Tag: The Digital WorkSpace

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SharePoint on the iPhone

In this post I will compare five free apps for the Iphone to use SharePoint on the road. I am going to review iShare, iSharePhone, mDMS, Moshare and iSharePlusLite. These five apps are available form the appstore for free.

iShare did not log onto my SharePoint site so a test run was impossible. iSharePhone is also free but requires some server side stuff which is not an option and a viable model in my opinion. mDMS requires some server side stuff as well. This leaves only Moshare by Moprise and iSharePlusLite by Southlabs.

Moshare is easy to set up. My account is recognized immediately and I can browse through our portal at once. Navigation is nice but our announcements are sorted with the latest item on top and no way to change the sorting. Display of an announcement is nice and even lets you edit or delete the item! Documents can be views in both office 2003 and office 2007 formats. When viewing a document there are two options. The first is to copy a link to the clipboard and the second is an option to email a copy of a document. The latter option is somewhat unnecessary for the hardcore SharePoint users. Navigating you site structure is easy, showing subsites on every level and with the back option you can move easy. Moshare does not offer a breadcrumb so it is not easy to see where you are. Blogs and Wiki’s cannot be opened so there is a big flaw there. The app does not let you change settings so if green is not your color then you will not like the interface… Search enables you to search inside SharePoint and retrieves some great results.

SharePlusLite is a free app that has a pro version as well. Setting your portal up is straightforward. URL’s need http or https. SPL shows your subsites and content directly. Your announcements are sorted the right way, so the newest announcement is on top! The view of an announcement is not that great trying to show everything in an item, I only want the title and body that cannot be viewed directly. The icons of the announcement indicate if an attachment is present. Documents are not opened right away but PDF, office 2003 and 2007 formats are recognized.  An option is presented to email the document but not to copy the link. Icons for the different content are the same as in SharePoint. Blogs do not work in SPL (although they claim they work) but wiki pages can be viewed! Search is only filtering the items shown, no real SharePoint search here.

Actually I cannot choose… The interface of SharePlusLite is much more complete and better. But the functionality in Moshare is much better with better item viewing, editing and real search capabilities. Conclusion is that there are some apps around but quality needs some improvements, but then again what can you expect for free!

One other consideration is: is this any better than the mobile interface, standard since SharePoint 2007. Well actually the interface is quite nice but lacks the ability to browse site structure and is really simple (and loads a lot faster than the apps!).

Question remains how does this work on an iPhone 4 with SharePoint 2010?

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Alles aan elkaar vast knopen

De laatste tijd verbaas ik mij in de stappen die alle web 2.0 sites en tools gemaakt hebben om hun diensten open te maken. Het is vandaag de dag voor de grote massa super eenvoudig geworden om bijvoorbeeld twitter aan linkedin te koppeling. Ik denk dat vooral twitter daar een grote rol in speelt. Deze dienst kan je zo ongeveer overal aan koppelen, om maar een paar bekende te noemen: youtube, delicious, slideshare, flickr en wordpress. Ik denk dat Twitter vooral een rol heeft gespeeld door haar de grote vlucht in populariteit en doordat andere diensten van deze populariteit willen profiteren zijn zij aan de slag gegaan om te integreren met Twitter. Vervolgens is het eenvoudig koppelen naar anderen als de eerste integratie gelukt is. Dit staat nog los van de ‘sharing’ mogelijkheden via diensten zoals addthis.

Deze belofte was reeds in het begin van het web 2.0 tijdperk gedaan door tim o’reilly maar krijgt nu pas echt een vlucht. Voor de gebruikers van al deze diensten betekent dit een grote verbetering en tijdsbesparing! Kortom hulde!

Komt bij mij gelijk de volgende vraag op: wanneer gaat deze trend zich voortzetten aan de binnenkant van bedrijven. Dit kan gemixed tussen diensten binnen en buiten de bedrijfsgrenzen. Bijvoorbeeld het gebruiken van twitterstatus updates in online presence? Of het tonen van het linkedin profiel in plaats van weer een eigen profielsite op het intranet. Maar ook in vormen die alleen aan de binnenkant zitten door bijvoorbeeld data over klanten centraal te verzamelen vanuit verschillende bronnen. Of het automatisch doorschakelen naar de voicemail als je agenda aangeeft dat je bezet bent.

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Business Processes Supported with Twitter

Earlier we posted some stuff about twitter. Today twitter has really hit mainstream in The Netherlands. So I guess it is time to look into how companies are using twitter to deliver value!

News
In terms of the groundwell strategies this a little bit of one way talking. Two examples are DWDD a popular TV news show and NRC a newspaper. DWDD only posts the people how are on the show in tweets so their followers know how is on the show that day. NRC tweets about new posts in their website containing a link to the site. For news the main goals is getting more visitors to the site and alerting people for new content.

