Integrated Collaboration: what users really want.
My colleague, Michael Sampson, has just
published the first part of his two-part white paper: Collaboration
Software Clients: Email, IM, Presence, RSS & Collaborative Workspaces
Should Be Integrated for Business Communication.
In his paper, Michael returns to “first principles,” as he discusses
the types of software-facilitated interactions the information professional
deals with on a day-to-day basis. I think Michael does a great job of identifying
the key requirements for functional collaboration while proposing how things,
in his view, “should” work.
Michael's paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of:
Email
Instant Messaging
Presence
RSS Newsreader
Collaborative Workspaces
I've known Michael for many years and he does amazing work. We first collaborated
together in 1997 on a presentation for the Electronic Messaging Association,
(EMA), on the topic of “Smart Messaging.” At that time,
Michael was a strategist for Telecom, New Zealand, and I was CTO of Peloria
Technology Corp. I moderated a presentation with Michael and another colleague,
Eva Wylie, of Unisys Corporation. Together, the three of us spoke about
the present and future needs of collaboration in the area of multimedia
messaging. It's been fun these past years to see some of our predictions
come to pass.
There is obviously still a long way to go, and Michael seeks to address
these issues.
A neat thing to know about Michael, is that he writes these reports and
his daily Shared
Spaces blog as a way of staying
sharp in his field. No doubt, he generates new business from some companies,
who read his work and choose to engage him for strategic consulting, but
the driver, as he once explained to me, is the public accountability that
his blog and these reports create for him. Michael's already published
that he will post part II of his paper in September, so he's already got
a stake in the ground. (You will want to add it to your “Waiting
For List”). I'm sure he won't disappoint us.
Nice work, Michael!
I've got a busy week ahead; I'll probably have more to say about Michael's
report soon. For now, I encourage you to download
it and have a look.
[Eric Mack On-Line]