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PPT Spaces > PPT Collaborations Blog
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Below is an example of a professional blog which can be created and maintained using PPT Blog Spaces. For more information, please visit http://www.pptgrp.com.
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11/27/2006
As you may have noticed, the PPT Collaborations blog has a spankin' new look and feel... all thanks to Microsoft's newly-released SharePoint 2007 technology. We've upgraded www.PPTSpaces.com, our platform for business collaboration, and moved it onto the new SharePoint collaboration platform. This will allow us to offer not only the traditional file and data sharing tools that came with the older versions of SharePoint, but also some new tools such as Wikis, Blogs, and even Workflows.
We've moved our blog from the www.PPTGrp.com domain to PPT Spaces, allowing us to leverage the powerful new platform for our blog. And to take it a step further, we love the new SharePoint 2007 platform so much that we've decided to offer FREE professional blogs... to help others get on board and take advantage of blogs for business.
PPT Professional Blogs allow people to share useful news and commentary, as well as collect feedback, in a convenient, journal-style format. Ease of use, combined with convenient distribution formats such as RSS, allow people to effectively share knowledge with colleagues, company employees, or business partners.
Although traditionally blogs have been used for social purposes, such as communicating with friends and family members, people are starting to realize that blogs have very useful business applications. Although this is not an exhaustive list, here are just a few examples of ways you can use a professional blog to further your business or career:
- Company news and press releases
- Professional or technical articles
- Board, user group, or community meeting minutes
- Status reports and team updates
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Application or product development notes
- Client case studies
- Shift reports
As you may have already seen, blogs have taken the world by storm, and it won't be long before every business -- from the multi-billion-dollar corporations to the independent business owners -- will have its own professional blog.
11/20/2006
As we’ve stated before, the three main categories of business needs which should be addressed when implementing a business collaboration strategy are People, Process, and Technology. They can be compared to the legs of a 3-legged stool; if any of the legs are weak or non-existent, then the stool will tip over immediately… much like a poorly-planned collaboration strategy.
Another very important component which should not be ignored, however, is Purpose. For the stool to be useful to everyone, it needs to have a purpose.
The power, flexibility, and ease of use of modern online collaboration tools can sometimes be a double-edged sword. If the usage of online collaboration within your organization is not well thought-out, it can quickly become a huge mish-mash of useless information. Purpose, however, can become your compass, providing direction, motivation, and a standard against which you can measure your success.
People with years of successful online collaboration experience — or experience with any business solution — will say that a shared sense of purpose is critical. When planning for online collaboration, it’s important to ensure that you have buy-in from managers, stakeholders, and team members. If any of these people don’t take your collaboration strategy seriously, then the bottom will soon fall out, and your collaboration tools will begin to collect dust.
When planning your purpose, try asking these questions:
- What’s in it for the managers and stakeholders? Most collaboration strategies need upper-level sponsorship to succeed, and most managers and stakeholders need to have a clear view of how it meets their business objectives.
- What’s in it for the Team Members? Remember, they are busy people, and if the collaboration processes and tools that you put into place are confusing, cumbersome, or they don’t make the Team Members’ jobs easier in some way, then they will discard what you’ve put together.
One example of a well-accepted purpose could be to share best practices within an organization, with the goal of adding 20 new practices to the organization’s knowledgebase during the next six months. This is explicit, tangible, measurable, and it provides benefits to everyone involved.
Another example could be to provide remote workers with the data and documents that they need to service their clients while traveling. We could then set a goal to migrate a certain number of document templates and client data into an online environment over the next six months.
Once you’ve surveyed the appropriate people in your organization (the more, the better) and established the purpose of your collaboration strategy, evangelize it. Make sure that everyone knows about it and understands it, since the best strategy in the world isn’t any good to anyone if they don’t know about it. 11/13/2006
Last time we introduced the benefits of online collaboration and gave a couple of very general examples. There is no doubt that it can affect a business’ bottom line — either directly or indirectly — and more companies are starting to get on board every day.
Last time we also mentioned that there are two main types of tangible, measureable online collaboration benefits: Direct Cost Savings and Labor & Productivity Savings. We’ll be using these terms throughout the rest of this post, so it makes sense to define them here before proceeding:
- Direct Cost Savings: Savings in expenditure other than labor - print, paper, telephone, travel costs, etc. - that can be directly attributed to the introduction of online collaboration.
- Labor and Productivity Savings: Savings in the amount of time required to carry out tasks as a result of introducing online collaboration.
Following are some more specific examples of the two main types of benefit — Direct Cost Savings and Labor & Productivity Savings — in several categories.
Information Publishing
Quickly and easily deliver news and information through an online tool.
- Direct Cost Savings: The print, paper and delivery costs that can be saved by making documents available on-line and discontinuing the paper equivalents.
