Collaboration

It has been a long time since I had anything to report about eGroupWare, an enterprise groupware package.  It also doesn't help that I haven't used the software for about a year.  However, eGroupWare 1.6 Final was released last week giving us some new news.

New additions and improvements in eGroupWare 1.6 include:

Even for The Register, not a very long article but it does ask some important questions.  The article, Welcome to the world of collaboration by stealth, suggests via questions that collaboration is bigger than the IT department.

Because it involves software, probably the IT department's. But is IT equipped for the task? And does it want the responsibility? Collaboration is a human process, in essence, so surely the buck stops somewhere else - even if IT provides a number of enabling tools.

I joined the new Content Wrangler Community with hopes of improving my social networking with other content management professionals. Scott Abel discusses his goals for the community on his blog.

Yes, another challenge for those of us that work in the IT department! Just what we wanted, right? We're spending all this time reworking the corporate Intranet so everyone can collaborate better. What happens when we're done and no one shows up?

I make it a habit not to post community squabbles that often take place in any IT project (whether open source or not).  When people have the best intentions and respect the opinions of others, I don't believe it is right for me or anyone else to publicly exploit discussions that are meant to remain within the community.  However, the conflicts going on at XOOPS.org have been made so public that it's hard for me to put a lot of faith in a project that treats its own people so poorly.

I am a loyal reader of Andrew McAfee's articles which he posts on his Harvard Business School blog, The Impact of IT on Business and their Leaders.  Andrew McAfee is an associate professor at Harvard and spends a great deal of time on his blog discussing and defining Enterprise 2.0.

I found this article via Creative Commons' Science Commons.  In the Financial Times article, "The irony of a web without science", James Boyle writes:

I have been struggling to decide what I think about the Wikipedia/WikiScanner episode that played out last week.  Collaboration Loop had some thoughts of their own in the article, The Death of Wikipedia?

Collaboration.  Everyone wants to do it better.  Collaboration.  Everyone wants to find that perfect online tool which can support needed communication necessary for good collaboration .  Collaboration.  Every company in the business wants to provide you their tool to help you make collaboration work for you.

Perhaps ReviewBasics might be just the communication tool you're looking for to meet your collaboration requirements.  Tim Shih, SharpStyle Labs, has been wanting me to take a look at their collaboration feedback tool, ReviewBasics.   Mr. Shih writes:

This may surprise regular visitors to my site, but I'm an avid reader of the Wall Street Journal.   Why is it surprising for some that I read the WSJ?  Well, probably because after all the links and excerpts to stories I have provided from CMS Report, this is the very first time I have ever mentioned an article from the WSJ in one of my blog posts.  The sad truth is that about every article found at WSJ.com can only be fully read if you are a subscriber of the online newspaper.  I have wanted to avoid frustrating readers the issues with providing a link to an article they can't access unless they're ready to hand over their cr