Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Collaboration Tools for The Office

Post from Michael Sampson that mentions the need to use collaboration tools (rather than email) for group projects. Money quote:

"If you are running projects in email, what's going on is locked up in individual email inboxes. That makes it so much more difficult to induct new people into projects as they join your firm, or to pick up projects that exiting people drop on the way out.

You need ... a collaboration tool that supports team projects, with all project artifacts in one place (documents, timeline, team profiles, tasks, calendar meetings and events, etc.), and the ability to add new people and remove departing people easily and quickly. There are a plethora of options ... inhouse variants (Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr, Microsoft SharePoint, Jive Clearspace, etc.) and hosted variants (Central Desktop, 37signals, Huddle.net, etc.). If you aren't already, shifting the doing of projects to project collaboration tools such as these should be a top priority. You will face costs in getting these tools deployed at a technical level, as well as costs in training your people how to use the tools and make the best use of them."

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