Usually collaboration using a whiteboard either has to happen in person or is fragmented because of the lack of a truly collaborative connection. You could stream a video of the board as it is being marked up but that’s a broadcast model. You could take a photo of the board and email it or upload into Evernote and share it, but that’s asynchronous.

With eBeam, you can write on a whiteboard and the system picks up what you’re writing and drawing and transmits it digitally in real time to your collaborators. The system creates less friction within the meeting (no one gets stuck re-copying the notes for the team, and remote participants immediately see the whiteboard content) and allows you to write and illustrate with a more natural flow while sharing the data in a smoother way. The low-bandwidth data transfer can be easily received even on home networks, and there are no big files to download. Even if you do choose to email the file to other participants after the meeting, the file size typically is just a few hundred KB.

Those away from the whiteboard can view for free, using the downloadable desktop viewer, and also annotate the board data during a session.

If you opt for the Projection pack upgrade, you can use the setup with a projector and turn a larger projected display area into a giant tablet, using an electronic stylus like a mouse with drawing functions. Then you can pull in other digital content such as image files and other files to mark up and share with team members and other collaborators.

You also can record your whiteboarding session and play it back with or without voice so you can see what you produced, in context, and in the order the activity occurred. eBeam can be used independently or as a complement to a web conferencing system. The system is integrated into the WebEx conferencing application.

The eBeam system comes with an eraser, a package of regular whiteboard markers as well as special sleeves in red, green, blue and black that slide over the markers so anything you write can be read by the system. There is also a receiver that you can place on any side of a standard whiteboard to read marker movements via USB or Bluetooth.

Base product lists at $899.95 USD for the USB version and $1049.95 for both USB and Bluetooth capabilities.

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Here’s a look at what Rondee offers today. There’s one notable change from 2008: Users do have to sign up to use the service, but it is a quick and easy process. Just enter your email and wait for the confirmation email to access just the on-demand service (you can enter more information to get a full-featured account).

On Demand

For impromptu calls or calls that are scheduled through your company’s calendar, you can notify call participants directly and provide them with the Rondee call-in number. You can register multiple unique PIN codes and choose number combinations that are easy for you to remember. In addition, you can create and “assign” different PINs with unique attributes including whether or not you want the call to automatically record, if you want call statistics sent to you after the call and the sound effects you want to signify when people enter or exit the call (chime, chime and name announced, or no sound). So you can use different PINs for your virtual team, vendor calls or recording a podcast. You can even add a listen-only PIN code to a call to give to participants for a teleseminar style call.

After your call, you can go to your PIN dashboard to access call data and if you opted for recordings, the audio MP3 file that you can listen to and download.

Scheduled

Rondee can also schedule calls, emailing participants directly with the call-in information. As part of this feature, Rondee offers attendance tracking and agenda archiving, so the system can keep tabs for you on who was really on that call. You can set up recurring calls for weekly team calls or a regularly scheduled training session. You can also enable recording, allow participants to invite others to the call and decide whether or not to get call stats emailed to you.

Participants get an email invitation with a link to a landing page on the Rondee site. On that page they can also see the call details, a call agenda they can edit, a drop down menu where they can confirm their participation, and a place to add comments.

Premium

The premium service offers two key benefits beyond the free service. Rather than the free Rondee’s California phone numbers for the call, premium users get a toll-free number. Rondee charges 5 cents per minute. Premium users also get text transcripts of their calls, which are 97 percent accurate and are delivered within two or three days. Rondee charges $1 per minute for transcription, with a minimum charge of $20.

If you’re looking for a straightforward and easy free conference call solution with both the on-demand and scheduling features, Rondee is still in the running as a viable and useful solution.

How are you handling your conference calls? Pros and cons?

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On the BlackBerry, WatchDox users can render PDF and Microsoft Office. It offers features allowing users to:

• Share and view documents securely on BlackBerry devices.
• Restrict shared documents from being copied, printed or forwarded.
• Eliminate documents remotely, if needed.

The company also announced updates to its Apple iOS app, including:

• Document sync. Users can securely sync their online documents or their virtual data room folders through the secure app versus less secure consumer-grade syncing methods.
• Passcode protection. In case of device loss or theft, a passcode provides an additional layer of security against information leaks.
• Performance enhancements. Access to documents should be speedier.

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The latest developments with Knoodle include:

• You can now add surveys, quizzes, video and audio on the fly at the time you create a presentation, instead of toggling to another screen to pull them in.
• The ability to drag-and-drop multiple files for easy bulk uploading.
• The ability to fine-tune slide syncing: If you have the time code, you can type in the exact time you want a slide to appear in your video or your audio track.
• A new feature to manage your presentations so you can see all the presentations you’ve created in a single viewing window to help streamline the editing and publishing process.

According to the Knoodle folks, today’s workplace looks like the Web: social, integrated and on-demand. There is an increasing need for fast knowledge sharing, particularly with the rise of virtual companies. And learning within virtual teams must come from everyone regardless of location, role or function. Everyone has the responsibility to be both teacher and learner. The demand from virtual companies is that the tools they use resemble social tools: they are more familiar and easier to adopt and use. The challenge when using a holistic, social approach to knowledge sharing and information flow, within a virtual or dispersed team in particular, is to manage the chaos. Tools must be pervasive, organized, and offer some measure of control and preferably with a dashboard view.

