Ever wonder why some collaboration projects take off and become successful but you can't get your company's users to use a simple wiki?  Do your discussion forums in Sharepoint go unused?  You did everything right... didn't you?  Well, the honest truth is that there is no silver bullet to making something popular, but there are a few strategies you can use to deal with the biggest obstacle you face in collaboration which is User Discomfort.  That's right, it's not your processes or your technology, it's not even your management.  The biggest impediment to getting your collaboration project off the ground...

I just read a few interesting posts by Tim Bray and Alex Payne about what to read and how to stay up to date (see below).  Much of what they say I agree with.  The simple problem is that there is just too much stuff out there that is interesting or important on some level.  Combine that with an ever expanding workload, a short attention span, and a fading memory and you have a combination that just can't work long term.  What's interesting is that I've asked several knowledge workers of one sort or another what their biggest problems are...

I have to admit that I'm a bit of a collaboration and community junkie and as such follow some obscure topics.  One topic I've had on my radar for quite some time is Flock Theory.  Flock theory tries to describe the self-organizing and emergent aspects of human behavior.  Succinctly put, behavior in some cases is not a property of any individual person (or bird), but rather emerges as a property of a group or social network (flock).  This concept can be used to describe aspects of both collaborative teams and open source communities.  I'm don't want to analyze the merits...

Teaming 2.0.0 Beta 1 has been released and includes some cool and some surprising changes: The big surprise is that we no longer bundle Liferay with Teaming. Our default configuration is now to run as a standalone web application. We had many requests to make this happen and we did.  For users who really can't live without Liferay we will soon release a Liferay "lite" version that integrates with existing Liferay. The significant new features of 2.0.0 are ... Open source Teaming now includes advanced workflow capabilities that allow an object in the system to have...

Just a quick note about a tutorial I put together today for remote applications, our new data mashup and integration method.  I wrote a PHP application using the Zend Framework and the lighttpd web server to serve it up.  Check it out in the Wiki .  It's a simple application that displays the contents of the HTTP Post that kablink sends your remote application when it asks for an HTML fragment.

Workfow Integration Tutorial

 

Ever wonder how you could integrate your kablink or Novell Teaming instance with a remote system and pass data back and forth?  What if you wanted to send your SAP or SalesForce.com systems some of your kablink data.  You can using custom actions and conditions that can be integrated into the workflow engine processing.  A new tutorial in the Wiki walks you through creating a custom workflow callout that can handle some pretty heavy lifting when it comes to data integration.  This tutorial really gives you a glimpse of the power that was added to Kablink...

How Cool is Conference?

 

We haven't talked enough about ICEcore Conference in the past and that needs to change.  The reasons historically have been that ICEcore's enterprise versions did not sell Conference by itself.  The model for enterprise has been Teaming and Teaming + Conferencing.  You couldn't get a Conference license without Team.  Unfortunately, this hasn't changed, however, it is time to give credit where credit is due and help everyone understand what Conference is and what it can do even when not using the Team component. So what is ICEcore Conference and what does it do?  This may be self-evident but Conference...

Discussion with Zack Grossbart upcoming author of 1-Minute Commute

 

I took the following notes during a call with Zack Grossbart, author of the upcoming book 1-Minute Commute due out in June (I believe). Zack has spent a considerable about of time studying the way open source development teams work and has uncovered some very useful information that I hope we can begin adopting in Kablink. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Look for the 1-Minute Commute at your favorite book store to get all the juicy data Zack uncovered during his research. Second...

FOSDEM was great fun. It was particularly interesting to see all the excitement around XMPP. The Jabber sessions were standing room only. Hopefully we can ride that wave with Conferencing which is based in large part on XMPP. My presentation "Architecture of Collaboration" is available with this entry. Let me know if you have any comments on its contents. There is also a more detailed article about the Knowledge cycle in this month's Novell Connections Magazine.