Hier ein Projektmanager auf den ich mich persönlich schon sehr freue. Es wird eine Desktop-Oberfläche in Adobe Air geben. Ich bin sehr gespannt. Leider wurde meine Betatestanfrage noch nicht beantwortet. Also weiter abwarten.

http://www.getzcope.com

List the possible options or choices from which you are to select.

List the criteria you will use to evaluate those.

Weight the criteria as you want---that is, assign a number to each criterion to indicate how heavily it should weigh in the final decision. (You actually can do this using the program: do a run with the criteria being the choices, using the sole criterion "Importance." After going through the decision routine, the result will be the weights for the criteria, in the judgment of the group.)

List the people who will be evaluating the options according to the criteria.

Weight the individuals as you want---again, assign a number to each person to see how much weight to give his or her opinions. (For example, an expert in the field might be given a greater weight than someone who knows little about the matter.) One nice thing: you can change the weights of the deciders to see what effects that would have, and if you weight all but one as zero, you can see how that one person ranked the choices.

The program then presents each decider with a set of pairs of the options for each criterion. Each decider than selects which of each pair is "better" given the criterion being considered.

Note the simplification: instead of considering the whole range of choices and criteria, the decision becomes a series of small decisions between two choices using a single criterion. These decisions are easily and quickly made.

The program then uses those choices and the weights (of criteria and of decision makers) to rank the choices, showing the "value" of each option. Sometimes a group of options will have values that are close---more or less tied---and sometimes options will have values that are far apart.

It works quite well, and now there's a Windows version available. You can view a demo of it here.

One example: I was leading a major software project, and I wanted to minimize the risks. So I brought the team together for a brainstorming session: "Assume the project has failed. What problem was the cause of failure?" We produced a list of possible problems. I then used the program and listed the problems and two criteria: How likely is the problem to happen, and how big an impact would the problem have if it did happen.

Each team member then went through the random pairings of problems, first evaluating each pair and indicating which one of each pair was more likely to happen, and then going through another set of pairs indicating which one of each pair would have a greater impact if it did happen. The program then ranked the problems based on the input of the entire team (appropriately weighted) and we had our risk factors identified in terms of their danger.

I've also used it to pick vacation spots, cat names, cars, and so on.

Zapproved also lets you attach files to documents, as well as setting due dates, priorities, and project names. Although you need an account to use the service, the others on your team do no. If your team is distributed and you spend an inordinate amount of time chasing down consensus on routine matters, it's worth a look. Zapproved is free while in beta, though they do say there will be a charge at launch.

See the International Herald Tribune's good roundup article, Meetings Going Virtual to Save Money:

The emerging trend, analysts say, goes well beyond a reaction to rising travel costs and a weakening economy this year.

"These technology tools are going to change the way corporations think about travel and work in the long run," said Claire Schooley, an analyst at Forrester Research.

No single technological breakthrough explains the progress, but rather a series of step-by-step advances - and steady investment - in telecommunications networks, software and computer processing.

The results can be seen not only in the expensive new telepresence systems like those from Cisco Systems or Hewlett-Packard, but also in a host of more mainstream collaboration technologies - Web conferencing, online document sharing, wikis, group instant messaging and Internet telephony. The audio and desktop presentations in Web-based meetings, for example, are now more likely to be in sync and interactive.

So companies of all sizes are beginning to shift to Web-based meetings for training and sales presentations.

And the ZDNet email newsletter in my inbox this morning reinforces the theme: Now is the Time for HD Video Communications - The Smart Business Tool

1. You create another twitter account specially for the group. Let's call it @keystone. Everyone in the group friends up @keystone and posts group messages to @keystone. Simple.
2. Decide on a keyword for the group twittering. Let's call ours grpKeyStone. Have a crontab watching each of the group members twitter rss. When a post is on the rss starting with grpKeyStone , the script re-tweets to each of the other members of the group with the usual @name.
3. Option 2 doesn't address your other friends getting tweets with the incomprehensible grpkeyStone on the beginning of them, so may be worth combining the above options. Have a separate twitter account to target the group messages at, and a script watching and re-tweeting the messages to the specific members of the group.

