This is the third in a twelve-part series exploring Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate.
The full research report is available for Download.

Question

How many of the emails you receive require your direct input or feedback on the contents of an attachment?

Survey Comments

• Almost all require my input. I am the editor for all the member and provider communications that are generated from our department. I also respond to RFPs on behalf of our department.
• If I do get attachments, the sender usually wants my opinion on something before that sender does the official ‘mass mailing’.
• Those that don’t require my direct input or feedback often need to be available as references and so need sorting and tracking to keep up with updated versions.
• I myself have discovered that a useful way of obtaining feedback when I have specific questions about an in-process project is to attach an excerpt of a PDF with Acrobat comments embedded. This gets me excellent results — much better than if I simply point the recipient to the PDF and indicate which pages I want them to examine.

Aaron Rester explains why web sites that respond to and enable the collective activity of their audience are less likely to become occasionally noticed but little-used monuments:

Just as Lefebvre leads us to see built spaces not as the expressions of a single architect, but rather as the production of the wide variety of human interactions that occur within them, so websites created by cartographers would cease being grand edifices of unidirectional communication and become instead the collective product of the individuals whose lives intersect within them.

The rise of the social web demands that if we are to help shape meaningful online experiences for our users, we must rethink our traditional role as builders of digital monuments and turn our attention to the close observation of the spaces that our users are producing around us.

I think this is even more true for internal websites, i.e. wikis. Most intranets are “grand edifices of unidirectional communication” whereas wikis can be precisely the opposite, if structured and introduced appropriately.

From an Apple support discussion on why sharing documents online via iWork.com is better than emailing them as attachments:

I don’t need to send to 20 other people, then get 20 mails back and read through those 20 mails. At the same time, each of those 20 has no idea what the other 19 are thinking and thus means there will be many overlapped ideas in those 20 mails I have to go through.

That nicely sums it up.

Meryl Evans wrote a guide for remote workers on Web Worker Daily, and included this tip from me on maintaining strong communication:

Communicating Without Geek Speak

Stewart Mader: A strong ability to communicate about what you’re doing. If you work for a company, you need to be good at using the intranet, enterprise wiki or other social computing tools to keep others up to date on what you’re doing, ask for their feedback and make sure they know you’re available to help them too.

This is the second in a twelve-part series exploring Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate.
The full research report is available for Download.

Question

We asked how many of the emails people receive on a daily basis contain attachments.

65% of respondents said a few of the daily emails they receive contain attachments, and 25% said at least half contain attachments. Only 2% said that the vast majority include attachments.

Survey Comments

• Usually, the attached file is only a page or two long. The content could easily be put up on a wiki for review/comments/reading.
• I have emphasized within those I communicate with to use links to docs on doc server instead of e-mail. In fact, I have an interesting diagram about the problems caused by e-mailing documents (out of synch with master, mailbox full, etc). Many employees at my company ‘get it’.
• We generally include the path to network folder locations rather than attaching files.
• Too many do not grasp the concept of shared folders.
• The government is bad at sending a long chain of emails and responses with an attachment still attached from the original email.

Billy Cripe on why disciplined and purposeful use of wikis and content management systems can help keep them from becoming a “dumping ground”:

Dumping grounds for documents will not help your Enterprise 2.0 projects. Dumps are not as useful, navigable, or referencable as planned cities. Sure you might find something neat or novel in a dump but the process is not repeatable and does not scale…The point is that E2.0 requires purpose and ECM requires discipline for success. There is a human element to managing information that is all too often left out by technology vendors and overlooked by clients.

Choosing the right wiki for your team, project, or organization is essential. The right tool will help catalyze adoption, encourage continued use, and help people get their work done well. So how can you find the best enterprise wiki for your needs?

I’m publishing the Enterprise Wiki Software Guide to help you get started. The guide contains descriptions and screenshots of twelve wikis that are designed with business and organizational needs in mind. These tools contain such capabilities and features as:

• Workspaces – organize information by group, project, product, etc.
• Permissions – set read and edit permissions for individual pages or entire spaces.
• User Management/LDAP – integrate with central user stores, like Active Directory
• Notifications – get notified by email or RSS when a page is updated.
• Design & Branding – match the look and feel of your website, intranet, etc.
• Discussion – threaded discussion can take place right alongside the content on wiki pages. For example, if you’re using the wiki for your employee handbook, someone can ask a question, clarify a policy, or suggest a refinement.
• Industry-Standard Databases – Oracle, MySQL, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server
• Templates – placeholder text people can use to spark activity on newly created pages.

I’ll continue to add more information on the products already listed, and add new products to the list. I’ll also be adding more features to the guide as well, so that you can rate and share your experiences with these tools. In the meantime, you’re welcome to post your thoughts on the guide and listed tools in the comments section of the Enterprise Wiki Software Guide.

Socialtext announced yesterday that they’re giving free access to their wiki and associated tools (blogging, micro-messaging, spreadsheet, etc.) for up to 50 people:

A free, hosted Socialtext account for up to 50 people from your company. It is private between co-workers. You and your colleagues get private, “Twitter‑like” micro‑blogging, social networking, and a shared wiki workspace.

Good way to get teams started, and once you hit 50 people, that’s a good indication that it’s worthwhile to invest the money and further grow adoption throughout your organization.

Mindtouch has announced a new product – Collaborative Intranet – that’s aimed at making corporate intranets more data-rich by pulling information from multiple other sources of business knowledge, and combining that with the interactive nature of an enterprise wiki. Here’s how the company describes what it does:

By deploying MindTouch Collaborative Intranet, companies can federate content from across the data and application silos their employees use each day — ERP, CRM, file servers, email, databases, web-services infrastructures, social networks — to create a vibrant real time information fabric. MindTouch Collaborative Intranet connects the legacy business systems companies use every day and pulls data from each individual silo into a single, common and unified Web interface.

From a 2005 article on How To Use Wikis For Business by Ezra Goodnoe in InformationWeek:

Wikis are structurally capable of handling conversation, but it is not their forte; instead, wikis excel at collaboration. They are intended to maintain a series of unique documents as their content evolves and to provide an organic means of organizing that information.

For a four year old quote, this is still very descriptive. Their ability to handle conversation has been refined and improved, but their core ability to handle interaction and collaboration on the contents of documents is still as strong as ever, because it is elegantly simple.