Two Adopted Real-World Solutions for Enterprise Collaboration

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Silicon Valley Code Camp

Video blogger David Spark of Spark Media Solutions and Dice interviewed me about real-world examples of enterprise collaboration. I mentioned two TWiki related examples.

David Spark:

Collaboration across the enterprise is quite the bugaboo. Getting yourself and a friend to collaborate on a project is easy. Getting everyone in your group to collaborate is not so difficult either. But getting an entire company to collaborate using social tools such as wikis and blogs is quite a tantamount task. It's not easy and it takes a lot of trial and error and coaxing.

At Silicon Valley Code Camp, I chatted with Peter Thoeny, CTO of Twiki, which started out as a wiki for the workplace. But it's also a box of LEGO, said Thoeny, you can use to build your own web or workflow application that can run within the wiki.

Thoeny offered up a couple simple solutions for enterprise collaboration:

Replace "Email All" with internal blogs -- One client of Twiki's was having a problem with employees taking advantage of the "Email All." The casual "send to all" for multiple messages a day was clogging up the company's mail servers. Twiki proposed a series of department-specific internal corporate blogs that allowed for editorial control. The content was very visible on the company's homepage, and a weekly email was sent out to all employee's offering highlights from the blog. The solution reduced the "Email All" messages to just one a day.

Wikifying a company -- File attachments are so yesterday and they're also extremely limiting to only those people who receive them. And those people often don't save or store them in a place for them to find later. Conversely, if the document is made publicly available on a wiki, and you just send a link, now that content is stored in an open corporate setting and has value to all, not just the intended recipient.

David interviewed many people at the Silicon Valley Code Camp. Here are two video compilations that are really funny:

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