MGIS 465 Group2

IT goals: cutting costs, improving service levels

Challenges: Communication, global company in many countries with people everywhere, multi time zones and languages and values and culture and customs and traditions and slang and terminology

Need real time collab with customers all over the world

Employee morale must be high

Management structure may discourage collab and opinions

Enterprise wide corporate IT mission and goals (aligned with regional offices)

Who is successful at collaborating? And who decides? ie. what is the criteria for determining this

Matrix style gets different perspectives from all levels of organization

Collaboration Notes
- Seems fine, although you'd have to be careful that there aren't too many annotations or that they don't turn into an argument or begin conflicting each other

- Interactive whiteboards are great, you can also use them with touch/ tablets so you can draw directly on them. Then you can save snapshots of the whiteboard at any point in time, and keep a up to date file as well. Different colors can be assigned to different people using it (and a legend provided).

- Will probably work, as long as reminders/alerts are generated timely. Also, you have to ensure that people aren't just ignoring these alerts.

- Makes sense, except why would you need to add notes in "a wiki or blog format?" Why not just add notes to a meeting notes page, which is part of a shared workspace called Meeting xxx-xx-xx? Sharepoint has this.

- MS Office is working towards this, they have remote assistance, office communicator and live meeting. Remote assistance requires one party to send an invitation to another to collaborate, which is pretty easy but usually requires an extra step (ie. phone call, then set up invitation). Office communicator is faster and more a messaging system, but if everyone is using this all the time it will make setting up remote assistance easier (although still two steps). Live meeting is hard to set everything up, basically like scheduling an in-person meeting over long distances.

- Fine for google and bing, but seems a bit much for something like an intranet or wiki search function.

- Camtasia is great, however depending on what you are recording it can require quite a bit of computing power. Also, you need an expert or at least someone with some knowledge to get streaming, encoding, compressing, uploading etc. to work properly so that everyone can view the video.

- Version management is very important, I wonder if SharePoint 2010 does it better than 2007. You always want the latest version or to simplify the number of documents you have.

- Best thing I can think of that does this is customer support sites that have that "Talk to an agent now!" button that opens a chat window with someone. I think these work ok, I've never used one but it seems easy enough to start.

- Makes more sense to me to always be online. Pretty easy to do that isn't it?

- Sounds pretty hard to do, I don't know if this exists anywhere yet.

- This sounds the same as some sort of task list or backlog. Things can be assigned to people and they can be alerted when they are due. Alternatively, a good way to set these up could be through prioritizing the to do list and then sending alerts based on the urgency of the task, but not actually assigning any due dates.

- I think decision management is better done in person around the same table. A tool doesn't allow much for discussion.

- Probably better that this would be read-only access. You wouldn't want people editing statistical models if they don't own the model are really understand the principles of it (but are interested in the results).

- Wouldn't the problem here be what standard of language to use? Would be hard to do this if you had someone in Calgary, Montreal, and London as they all speak different dialects. A spell checker of choice would only agree with one of them.

- This already exists, in live meeting and remote assistance. Definitely useful. However, security should be considered when giving control to anyone who isn't the admin or user of a computer.

- Basically, this is the point of the Track Changes feature in word. Which doesn't work amazingly well but still shows people what has changed.

- I don't know much about this, but I feel like blogging sites like wordpress and tumblr have features that are very close to this.