Work boundaries have blurred and so has our understanding of who knows what in a given company. WikiOrgCharts uses the power of crowdsourcing to bring that information into focus. Having a clear picture of roles within an organization makes it easier for partnering companies to collaborate.
Wikis are a handy way for teams to share information and collaborate. But the trouble with many traditional wiki products is that they tend to be difficult to use. Papyrs is a slickly designed drag-and-drop wiki app that makes building intranet pages incredibly easy.
While there’s no single way to kick off a group in a collaborative process, the available research says you should start small with a specific, achievable goal, rather than trying to implement a full technology platform at the same time as you’re organizing the project.
As part of a rapidly growing company with product lines that are continually evolving, I was recently tasked with choosing a platform for the storage of company data, to bring together the information currently housed in Google Docs, emails and elsewhere. I chose editme, here’s why.
Think about how many times you’ve answered a similar question over the past year. Those 15 minutes minutes start to add up really quickly when you multiply them out across dozens of requests. That’s where reducing, reusing and recycling your work can have huge productivity benefits.
Web-based communication systems for companies and groups seem to be all the rage these days. Such systems fall into two groups: the ones that are built around projects, tickets and the like, and enterprise microblogging platforms that are more like Twitter and Facebook.
When two hundred journalists got together recently for an “un-conference” on the future of journalism, it was hardly surprising that the results were documented, minute by minute, through notes, wikis, photos, audio, video, blogs and an amazing number of tweets.
The organizers approached me to develop a web site to aggregate these posts in real-time before, during and after the event. In the process, I learned how such a site can reinforce the development of community. Read More about Using the Web and Social Media to Create More Effective Events
e-tipi sounds like a weird name for a web-based service, and when you find out it stands for “Espresso Thinking Platform,” things don’t become much clearer. But once you find out what the app’s developers think “Espresso Thinking” is, then you start to get the idea:
“We believe that sharing an espresso in a nice café creates a particular atmosphere that frees minds and promotes promising ideas to expressly appear. This is what we call Espresso Thinking.”
It’s a nice thought, but is that really something that can be captured in a web-based environment? I recently talked about the same kind of collaboration (lack of coffee products notwithstanding) in an article about my beloved sketchbook, so I was eager to find out if I could recreate the experience digitally using e-tipi. Read More about e-tipi: The Collaborative Idea Machine
Over on the OStatic blog, Lisa Hoover covered Luminotes, which has been around for a while, but just became completely free and open source, for anyone to use. It’s a note-taking and wiki-building tool that you can either use online or offline, collaborating with others, or just collecting notes and information on your own. I’ve been working with it, and I think a lot of people will like it for its ease of use and flexibility.
Read More about Luminotes Wiki and Note-Taking Tool Goes Totally Free
Document collaboration with distributed teams can be a bit of a headache, as I’ve noted in previous posts. No doubt, if you’ve ever tried it yourself, you don’t need me to remind you. More tools are available than ever before for getting this kind of work done, but with a plethora of choices comes a conundrum. What kind of tool works best for collaborating on a single document? A specialized web app, a wiki, something like iWork.com that integrates with your word processing program, or a Google Docs/Zoho Writer shared document? I’ve yet to find a definite answer, but not for lack of trying.
Revizr is a new app that combines wiki elements with change tracking features that preserves the integrity of your original document, so you can see exactly what your collaborators have added (or taken away) from your copy. And it does so in an app that’s so easy to use, you’re actually using it the moment you visit its homepage for the first time. In order to manipulate your own documents, and work together with others, you will have to sign up, but if you’re just looking for a taste of what Revizr can do before you enroll, the trial is the site itself. Read More about Revizr: Red Pen Collaboration Goes Wiki