Clear as mud :)

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Incess Consulting Pvt Ltd - Hyderabad
Xoraint  - Mumbai
Ciena - Gurgaon
Deloitte - Chennai
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Value Consulting - Mumbai
HCL - Chennai and many more openings

View all these walkin - job details here

Link: smartKontakt - online Groupware

Rachel's post related to the difference between social networking tools and computer-supported collaborative work tools or groupware. If you ask people why they use groupware like SharePoint, Domino, ThinkTank, and WebEx, the easy answer is, "to accomplish group work and increase productivity." When you ask people why they use tools like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, the easy answer is, "to socialize." As Rachel describes, these two broad goals share a set of common processes that can be facilitated by tools from both categories. Also, the boundary between these categories is getting blurrier by the day.

Of course, the motivation to socialize is very complex and I am going to focus on just one aspect of it here. Outside of improving productivity and finding the love of your life, why do we seek the company of other people? Leon Festinger (1954) had some ideas about this that he developed into his Social Comparison Theory. Although subsequent research has indicated that things are much more complex than Festinger theorized, the basic principles of social comparison have held up and have implications for online social networking.

Festinger argued that the only way we can evaluate our own abilities in the absence of objective standards is to compare ourselves with others. Am I a good eLearning Director? Do I have a good understanding of new and emerging technologies? I ask myself these questions every day. I try to answer them by finding others with whom to compare. Who do I choose? Festinger held that we sometimes choose people or groups that are clearly worse than us. This downward social comparison is quick and reassuring (e.g., "At least I know more than that guy"). However, if all we did was compare downward, we would never improve. Festinger suggested that human beings are motivated by a unidirectional drive upward. We want to improve our abilities, so we must evaluate ourselves against others who are better than us - not light years better, but just a little bit better. This way, we gain some sense that we are improving. Of course, those people with whom we compare are improving right along with us, so we may end up comparing ourselves with the same person for quite awhile, locked in a friendly and mutually beneficial game of leapfrog.

That's one reason why applications like Twitter are so valuable and so different from other workplace collaboration tools. They appeal to different motives and satisfy different, but equally important, social needs. Second, the people with whom I compare myself are often not working for Winona State (no offense WSU colleagues). Of the top five most influential people on your Twitter list, how many work inside your company or institution? Of those on your list from within your organization, are you following them for social comparison purposes or for other reasons? I think we purposely pick people who don't work inside our organizations in hopes of finding new partners, new ideas, and new standards of comparison that will challenge us to move upward. Facebook and Twitter, as open, free, accessible tools are more appealing for social networking than enterprise collaboration systems like SharePoint that are currently more difficult for external friends and colleagues to access.

Finally, both of these implications suggest that using Facebook for enterprise collaboration purposes is probably not such a great idea. I am guessing that this is not even an issue in the corporate world, but it is in higher education as faculty and administrators take their first steps into the great Facebook abyss. Fortunately for our students, this sort of thing usually happens long after they have left and moved on to something else. In fact, I sometimes think that faculty using tools like Facebook to support exam review sessions signals to the last remaining students that the tool is officially lame. I think there is a lesson here for any organization. As important as social networking and communities of practice are within an organization, people are venturing out into the blogosphere for good reason - reasons that will benefit them and your company. Don't follow them and don't let the worlds collide.

Ken

1. pick a good wiki
2. let your wiki 'virally' grow
3. find and empower wiki champions in each team
4. start off as open as possible, worry about guidelines later
5. refer people to the wiki where you can
6. bottom-up, not top-down
7. training should not be more than one hour demo

I do not have any experience with enterprise wiki's, but still I think there may be room for a top-down adoption, but not unless the top uses the wiki in a consistent manner, and give the good example !