- Labor & Productivity Savings: Faster access to information; more rapid and easy exchange of information; less duplication of effort (because there is only one owner for each piece of information).
Document Management
Allow users to view, edit, print, and control documents collaboratively.
- Direct Cost Savings: The print, paper, digital media and delivery costs that can be saved by making documents available on-line for review, editing and approval rather than distributing as hard copy or on disk.
- Labor & Productivity Savings: Less time spent on reviewing, editing and revision; less time spent locating documents; less duplication of effort (because there is only one owner for each document); less time wasted correcting errors caused by work being undertaken on incorrect versions.
Training
Deliver training at the desktop so that it can be consumed conveniently.
- Direct Cost Savings: Savings in travel and accommodation, trainers, rooms and equipment for courses delivered via the web rather than in a classroom.
- Labor and Productivity Savings: Less time spent traveling to courses; less time required to reach learning objectives (through self-paced methods), and flexible timing.
Workflow
Automate administrative work and implement consistent processes.
- Direct Cost Savings: The print, paper and delivery costs that can be saved by making forms available online.
- Labor & Productivity Savings: Less time spent per person per form in obtaining up-to-date copies of the form to complete; less time spent where to route the information.
Databases and Other Business Systems
Provide an intuitive and flexible interface to databases and other business systems.
- Direct Cost Savings: The hardware, software, maintenance, and training costs that can be saved by eliminating redundant systems.
- Labor & Productivity Savings: Less time required to learn and use applications; less time spent maintaining redundant systems.
Surveys and Discussion
Provide a means for users to discuss topics, answer questions, and provide feedback.
- Direct Cost Savings: Travel and accommodation costs for meetings that could instead be conducted online.
- Labor & Productivity Savings: Less time spent traveling to meetings; less time spent in meetings; less time spent resolving issues and concerns.
These examples are still quite generic, but hopefully they are enough to provoke some thoughts about how the benefits of online collaboration can be applied within your own organization. We always welcome comments about what’s written here, and if you have an online collaboration success story that you would like to share, we’d love to hear from you and perhaps write about it here. 11/6/2006
Business people who have experience with online collaboration would say that it is an effective tool to combat the waste of time, effort and materials within an organization, while at the same time generating new opportunities for collaboration and productivity.
If used properly, online collaboration can enhance business productivity to a great extent. A lot depends on the types of processes or technologies that are being augmented or replaced. For example, if they’re replacing traditional paper-based processes, such as paper forms or printed manuals, then the improvements in cost and productivity can be tremendous. Some of the benefits of using online collaboration are tangible and easily measured, such as savings in operating cost and reduction in paperwork. Some of the other benefits, such as improved customer service and easier access to up-to-date information, are less measurable, but still extremely valuable.
A good example of a tangible benefit is the reduction in paper cost from publishing information online. Certain statistics quote that 18% of corporate printed material becomes outdated after 30 days. Imagine that after 60 or 90 days. Now, imagine if that material were always online and current!
Next time we’ll cover two types of measurable benefits of online collaboration — Direct Cost Savings and Labor & Productivity Savings — as well as several specific examples. 10/30/2006
What’s the difference between Knowledge Management (KM) and Collaboration?
Although some people might use these two terms interchangeably, they definitely have different, yet related definitions. Generally speaking, Knowledge Management is a much broader term which can be defined loosely as the practice of gathering, creating, and distributing knowledge within an organization. Collaboration, on the other hand, is a slightly more specific term, describing the act of two or more parties which work together toward a common goal. In this context, Collaboration refers to creating and updating pieces of business information, such as a document or a set of data.
Based solely on these brief definitions, one might think that KM and Collaboration are really not closely related after all. But what if you were told that Collaboration processes and tools can actually be considered to be a subset of KM? Here’s how…
From a process perspective, if we focus on the first two parts of the KM definition from above (gathering and creating information), this starts to sound a lot like Collaboration… which is the act of two or more parties creating or altering a piece of business information. The business information entity might be a document, a set of data, or merely an idea for a new product or process improvement. Once the parties have created or updated the entity in question (thus the Collaboration effort is complete), then the overall process typically moves into the storage, sharing, and distribution KM phases (assuming that the resulting entity has some business value to a larger group of people outside those who participated in the collaboration effort).
Grey areas can often exist when trying to define the difference between KM and Collaboration, especially when we start to look at the tools that people use in both areas. Microsoft’s set of SharePoint technologies, for example, is sometimes referred to as a set of online Collaboration tools, allowing people to share and collaborate on documents and data, yet it is actually flexible enough to accommodate all of the KM processes described above. Not only can people create and update collaboratively using SharePoint, they can also store their works centrally and securely in online repositories, as well as publish them for others to see and use. 10/23/2006
Gone are the days when only techno-fanatics use blogs (short for ‘web logs’) to quickly and easily publish their thoughts online for the world to see. Gradually, the business world has begun to get with the program, publishing blogs on company websites or other community sites such as MSN Spaces, MySpace, or similar; most are using their blogs for posting company and industry news, what’s going on behind the scenes, and marketing jargon.
