integrate well with the current Lotus installation
Drawbacks
- QuickPlace interface is not intuitive
- QuickPlace is being replaced by a different product known as Quickr
- Integration sometimes appears incomplete
- Web interface and desktop client functionality can 'collide'
Oracle Portal
Creates a tailored window into a group's web presence
- content areas, web pages, applications, data from outside sources brought together in one central location
Oracle Collaboration Suite
Collection of collaborative tools integrated into the familiar Portal environment
Real-Time Collaboration Package
- Web conferencing: White boarding, application sharing, desktop sharing
- Communication: Text, Voice, Conferencing
Content Services & Records Management
- A group tracks and archives their colaborative content or office records
- Manage data for reference or for regulatory compliance and discovery
Oracle Collaboration Suite
Workspaces
- Create separate areas to store files for different groups
- Ability to secure the area through passwords and domain id
- View, track, and manage all the content placed in the space
All of these tools aim to be simply integrated into existing Oracle Portals and feel familar to users
Oracle Products Overall
Benefits:
- Highly scalable, enterprise ready applications
- Secure
- Supported and updated
- Meant to create a seamless package
Questions:
- Introduction of other products (WebCenter) is raising questions from outside Oracle about the future path of Oracle development
GoToMeeting
Browser based tool to provide web conferencing and desktop sharing similar to Oracle CS and Lotus products.
Designed to be very lightwieght and user friendly
- Simple announcement and signup
- Only requires the use of a web browser
- Simple interface to control the flow of the meeting
GoToMeeting
The host of the meeting can use the tools already available on their desktop to create a conference like atmosphere
- Display PowerPoint Presentations
- Demonstrate the use of a Web Application
- Show video or play audio
Securely share your desktop. Transfer control of your keyboard and mouse to other users.
Collaboration in the Web 2.0 World
Web 2.0 collaboration is about transforming the Web pages themselves from static documents into a dynamic platform for interaction.
The focus is less on the specific tool (webconferencing, etc) and more on the way that a user takes and leaves information on the web page.
Traits of 2.0 collaboration:
- Open - Transparency of process and information
- Peering - Self organization rather than hierarchical, highly social
- Sharing - intellectual property, hardware, software, data
- Acting globally - neither chronological nor geographical boundaries.
Which ultimately leads us to Enterprise 2.0, or the "consumerization of the enterprise" through the application of Web 2.0 technologies by workers using network software within an organization or business.
- Andrew P. McAfee introduced the Enterprise 2.0 idea in "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration"
- SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals)
- Search: combine use of enterprise search and discovery.
- Linking: using links to connect information together into a meaningful info ecosystem.
- Authoring: low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content.
- Tagging: to let users create emergent organizational structure.
- Extensions: spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions.
- Signals: to let users know when information they care about has been published or updated.
Wikis: A "Radical experiment in trust"
MSND Wiki: Public Access Enterprise Wikis
- Information is contributed and edited by anyone who views it
- Risk limited by a speration between the contents of the wiki and "the party line"
- Can teach the host of the wiki: The wiki provides a snapshot of what its users perceive to be true
The radical experiment in trust requires a change in culture. If an organization thinks about governance by moving it from less central control to more peer control then the business can actually reduce risk overall since public platforms for collaboration and allow all employees to see the organization-wide activity of the intranet, spot inappropriate behavior, and take immediate action rather than letting it happen undetected and unaddressed.
Other Web 2.0 Collaboration Tech
Ranking and Tagging: Users decide what is relevant and important
- Subject Matter Ranking - Digg, Reddit
- Tag clouds
How Does it Work?
Ratings formed by collaborative opinions on content. Users can see the most popular information based on the feedback of others. This helps the user discover great content the probably wouldn't find using a normal search engine.
RSS Feeds
- Manage this information overload
From WikiPedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed," "web feed," or "channel," contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that's easier than checking them manually.
Multi-Media
How Does it Work?
Flash Video is used by sites such as YouTube, Veoh and Google for distributing content. Users are encouraged to interact with each other either by voting the content up or down, provide commentary or submit a video response.
Specialized applications
- Project management, Issue tracking, Sahana, Mechanical Turk
Future of the technology
- Is the future now?
- Real-time, spontaneous collaboration
- More mobile
- Smaller, faster applications which are easily distributed
- The ability to create the application becomes more mainstream
- More openness - the data is in the cloud
Is the future now? http://dataportability.org/ . Mission: To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.
Data is the new 'Intel Inside'
In order to reap the benefits of Web 2.0 technology the
