In this article we are going to enrich this discussion in sharing our experiences with changes in project communication due to microblogging usage. Read the rest of this entry »
As with Twitter you can use the shortcode @<username> in Communote, too. Use this code to explicitly address a posting to a user. Every user can choose how Communote should react on a @-mention: there is an email notification and the fast possibility of instant messaging (Jabber/XMPP).
The big advantage of this form of task assignment is transperency. Not only the project management and @tom know the task but the whole team. Through this, everybody knows who to ask for task-related questions. Further, team members can share their knowledge (i.e. to Mr Miller or customer ABC).
Build a Project Documentation
It is very fast and easy to post short summaries of meetings and conversations. In doing so, team members inform stakeholders who were not present in the meeting. Furthermore, Communote helps when you need to research for old facts. It has become your seamless project memory.
Discussion
Projects with complex tasks need discussions between the team members to find the right way to achieve the goals. It can be hard to organise such discussion meetings if the team works distributed or is very big. In a meeting, you also have social problems like group think or fear. Communote is a perfect platform for an open discussion among team members. As it enables asynchronous discussions you can also revive older discussions and thoughts.
Knowledge Identification
Communote will be your central platform for communication and knowledge. With asking “Who has experiences with ITIL?” you do not have to flood everybody’s email boxes. This team member who could give a positive answer will notice the keyword “ITIL” and post an answer. The others do not get bothered.
Management of Documents
You can use attachments with every Communote posting. Therefore the tool is also a fast and easy platform for a light-weight project document management.
Multi Project Management
Communote is a multi-microblogging platform. You can start as much microblogs as you want and add users to the single microblogs. Using this you can unite different projects on a single platform. The project manager sees all postings from all of her projects in an integrated view. You will love it!
Projects teams usually have to handle a large amount of information. Also, the team members often work in different locations and sometimes do not know each other very well. That is why it can be hard to build a common understanding of the tasks or to achieve team spirit. This is where microblogging steps in. In writing and reading many small and informal information snippets your team members have an “I-am-near-by” experience and will be aware of what theire colleagues are doing.
We collected a number of other arguments for the use of Communote as project management tool in the following table:
Transparency
In using microblogging the whole project and its processes become transparent for the team, the manager and other stakeholders. You have access to the informal communication of team members and therefore it is possible to anticipate chances/risks or good/bad developments much earlier.
Speed
Because of the transparency every team member is aware of problems or change requests and can therefore act fast and early.
Self-organisation
Communote supports self-organisation in project teams. Because every important information is available via the microblogging platform, all team members or sub-projects can plan their activities on an up-to-date information base. This frees the project manager from many of the coordination tasks.
Mobility
Communote comes with a mobile client. Using this you can send postings via mobile phone or PDA. This integrates travelling team members in the project’s information flow.
Documentation
If you use Communote for your project communication you seamlessly write a project history (like a project diary). And: you do not only document facts but also the underlying decision processes.
Networking
Microblogging supports networking. Open your project microblog to the whole company and you will discover valuable hints from colleagues addressing your problems or risks.
At Communardo the microblog has become a most important means of communication for many projects. In one of the following blog posts we will explain how to use Communote in projects and how this changes the team communications within projects.
Valuable ideas and good thoughts are not only born when we are sitting in front of our pc. Often they appear on the train, in the hotel or an walk. We have developed a mobile client for mobile phones and PDAs for this purpose. The tool is basesd on Java and uses Communote’s new JSON API. It supports a wide range of devices, including the Blackberry.
Our team members Andreas and Enrico presented a preview version of the mobile client last week at the MobileCamp in Dresden. You can find additional background information on mobile microblogging usage on their slides:
Our development team used the last weeks to implement a number of feature requests and some great enhancements. The three highlights are the new auto-save function, the IP range filter and the integration to the wiki tool Confluence:
Auto-Save Functionality
There is no character limitation in Communote and so even longer information snippets can be managed there. For example many users write short meeting protocols right into their project microblog. Especially for such use cases the new auto-save functionality was designed. It makes sure that problems with your internet connection or a problem with the browser does not lead to a loss of important information: the text is saved in the background and is restored automatically.
IP Range Filter
Using this new functionality you can restrict access to your Communote to certain IP ranges. With the IP range filter you can control your company’s information flow even better.
Confluence Integration
While Communote hosts the dynamic flow of information, wikis are very good in the joint creation and editing of documents. Our new Confluence plugin connects both worlds: you can show and create Communote postings right into Confluence wiki pages. An example use case is a project wiki with wiki sites for every sub-project (for static information like team members and tasks) including current micro-postings from Communote.
Other new functionality
automatic database updates
extended API
blocking of accounts after the wrong password
Favicon
Various bug fixes
The new features have been made available with the new Version 1.0.1.
Microblogging is a great tool for knowledge-intensive work environments. This is the case for academic research and education. One of our customers, the chair for Management Information Systems of Chemnitz University, was featured with a posting about educational microblogging on the well-known Touchbase-Blog last week.
The research group will attend the Educamp in Ilmenau (Germany) at the weekend and discuss innovative concepts for education. This is a great chance to discuss microblogging with them and get the latest news on their microblogging experiences.
We at Communardo are using Microblogging with Communote nearly half a year now. I am going to share the main lessons from this case:
Get the leaders
You might be able to implement Microblogging bottom-up without leadership support. However, I recommend convincing at least one “communicator”. Microblogging is about information telling. That is why you need people who have something to tell what other people want (or have to) hear. Your communicator could be a project manager, a well-known expert or even the head of your company. As the communicator uses Microblogging he/she creates a stream of followers.