Customer services
UPC is a Dutch example with close to 1500 followers, maybee inspired by Jetblue. The twitter stream is a way for customers to get in touch with customer support about problems with their cable TV. UPC is not as big as Jetblue, Jetblue has 1,5 million followers! Rijkswaterstaat is the dutch traffic agency that uses twitter to talk with the general public and explain projects and roadblocks. The twitter customer service is about another channel in the services mix.

Politics
D66 is using twitter for news events and discussion about policies.More political parties have discovered twitter, like PvdA and VVD. More or less politics use twitter as a mix between news and customer services.

Jobofferings
Randstad is posting joboffers on twitter through multiple accounts, you can find a buch of them using search. They segment in country and types of jobs. Some accounts are more popular than others. Other agencies offering this service are YER en Adformatie.

Discounts
Some companies give discounts to followers of specific people. Blogger Nalden is very popular in The Netherlands and companies give discounts to his followers!

Are there more business processes supported by twitter? There must be, so let us know!

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New Generations and Work

Last night @nalden was at “De Wereld Draait Door” a dutch daily news talk show. Nalden is a great guy living in the true sense of the new generations hitting your workfloors about now. In this show he talks about his blog and his way of live sharing his thoughts to those who are interested. And he can make a nice living doing just this. When he is confronted with the jobtitle ’trendwatcher’, he denies this and says he is just a young man paying attention! This is a great way to illustrate the connected mode of Generation Y. I included the video is his discussion in Dutch so you can get an idea about what is going on with this generation that is wondering around inside your company trying to figure out why corporate life got alienated from what is going on outside their walls.

http://dewerelddraaitdoor.vara.nl/typo3conf/ext/vara_flashplayer/player/player.swf

Nalden is making his living in his own unique way but these are a lot of people just like him that are looking for jobs inside your companies. They are making use of technologies that are not provided by most IT departments and in a way that is unknown to most managers.

Shouldn’t your company be trying to make these talented people feel at home and challenge them to make a difference for their company?

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The New World of Work in The Netherlands

I was trying to make an overview of communities and sites concerning the New World of Work in The Netherlands, “Het Nieuwe Werken”. I came up with the following alphabetical list, which is not complete off course. I excluded all vendors and only added non branded communities.

  • Ambtenaar 2.0, a community with more than 2500 members looking into the new government worker, with regular open coffee events and lots of activity online. Ambtenaar 2.0 is a more open variety of Overheid 2.0, a more closed community on Government 2.0
  • Het Nieuwe Werken Blog, a pure blog written by some the thoughtleaders in the Netherlands on this subject, active since february 2009

  • Het Nieuwe Werken op Lindedin, a group with more than 4700 members and 154 recent discussions

  • Innovatief Organiseren, a platform started by managementsite.nl, active since september 2006

  • Nework community op Linkedin, a closed community with 200 members (of which 88 registered at linkedin) and quarterly meetings

  • Over Het Nieuwe Werken, a community and conference initiated by Kluwer

  • Telewerkforum, a foundation active since 1995 and supported by 88 companies

  • Vernieuwing in Werk, a more recent community with more than 250 members, active online and in meetups

  • Werken 2.0, a blog with more than 563 articles on the subject and also an overview of the communities on linkedin and ning

To show how much content is being added on this theme I performed a Google search on “Het Nieuwe Werken” delivers about 72.400 results. A more loosely executed search on this theme gets you more than 4 million results. The theme is hot in The Netherlands and based on some discussions with people outside of the Netherlands I think were somewhat ahead of the troops. But I doubt if this is true…

Fo you know of other initiatives in The Netherlands or Global initiative? Do you have an opinion on the state of The New World of Work in a global perspective? Let us know!

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Groudswell part II

Yesterday Josh Bernoff presented the table of contents of the sequel to Groundswell. In his new book the groundswell inside the company gets more attention than in the first book. Four chapters will be dedicated to “Your People”. I am looking forward to the contents of these chapters! These chapters will discuss empowerment, collaboration and leadership.

In his blogpost he mentions one of the principles they came up with: “If you want to succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve their problems”. This principle will have big impact on IT and Risk for making it possible for employees to actually design their own IT to fit their needs. IT have to hop on to the trend or be left back and actualy lose the role they were designed to do! The risk people have to figure out a way to empower employees to make smart decisions and minimize risk at the same time. The current financial crisis illustrates that these two do not necessarily go together well…

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Groundswell: POST and implementing new ways of working

Last weekend I finished reading Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. They describe strategies for winning in a world transformed by social technologies. To start of an organization needs to think about POST (People, objectives, strategy and technology). As I look back in doing implementations of new ways of digital working inside companies, I see the same pattern in all of my projects. At the start we try to analyze the current state of an entire company. Our analysis does not stop with people but considers processes and IT and the physical workplace. The social technographics profile tries to standardize and benchmark the population you aim for. This is essential because you need make sure your solutions are going to be used by your chosen population. When you are profiling an organization you will encounter differences within parts of your organization. These differences will occur between divisions and team, between countries between generations and between male and female.

