New Blog Design & Domain

Welcome to CollaborationBluePrint.com.au my new blog design and place to talk about what I am doing and thinking! I had been using the older brownblog for the last few years and I decided it needed a facelift. I also wanted to refocus my blogging to what I am really doing which is helping our clients to better collaborate.

I have this idea of a collaboration blueprint. A map or detailed design if you like of what business and people need to enable collaboration. In fact not just collaboration for the sake of it but collaboration that has a positive impact on what we do. Collaboration that improves our work and helps us achieve our objectives. This blueprint isn't about specific industries but rather about the different facets and tools needed by people to work with other people online, offline, in the office, remote, mobile, next to each other, or on the other side of the world. Hence the new domain collaborationblueprint.com.au.

So as these ideas come together I am going to present them here. I am still going to continue to use the blog as a way of documenting or recording some of the more technical work I am doing. I have found this to be a neat way or recording techniques I use so that I can use them again in the future. Hopefully this also has the effect of helping a few other people that are facing similar challenges. And off course I will still have the occasional personal topic or just a comment on something I find interesting.

Sametime 7.5 Feature Blog

There is a neat Sametime 7.5 blog running over at IBM developerWorks. Ted Stanton has been posting Sametime Sunday (I am guessing this in on the same theme as Show N Tell Thursday). There is some great insites into some of the new features coming in Sametime 7.5.

I particularly like the Click to Talk (VOIP), and the automatic changing of your status depending on what you are currently doing is also neat. An example is Can't Chat Now, In a Meeting. When you are in a meeting it automatically changes your status to match. This is great as how many times does it happen that you are in a Sametime Conference and hence online, but as you are in a meeting you actually want to have a status of Busy. 

Using a Wiki for Workflow

searchSMB has an interesting article on using Wiki's for tasks that used to be done using basic workflow.

Wiki's are becoming far more common place and organisations are starting to accept them for corporate applications. An example given is the instance of a group meeting where notes are taken which are then sent around everyone in the meeting for approval/correction. With 4-5 people this might take a few days with normal sequential workflow. Put it in a wiki and everyone can update it when they want with an automatic history of what has changed.

Off course this could be done using a smarter workflow process in Lotus Notes. Using our workflow engine you would just set this up as parallel workflow rather than sequential. Off course there are complications to deal with such as replication conflicts but there are ways to manage this (another topic). I guess the point is though that a Wiki can be used for this purpose without the complexity of extensive workflow.

The one thing that seems to worry a lot of our clients regarding Wiki's is that anyone can modify anything. The point here of course is that there is a detailed history of changes automatically generated. Hence there is full visibility of what has been done by whom.