Lately, business people are starting to really open their eyes to the benefits that blogs bring to the organization… above and beyond the standard PR application on an outward facing company website. Due to the chronological, journal-like format of blogs, people are starting to realize that they can use them for applications such as shift logs, helpdesk incident reports, or internal company announcements. The blog has gone from techno-toy status to a real business tool for increasing productivity and reducing costs.
Microsoft has just recently made an interesting paper available on their website: “Blogs and Wikis in Business“. Although by no means is it comprehensive, it does briefly describe some scenarios and best practices for using these two increasingly popular online tools for your business. The paper also describes more specifically how the blog and wiki functions inside the new SharePoint 2007 toolset can be used to make your business better.
Something that is not covered in the Microsoft paper, yet is well worth mentioning, is the fact most commonly-available blog software tools include RSS (Really Simple Syndication)… a technology that readers can use to automatically subscribe to the information which is being published in a blog. Using an RSS reader program on your desktop, you can avoid the time-consuming chore of visiting one or more blogs to read their latest posts and keep updated. Instead, you can simply subscribe to the RSS feed from each of the blogs (usually with only a couple of mouse clicks), then sit back and let the RSS aggregator grab the latest posts from the blogs and display them on your desktop. There are several free RSS readers / aggregators available, but it’s worth mentioning that the next version of the Microsoft Windows operating system (Windows Vista), the next version of Microsoft Outlook (Outlook 2007), and the next version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser (IE7) will ALL have RSS viewing and aggregation capabilities. Look for them later this year or shortly after the first of next year.
We recommend that you download the Microsoft paper and start thinking about how you can start blogging to automate your existing processes and eliminate some of the outdated, non-integrated tools that you use today. 10/16/2006
Generally speaking, business collaboration tools help people to more easily find, use, and share information that they need to do their work and make better decisions. The advent of the Internet has enabled people to use many powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use collaboration tools. In this post, we’ll cover two different categories of Internet-based collaboration tools, Communication Tools and Information Management Tools, and provide several examples in each category.
Communication Tools
- E-mail: Perhaps the most commonly-used collaboration tool of all time, electronic mail allows people to easily compose and send messages to one another. Although E-mail is a communication protocol which has been standardized for decades, there are many different computer programs, or “clients”, which people can use to exchange E-mail messages. Examples include Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, and Mozilla Thunderbird.
- Instant Messaging: A form of real-time communication, usually consisting of a series of simple text messages sent instantly between two or more people using a desktop IM program. There are several IM networks currently in use, such as Yahoo! Instant Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and MSN Messenger. Some IM clients, such as Trillian, can be used to communicate on multiple IM networks.
- Blogs: Web logs, or “blogs”, allow people to easily publish information on a website in chronological journal format. People with expertise in building websites can easily obtain free software for creating and publishing their own blogs, and those without that expertise can easily get started by subscribing to a free service such as Google’s Blogger or Microsoft’s MSN Spaces. For business environments, Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies include blogging features which are easy to deploy and use.
- Discussion Forums: Online discussion or message boards allow people to post messages or questions on a specific topic. Other people can then read the forum postings and post their own comments or replies. People with expertise in building websites can easily obtain free software for creating and maintaining their own discussion forums, and those without that expertise can easily participate in other forums by posting their own messages, questions, or answers. Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies include discussion forum features which are easy to deploy and use.
- Online Chat: A form of real-time communication, usually consisting of a series of simple text messages sent instantly between two or more people through a website. This form of communication is often used to launch live online sessions for offering support and answering questions quickly. Online chat software can be easily obtained and integrated into an existing website.
- Web Conferencing: This form of real-time communication which often comes in a couple of forms: video conferencing, in which two or more people have a virtual meeting by transmitting live audio and video with microphones and cameras, and application sharing, in which two or more people view, and possibly share control of one person’s desktop pc. Several vendors offer web conferencing services, such as WebEx and Microsoft’s LiveMeeting.
Information Management Tools
- Shared Calendars: An event or time management feature included in several web-based collaboration packages, allowing people to post information about important events, meetings, or time-sensitive tasks. More sophisticated systems include workflow tools for automating processes such as task routing. Several vendors offer software packages and services which provide these functions. Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies include event calendar features which are easy to deploy and use.
- Project Management Systems: One of the more specialized collaboration tools which allow people to schedule and track the activities required to complete a project. Some of the more advanced project management systems, such as Microsoft Project Server, offer detailed task scheduling with dependencies between tasks, resource assignments with scheduling conflict reports, and issue management. Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies also offer lightweight project task scheduling, issue management, and workflow features which are easy to deploy and use.
