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Life after the paperless office
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New technologies arising from both personal and business spheres are creating exciting opportunities for organisations to work collaboratively with staff, suppliers and customers.
In this article, Steve Greenaway Technical Architect with Oakleigh's Technology Division, gives us a guide to these technologies, including RSS, wiki and Sharepoint, and the possibilities they offer.
Nowadays, being able to work collaboratively with colleagues, partners and customers, especially if there is an overall aim to reduce or eliminate the use of paper altogether, is the way forward. Organisations increasingly have to adapt to mobile workers, mobile technology and remote working.
To be able to work effectively in a collaborative environment, the issues of email, fax, file sharing, calendar and resource, virtual meetings and voicemail should be considered as potential methods for allowing more collaborative working practices.
Better still, they should all be available in one place either in the office, at home or on the move. Working in this way allows for a more productive workforce by centralising the plethora of information an employee receives in one place and then allowing for this to be disseminated quickly and easily.
SharePoint Integration
Microsoft's SharePoint product is designed to enhance integration with Microsoft Office by allowing the creation of team and meeting sites and the collaboration around live documents directly from within Office applications. The technology enables organisations to:
- Personalise and customise their intranet portal experience using advanced user profiling capabilities,
- To collaborate with internal and external team members through SharePoint sites in one consolidated portal view, and
- To integrate and access applications with easy to configure components that can take advantage of built-in integration with other Microsoft products.
This technology also offers rich lists for calendar items, announcements, links and tasks, and custom lists that provide flexibility for a wide range of uses. In addition, the software enables users to create Meeting and Document Workspaces directly from within Office applications.
These sites, created using tested templates, facilitate document discussion and meetings, enabling users to work together better in teams.
Collaboration Crossover
New collaboration techniques that are growing rapidly in popularity in the Internet community are starting to crossover into the business world. This is leading to increased possibilities for collaboration within the enterprise.
The challenge is to reap the benefit of the best aspects of these new tools, whilst avoiding the pitfalls that can arise from ignoring these possibilities altogether. These applications cover both asynchronous collaboration, for example, blogs, wikis and podcasting; and synchronous collaboration, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) calls.
Blogging
A blog, short for "Web log", is a Web page containing brief items of information arranged in date order, akin to an on-line diary or journal, often containing links to other Web pages or blogs.
In the enterprise, blogs can be used as a way for Subject Matter Experts to put their knowledge into the organisational domain, and for any individual to publish information that may be of benefit to their colleagues.
A blog is also typically combined with a feedback or discussion facility, allowing others to discuss the content of each post, and can also support a publish/subscribe model when combined with an RSS feed (see below).
The alternatives to a blog might be an e-mail based discussion group, or threaded discussions on an Intranet or portal, but these lose both the personal aspect of a blog, and the convenience of aggregating the author's views on a range of topics into one easily searchable location.
Wikis
A Wiki (variously credited as deriving from the Hawaiian word for quick, or as an acronym for "What I Know Is") is a Web site where the content can be contributed and edited by all participants; the best-known Wiki is Wikipedia - a community-edited encyclopaedia.
Wikis have much in common with blogging, in that individuals can contribute their expertise to an on-line resource, but here the emphasis is on reaching a consensus among the participants.
For some applications this is quite easy to do - a popular use has been within technical support teams to build up a knowledge base on resolving common problems, and FAQ lists for customers or less experienced staff; in other areas, as one might imagine in trying to get experts to agree, a consensus can be difficult to achieve.
RSS
Another disputed acronym, RSS stands either for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, and is a convenient eXtensible Markup Language format for publishing a feed of information from a Web site.
The power of RSS comes through the ability for other sites, or individuals to subscribe to RSS published feeds using an RSS client or aggregator. When combined with a filtering capability, this enables one to receive a customised flow of information from multiple sources, (including blogs and Wikis).
From an enterprise perspective, there are many applications from both the Publish and Subscribe angles that make RSS a powerful tool. It essentially refines access to any source of information, by allowing the recipient to define what sort of material they are interested in, and creating a custom feed; by implementing a management layer it can also help the organisation direct the right information to the right person, whether employee, customer, or partner.
Podcasting
Derived from the ubiquitous Apple music player, podcasting refers to making audio files available over the Web for downloading and listening to. When combined with RSS technology, it can also incorporate a publish/subscribe mechanism.
The files are typically in MP3 format, so can be consumed on most computing devices as well as consumer audio players. In the enterprise, podcasting is rather similar to listening to a business audio cassette or CD on the move. Recordings of executive messages, audio conferences, and presentations can all be easily distributed and consumed at a time that is convenient for the recipient.
VoIP Conferencing
The rise in VoIP is of course already a corporate phenomenon, but it is the interest in services, such as Skype, which provide free-of-charge or low-cost audio conferencing facilities once installed on a PC, that is noteworthy. Currently, setting up multi-party conference calls over the fixed-line network is both inconvenient and expensive.
Using tools such as Skype, it is very simple and free for those who are Skype-enabled. At an enterprise level, this is a simple proposition - if you want to encourage distributed teams to collaborate more frequently, this is a low-cost, low-risk mechanism.
If you have any questions about the subjects covered in this white paper or you would like to find out more about how Oakleigh Consulting could help your organisation, please contact us on 0161 835 4100 or email us.
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