The conclusion is you should use some sort of profiling at the beginning of your project, this will result in multiple different profiles. Some companies transform profiles into persona’s to better understand needs and considerations for a target group. You need to analyze work processes to grasp the work that is being done inside. Plotting these processes inside a matrix to see differences between collaborative nature and complexity of work. This complete analysis will give a good base for designing a new way of working!

What are your thoughts on this? How do you think POST can be enriched to cover more ground?

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Collaboration and Communication

In today’s world of work the need for effective and efficient collaboration to create value is big. To create value we collaborate with coworkers, peers and customers form around the world to solve problems or create new and better products. Collaboration is for the most part communication between the collaborators. Communication is one of the hardest things to do out there. There are three mayor challeges in communicating to collaborate.

The first one is about communication in general. If we want to collaborate we have to communicate to express our thoughts on the subject, get feedback, discuss new ideas, summarize and make conclusions. This is a very hard thing to do effective and efficient. We need to know our own communication skills and preferences and know about these skills and preferences for the people we collaborate with. I think the MBTI assessment is a great way to figure out personal preferences and their impact on communication.

Second challenge is about language. The current playing field is a global one and thus we communicate in different languages. The langauage that is used in communication between people with different languages is mostly english. Let’s call english the global interaction language. If you are a native english speaker you have some advantages here, but for the most of us this is a challenge to translate ideas of others and your own ideas from the interaction language to the native language. For me this blogpost is witten in english (as my cobloggers and myself want to engage the largest possible crowd) but my thoughts are in dutch. Somewhere between my mind and fingers my ideas get translated. Just the use of the interaction language is not enough because the crowd out there does not have the same level of english. For everybody including native english speakers another challenge is to use terminology that the reader can comprehend.

The third challenge is about cultural differences that have impact on communications. The sender and receiver of communication both have mental models in which they interpret communication. This interpretation is after translation. So in this blogpost I am thinking in dutch and writing in english. But I am writing this from a dutch mindset and chances are the you, my valued reader ;-), are interpreting my english writing with a indian mindset. Differences in your culture colour your reading and comprehension of my thoughts. To make this post succesfull I should have written this post with your cultural background in mind and you should have read this post with my cultural background in mind aswell! This is a very difficult task because I am not familiar with indian culture and I don’t want to focus on indian readers but to a global audience, so where to start? For the reader this is also a hard thing to do, because it implicates you need to know about dutch culture as well! Some of the best examples on this challenge I read the other day in Outliers a book by Malcolm Gladwell. He talked about communication in the cockpit of aeroplanes and the possible destructive power of culture on collaboration.

If we take these challenges into account it is a mirracle that communication is succeeding in the first place. The question is if this mirracle is a consequence of contious actions or uncontius behaviour?

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Learning and Creativity

This week I read the article “Teaching Smart People How to Learn” by Chris Argyris. It is a great piece of work discussing the idea and practical application of double loop learning. The examples in this article are very vivid and really get to the point why proffesionals or knowledge workers avoid learning.

Defensive reasoning is a big barrier for double loop learning. Teammembers search for solutions and reasons to problems outside themselves. They are affraid to acknoledge failure and thus are preventing themselves from learning. Success in their careers is the main source for them to be affraid of critisicm.

Learning and the educational systems are two subjects rather close to each other and there is a great video from TED by Sir Ken Robinson.

[ted id=”66″]

Ken argues that educational systems kill creativity. Kids are not affraid to be wrong and if you are not prepared to be wrong you never come up with something original. Kids lose this ability to be wrong and turn in to adults that are affraid to be wrong. Education is telling students that mistakes are the worst things to make.

In sports it is a common sense that mistakes and losing are needed to win matches and achieve goals. If a player makes a mistake during a match this is the only moment you can make them see how to perform better and to avoid the mistake. When I am coaching I always try to make teams lose bigtime during the training season. That is the time when they learn the most and create a bigger appetite for succes.

Chris and Ken are both stating that the inability to make mistakes, to be wrong and be defensive about them is a big problem. This problem leads to the inability to learn and the inability to be creative. We need to start learning again to make mistakes, be honest about them and learn from these mistakes to do a better job!

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Teamwork in The New World of Work

Last weeks I have been working on my thoughts about the new world of work/enterprise 2.0 trying to find new of more meaning. Collaboration is one of the most used word but a google search for collaboration delivers a lot of technical results. Tech companies trying to promote the newest most sophisticated collaboration tools. These tools are very interesting and all but are they the most important aspect of collaboration. I am sure they are NOT and research proves this! Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT is doing some excellent research in this area, explaining the relationship between productivity and social networks. The quote “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics” of Robert Solow is world famous and is saying that only investment in computers just is not enough.

The soft, intangible side of collaboration in teams is a topic that I am going to exam for the coming period. It seems that a clear talent development program has to be in place aligned with overall workstrategy, physical workplace changes and digital workplace changes. Empowerment will be an import topic in the program. Management needs to learn to lead workers to make their own decisions on goals and strategies. This is just on of the many topics that is relevant to the soft side of collaboration.

What is your opinion or are you willing to help me in this quest?