- Directories: A collection of a specific type of information, such as employees, clients, vendors, or competing products, can be gathered and stored in an online directory for easy reference. Several vendors offer software packages and services which provide these functions. Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies include directory features, such as business contacts and web links, which are easy to deploy and use.
- Workflow Systems: One of the more sophisticated collaboration tools which allow people to control and track the progress of documents, data, or tasks through a work process. Document approval and task routing are two examples of processes which can be tracked with a workflow system. Several vendors offer software packages and services which provide these functions. Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies include document, data, and task workflow features which are easy to deploy and use.
- Document Management: A collaboration tool which allows people to collect, organize, and manage documents in a central location within a team or organization, making sharing and collaboration more convenient. More sophisticated systems include workflow tools for automating processes such as document review and approval. Several vendors, such as Documentum, offer software packages and services which provide these functions. Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies include document management and workflow features which are easy to deploy and use.
- Wikis: A wiki is a collaboration tool which consists of a web page or website which is easily editable by visitors. People can easily add, remove, or modify the content of a wiki web page, making collaborative authoring an extremely streamlined process. People with expertise in building websites can easily obtain free software for creating and maintaining their own wikis, and those without that expertise can easily participate in other wikis by posting their own updates. Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies include wiki features which are easy to deploy and use.
As can be seen here, there are many available options which make it easy for businesses to get started collaborating online. Businesses large and small are turning in record numbers towards online collaboration because it can save them thousands of dollars by providing faster access to secure data, a friendly and flexible interface to that data, and as result, better efficiencies. In enterprise environments, more and more companies are turning to technologies such as SharePoint, since it includes many of the tools mentioned above, and it integrates smoothly with the family of Microsoft Office desktop tools such as MS Word and MS Excel. 10/9/2006
We’ve heard it time and time again:
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
…and although many companies state that knowledge sharing is important to their business, culture, etc., in most cases, the opposite is really happening.
Information hoarding — where people do not want to share knowledge because they see knowledge as a source of power — is very common, and can happen for various reasons within any given business environment:
- People feel that an injustice has been done to them
- People are distrustful of co-workers or management
- People are retaliating against someone else’s behavior toward them
- The organizational climate encourages secrecy, not sharing
In order for business collaboration to work effectively within a company, this ever-so-common barrier needs to be torn down.
How, you ask?
People are more willing to share with those who they trust and who treat them fairly. When organizations emphasize positive relationships and trust among employees, knowledge sharing will become part of the culture. Here are a few ways to promote knowledge sharing — not hoarding — within your company:
- Emphasize positive relationships and trust among employees
- Explain the mutual benefits of having colleagues share their knowledge
- Treat all workers fairly and respectfully
- Make knowledge sharing part of the culture
In many cases, it will be difficult and it will take time, but the resulting benefits will be well worth the effort. Remember… implementing a new business collaboration strategy involves more than sending out a mass email message or adding a few paragraphs to an employee handbook… something of this magnitude involves a cultural change. People are distributed all along the bell curve of new process and technology adoption, from those who are very accepting of change to those who will avoid it like the plague. The key is to find the switch that turns on the light in each of their heads, allowing them to see the big picture and how knowledge sharing really does benefit them. 10/2/2006
This being the innaugural post on the Collaborations blog, I thought that I would introduce our business solution philosophy, which is based on a balance between People, Process, and Technology, as well as how it relates to business collaboration.
Based on our experience in process improvement, new business system implementation, and user communities, we’ve found that a successful business solution needs to address these three fundamental categories of business need:
People
- Business people need access to the latest and most accurate information.
- Business people need to filter through increasing volumes of information.
- Business people need to easily share information and knowledge with others.
- Business people need to work and participate… regardless of time or location.
- Business people need to avoid duplication of work.
- Business people need to stay informed.
Process
- Business processes need standardization
- Business processes need increased efficiency and productivity
- Business processes need to ensure compliance
- Business processes need simplification
- Business processes need correct workflow
Technology
- Business technology needs to consist of standard, familiar tools
- Business technology needs open, yet secure systems
- Business technology needs to integrate and share data between systems
- Business technology needs easy deployment and manageability
- Business technology needs scalability… from a small team to a large corporation
In future posts on this blog, we’ll discuss each of these categories of business need in much more detail, but for now, this hopefully provides a brief glimpse into our business collaboration philosophy… and the direction of this blog. At times you’ll read about how people fit into the big picture of collaboration, and at other times it will be process or technology. All three are important, however, and none of them should be ignored when planning or implementing a new business collaboration strategy within your business environment.
These concepts are not meant to be the final word on collaboration, but we feel that they are important enough to share with the business community. Hopefully reading this blog will spark ideas and conversation within your company, and we hope you find it informative, relevant, and useful! |
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