Email was the original groupware. It was the first "killer app" for the internet, and the vast majority of traffic on the early 'net was email. Groups of researchers used it communicate in those early days, and today it is as mainstream as chocolate pudding. Usenet came next, in the 80s. It was a kind of discussion forum arranged around categories called newsgroups. Although it is still in use today, it has largely been supplanted by newer developments like web-based forums. The point is that lots of software is groupware: instant messanging, wikis, etc. So we all use different types of groupware for different purposes or for different groups. Other than email, there has been no University-wide attempt to give everyone a common set of groupware applications.

OUCS plans to begin deployment, according to the project page, in June of this year. However, the user requirements document was finalized in February, so we already have a pretty good "high level" idea of what the University hopes to accomplish. Even though the document breaks up requirements into 8 "components," from a user's perspective, there are 5 main applications:

1. Email
2. Calendaring and Resource Booking
3. Contact List
4. Shared Data Repository
5. Interface to Student Information System (SIS)

(The other 3 requirements components cover all the applications and are: encryption support, remote web access, and mobile access.)

Email is pretty self-explanatory, but there are a couple requirements worth noting:

• webmail needs to support a range of functions "typical of leading/common current webmail clients."
• must have the ability to synchronize with mobile clients (e.g. syncML, Blackberry, ActiveSync)
• support for shared mail folders

The last one is particularly important for on-campus student groups, who often want to have an email inbox for the group which can be monitored by all the officers.

Calendaring is the ability to keep and manage one or more calendars which are stored on the server and accessible from either the web interface, a mobile device, or a desktop calendar client (iCal, Outlook, etc.). This becomes groupware when you have the ability to share your calendar with people or groups to aid in scheduling. Unfortunately, there isn't a requirement to be able to schedule meetings with a visual representation of people's Free/Busy information (generated from their calendar, if they choose to share it). This is one of my favorite features of using a system like MS Exchange Server. Let's hope whatever we get has this feature anyway. Resource booking means being able to see when resources, like rooms or projectors, are unscheduled, and the ability to reserve them from the groupware. That'll save a lot of time in trying to book tutorials.

The contact list is just like it sounds---an address book. They've included some much needed requirements that it is straightforward to import and export from the contact list. They've also mandated that the groupware interact with something called the Core User Directory, which I can only assume is the central University Admin's database of all the people at Oxford. This should hopefully mean you can find contact information for people who are members of the University very easily.

The Shared Data Repository is a fancy name for a place to upload files you want to share with people or groups. Notably, though, it is required to have version control (yes!), be searchable, be cross-platform, and have directory-level access control.

The interface to the Student Information System is an integration requirement with Oxford's existing system. The SIS is where students can look up administrative information about their status and update their contact information with the University (among other things).

I appreciate that OUCS has been careful to include requirements about platform-agnosticism: there would otherwise be the potential of many a Linux user being left out in the cold. The requirement that all groupware functionality be fully available via the web, securely, from any internet connection is a bold one, and I'll be interested to see what software vendors come up with. I'm also pleased that at least for the email and calendaring they've explicitly listed mobile access as a requirement. It would be nice to see for the contact list as well, but there is a requirement about the groupware being compatible with 3rd party interfaces like Intellisync, so I'm hopeful this one will also end up being in the final implementation. I'd also liked to have seen a standards-based (i.e. Jabber) instant messaging system. I know that everyone already has their own favorite IM service/client, but the integration with the user database would make it much easier to find and make contact with people.

I have one final complaint: no wikis?

I'll end by noting that I'm on the email list for the User Consultative Group, and we've just been having a discussion about "use cases" to send to software vendors.  So, I remain somewhat skeptical about them having a solution shortlisted and then chosen by June. My guess is that implementation is delayed until late summer at the earliest---but this is Hofstadter's Law-style pessimism, so take it with a grain of salt.