For instance our CEO Dirk uses Communote heavily. If you want to get in touch with him the Microblog is a good way to do this. Self-projection might be another driver to use Microblogging when your boss reads the postings.
Create perceived critical mass
You do not have to force every employee of your company to use Communote from day one. Especially in big companies a sufficient way to launch Microblogging is to focus on single departments and spread the word afterwards out of these early adopters. The most important factor seems to be perceived critical mass. We used Microblogging in a test project with only 3 members before we developed Communote. These 3 people had one common task to work on and for that reason all conditions for a productive Microblogging usage were fulfilled. Later, when Communote was available for internal use these 3 people were spreading the idea of Microblogging within Communardo by word of mouth. Within a couple of weeks more than 50 colleagues joined making Communote the main communications platform besides email.
Integrate your Microblog
Would you register for yet another service from your IT department? No? So make it easy for your users to try Microblogging and experience the benefits. You can integrate Communote with your existing LDAP directory easily. This way people can login using their normal user names and passwords. They will appreciate that.
Another important aspect of integration is to offer different ways of content consumption and creation. Communote offers secure RSS feeds and Instant Messaging (XMPP, Jabber) integration. A mobile client and portal widgets will follow soon. Given these possibilities, your users do not have to visit yet another website from time to time. They can just integrate it in their already present tools. This will raise acceptance for Microblogging.
Do not forget the passive users
An analysis of user behavior in our internal Communote showed that one third of users post less than 1 message per week. This does not say anything about their acceptance of the tool. We asked some of them and found out that they use Communote really often as a reader. So as with every communication tool there are different kinds of users. Ask them from time to time if they keep using the Microblog and try to encourage them to share their thoughts there.
Next issue
We are going to continue this blog posting. In the next issue we will discuss important decisions you will have to face right from the start. This includes rights management policy, blog creation policy and tagging.
Communote will be presented at Cebit fair in Hannover from March 3rd to 8th 2009. We choose the brand new Webciety area for this years presentation of products & services from Communardo. You will find us in Hall 6, G60 (T1.04). One of our main exhibits will be Communote and its applications within enterprises.
Communote will also be part of a presentation of Dirk Röhrborn on “Microsharing im Unternehmen: Wie Dokumentieren und Lernen Teil der täglichen Arbeit wird” at the “Learning & Knowledge Solutions” forum on wednesday, March 4th at 1 pm in hall 6 / B 34.
If you would like to meet us at Cebit please get in touch with us via (e-mail) communote (at) communardo (dot) de or twitter.
Do you need a free ticket? Please let us know. We have a limited number of tickets available for you. We look forward to meeting you in Hannover.
The first european conference on microblogging took place in Hamburg/Germany on January 23-24, 2009. MBC09 was a mashup format of conference and barcamp. Many interesting people from the german microblogging scene gathered there together with a number of internation guests, such as Evan Prodomou the inventor of the open source service identi.ca.
Main topics at the event were corporate twittering, internal enterprise microblogging, business models, microblogging clients for microblogging and also some technical aspects.
MBC09 was a great opprotunitiy for us to present the enterprise version of Communote to the public. The slides are available on slideshare, the video will follow.
Martin & Dirk had two great days in Hamburg filled with lots of interesting talks. Some of the people we met even started their enterprise Communote account during the session already. Thank you all very much for your interest and also the valueable feedback given to us. Further development of our service will benefit a lot from that.
After you signed up for a beta-account of Communote’s enteprise version you are the administrator of your own microblogging system. We designed the adminstrator’s workbench as simple as possible. In fact, the only recurrent task for you will be to manage new users. But of course there is other functionality and I am going to give you a short overview in this blog post.
As an administrator you will see the link to the workbench on the top of Communote:
The first admin page contains some statistical information. There are several limits in the beta version and here you find your free quota. The menu item “Client profile” enables you to customize Communote’s look and feel. You can change the name of your microblogging system, say what to do with new users and set your own logo. Communote can inform users via email if they have new @-replies. You may change the email’s signature here, too.
The next pages are for changing your password and for configuring your LDAP connection. What you will need more often is the section “User management”. It looks like this:
In the user management view you can see all users of your microblogging system and the status of them. There are different user statuses in Communote:
Registered: The user registered to your microblogging system (typed in his email address)
Invited: An administrator (maybe you) invited the user
Confirmed: The user confirmed his email address by clicking on the confirmation link
Active: It depends on your settings if new users get activated automatically as soon as they finishe the registration form (name, password…) or if you want to manually activate them.
So if you choose to handle your new users manually you will receive an email once somebody finishes the registration procedure (registered, confirmed and filled the form). In this case you can follow the link in this email to the user management workbench. Just choose the user here and click the button “activate user” if you wish so. You could also assign management rights to users here. This means that they would have access to the administrator’s workbench, too:
And that was it. If you want to invite users directly to your Communote account you can do this by using the last item “Invite users to your client”.
Microblogging is a rather new and unique form of communication. There are a number of discussions on the effects of this technique. Justin Franks refers to Harvard professor Hansen and argues that the “search barrier” in organisations is pulled down, while Stefan Hauptmann explains the phenomenon with the sociological concept of “unlikely communication”.
