Communote offers a wide range of applications in the enterprise. We ourselves are always thrilled by what scenarios customers come to us, and how Communote is used by our customers.

We want to introduce the use of Communote in the following areas:

Corporate Communication

„… finally I see my employees’ concerns, and can easily give new impetus to different hierarchical levels.“

Your employees are stressed out because of permanently getting new cc emails? Nevertheless, important information do not find the proper recipients?

By using Communote, you can communicate with your employees in a goal-oriented way, and open a feedback-channel for new ideas. Decisions, current issues, and statuses are transparent and clear to everyone.

This enables a more effective and more personal respond for employees. A communication of new strategies and tactical activities is created and gives new impetus.

„… within only a short time, I receive feedbacks, hints, advices, and support.“

By using Communote, networks are created beyond internal company limits and competences.

• exchange of information without any barriers and administration
• new perspectives for a company’s suggestion system
• ideas arise during ordinary work and can be discussed, and encouraged directly over there
• decisions are accelerated, and problem solving transparent for everyone
• new issues and ideas get a direct feedback
• the innovative strength is a huge competitive advantage

Sales and Marketing

„… all employees concerned do really get to know all important topics. Information does not disappear in personal email accounts anymore.“

Salesmen have a key function in your company, and are the direct link to your costumers. Unfortunately, the integration of salesmen in the company and in its specialty department is often missing.

With the help of Communote, salesmen are integrated in the company. Customers’ feedback and requirements are clearly visible. Specialty departments can better understand its customers’ requirements.

The provision of direct customer information by salesmen enables a much better customer and market orientation in your company that can help your company to yield a competitive advantage.

Communication with partners

“… partners and suppliers can be integrated into my projects as if they were on-site …”

Take Communote to work more closely with its partners in the supply chain. Integrate external workers to your projects and issues, and take advantage of the strength of informal communication.

In this article we are going to enrich this discussion in sharing our experiences with changes in project communication due to microblogging usage.

Digitalisation of Micro Information

The biggest part of every-day workspace communication are small pieces of micro information like questions, answers, ideas, problems, status reports or short documentations of decisions. Still it is common practise to write such information on post-it notes, use emails with a wide range of addressees or share it via instant messaging. This means that such information is virtually lost for further usage. Communote fits the demands of micro information much better. It makes it very easy to publish short information nuggets. In Communote, these pieces of information are available to everybody who could need them immediately. This keeps your colleagues up-to-date and enables future use of your valuable micro information.

Tool Shift

In using microblogging you change the usage of existing communication channels like email, blogs and wikis. We see a more focused use of email. It is used more in the original sense as electronic version of letters for direct and personal one-to-one communication. This significantly leads to a reduction of email overload. The same focus on original strengths of the medium can be seen in usage of wikis and blogs. Wikis are perfect for shared creation of well-structured documents like concepts and documentations and are used for this purpose in microblogging-enabled projects, too. Further, classic blogs are still in use for personal thoughts, argumentations and reports with a more formal character and longer as well as more thoughtful contents.

Information Awareness

We hear from our customers that the massively increased information awareness is one of the biggest advantages of Communote. Team members are significantly better informed about the current work status of others, especially about other sub-projects or work packages. This effect can be achieved when every team member gives short status updates on his/her work status, problems, issues, ideas and feelings.

Efficient Meetings and Fast Reactions

If you use Communote the time you spend in meetings will dramatically decrease. Further, not only the duration of meetings will shrink but you will have to schedule fewer meetings. The original purpose of team meetings is the joint discussion of important issues and decision making. However, much too often most meetings consist of status reports to get everybody up-to-date. As you have Communote for the status updates your meetings will be much more efficient. The high information awareness leads to another effect: your team members are able to react much faster on current developments and not only after they heard them in a team meeting.

Support for Project Managers

When using Communote, project managers do not have to spend much of their time in being the information broker for their teams. Team members are aware about their colleague’s actions and can communicate directly with them while this communication still stays under control of the team leader. Communote gives an overview on the current project situation immediately.

Knowledge Sharing

If you open your project microblogging for others in your company you can benefit from their knowledge. We see it often that people give answers to problems which occurred in other projects. In many cases these very valuable hints come from people who would not be asked for help as nobody knows that they would know it. The whole organisational communication becomes much more flexible. A kind of ‘network communication’ replaces the typical ‘top-down communication’.

This series of enterprise usecases of Communote micrblogs will be continued shortly. We are looking forward to your feedback.

We collected a number of other arguments for the use of Communote as project management tool in the following table:

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.

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.