Web 2.0 Collaboration According to Stowe Boyd
I just finished a webcast presentation from Stowe Boyd on Web 2.0 and Collaboration, entitled [What Web 2.0 Means to You: Simple Applications To Help You Collaborate with Ease](http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2006/03/what_web_20_mea.html “Webcast Announcement”). First I’d like to extend my personal thanks to Stowe for the taking the time to make the presentation and then answer questions afterward. The presentation, while not quite as in-depth as I’d hope none-the-less had some interesting information and validated what I already knew about the topic.
The presentation focused on the following topics.
* Best Project Tools
* Best Office Tools
* Best Email
* Best Calendar
* Best Collaboration Suite
As with much of the current Web 2.0 world, many of the apps he recommended were in Beta or even Alpha but all appeared to be capable tools none-the-less. Throughout the discussion I kept looking for solutions I could bring into my own world including my corporate employment, ongoing college education, and personal projects, and while I could see plenty of uses for the last two it was the corporate settings that came up short. None of the tools seemed to have support for the centralized administration and control that is common in my organization and while workarounds are possible they would require a lot of manual intervention.
This raises the possibility that it isn’t the tool that is broken but rather the way my office works that is ineffective, however the effort and time required to convince and then train hundreds of people in a new way of working would be so extensive as to rule that possibility out, requiring that the tool integrate with the way we already work for better or worse. I say this as my employer rolls out Sharepoint across the organization which is a new way of working and collaborating that will require extensive training, so perhaps I am mistaken? I also wonder if it has to be an all or nothing proposition, might there be a way to use these tools alongside existing corporate apps and get the best out of both worlds? Could a free Basecamp account be used to supplement an existing Sharepoint collaboration site?
The issue that I haven’t seen addressed by either Sharepoint or the Web 2.0 apps here are the interrelated problems knowledge retention and interoperability. What happens when an employee leaves and takes their Basecamp account with them, including project records and notes that may be needed for years to come for reference and billing questions? How can I take the data from one application and move on with it to another application, or even within the same application? For example, what if I have a personal site setup in Sharepoint being used for a small project I’m working on which is then merged into a larger project involving several people with their own Sharepoint site? Is it possible to move a project from one Basecamp account to another? I don’t believe any of the solutions offer an export functionality, other than RSS or iCal. And it doesn’t matter how much you can export from one service if you can’t then import it into another. All applications get replaced over time, and less and less time in our rapidly changing landscape, so it is imperative that the data can outlive the application.
Shortcomings aside, the tools discussed still hold a lot of opportunity for informal and flexible teams if being less attractive to rigid and slower moving corporate teams. I think the current tools are most useful to small entrepreneurial businesses who can now replace an entire corporate IT office with an internet connection and browser, allowing more focus and time to be spent on the product. This is an exciting time with more quality tools available then ever before and I look forward to seeing what the future holds.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