So where does Knoodle fit in to this concept of holistic, social learning? It’s easy to implement, even for people who are not professional producers of presentations. You can create content on the fly or take pre-existing content, including slides, audio, graphics and text, straight into the Knoodle application. If everyone can capture their knowledge from the field, from their home offices, from their cubicles, and make it readily available to the rest of the team, there is less “silo-ing” of information and learning.

Pricing is flexible and based on customer needs and required hours per month in terms of viewing of presentations. You can ramp up your plan or downgrade it based on actual usage. If you export your video presentations, viewing is done out of the Knoodle system so doesn’t count against your subscription plan.

How are you capturing knowledge within your organization to foster social learning?

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One of the most common definitions of crowdsourcing is “an open call to an undefined group of people.” This definition would seem to exclude a call for input to a more defined and limited group: your employees. Crowdsourcing techniques, however, leverage online technologies to “harness” the input of many and to apply that input toward getting results of some kind, so why can’t they also be applied to the people within an organization instead of without?

Some popular uses of crowdsourcing include:

• Crowd wisdom where many can contribute possible answers to questions.
• Crowd innovation where many can participate in problem-solving.
• Crowd creation where many can be part of producing something and often each participant takes a smaller piece of the whole based on their skills and abilities.
• Crowd voting where the best ideas “bubble” to the top by community review and voting.

Why not take these models and apply them to problem-solving, creative brainstorming, and creation tasks within your organization? You can even use readily available crowdsourcing technology and platforms to facilitate those processes.

Where can you go for crowdsourcing technology? Companies like Chaordix and Spigit specialize in “innovation management,” and they’ve built online tools to manage input from groups and allow for voting and other features to facilitate “crowd” participation. Even a DIY crowdsourcing system such as the one offered by Crowdtap could prove an interesting tool when the “crowd” you use for input and feedback isn’t a large random pool of unknown people but actually the folks working within your own organization.

In organizations, there is a tendency for each team member to operate strictly within their department or division. In virtual teams, these divisions may be less obvious, but the silos still exist, and may even be worsened due to the lack of proximity. By using crowdsourcing tools and applying more democratic methods of soliciting crowd input, allowing for group voting of ideas, and reaching across departments for participation, you may be able to:

• Innovate more quickly because you are tapping into your team in different ways
• Identify issues and reach solutions more effectively by utilizing your team more widely
• Gain insights into your team’s talents and abilities by providing more open opportunities for participation

In some situations, crowdsourcing can take on a competitive edge in the form of a contest or competition where participants are rewarded in some way for the “best” solution — and the best solution is often not something determined by a top-down approach, but rather by the votes of the crowdsourcing community as a whole. We’ve previously written about the gamification of work; in some circumstances, applying a competitive layer to participation in problem-solving or innovation initiatives can increase motivation and stimulate better responses.

Using your team for crowdosurcing can not only help to “get things done,” it can potentially produce fresh, interesting and beneficial results.

Editor’s note: Aliza’s new book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Crowdsourcing, has just been published by Alpha.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng user lusi 

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“One of the problems in today’s marketplace is how loosely people are using the term,” says Louis Hayner, Chief Sales Officer for Alteva, a provider offering interconnected hosted voice and messaging services with the Microsoft Communication Services product suite.

“‘True UC’ means bringing certain types of different technologies together to create one communications platform – instant messenger, email, workflow applications, CRM, procurement, and even programs like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Exchange.” In short, Hayner says UC combines voice communications (IP phone) and office communications (instant messenger, video conferencing, desktop sharing, telepresence, etc.) and can include additional systems such as CRM.

While Alteva is an enterprise-level solution, another example of a UC provider is Onebox, a suite of services including phone, fax, email, conference calling, calendar and web sharing under a single platform. Its all-in-one virtual phone solution also features an auto-attendant, professional greetings, voicemail, online faxing, and conference calling to manage all business communications both internally and externally.

There are many people and entities who can benefit from UC, says Bill Threlkeld, Senior Manager of Public Relations at j2 Global Communications, Inc., the parent company of Onebox, including:

• Companies with a mobile workforce that require workers to be away from the office but still be connected. UC solutions like Onebox or Alteva let workers receive calls to their business line at any phone they designate, such as their mobile, their home office, a remote worksite, etc.
• Entrepreneurs and SMBs that don’t want to make a significant investments in hardware like PBX systems, fax machines, and other machines but still require the functionality of these tools.
• Companies with a virtual office structure with workers who work at home or from satellite offices that still need to maintain the perception of an “under one roof” image to the outside world.

The benefits of the different parts of UC can be increased by bringing them together into a more cohesive package including cost savings and seamless technology with less “cobbling together” of different systems. UC can increase day-to-day productivity for teams, putting different communication tools at the ready, usually via a consolidated dashboard for easier access. UC systems can be easier for team members to adopt because there aren’t multiple, separate software packages to train them on to bring them up to speed. UC can also present a more unified front to vendors and clients and anyone outside the internal team.

A system like Alteva’s lets you choose from various levels of UC packages or go a la carte. If you only have a need for hosted VoIP, for example, you can buy that first then later add other features as needed.

Hayner says there are multiple benefits to Alteva’s service (most of which also apply to other UC providers):

• Business continuity. You get direct access to redirect calls or relocate your entire business in the event of a storm or disaster.
• Mitigation of technology obsolescence. You have immediate access to new features and functionality without costly upgrades, no maintenance fees, no costly moves, adds or changes.
• Scalability. You can easily add and remove users as your business expands and contracts so the system fits your business needs.
• Consolidation. Instead of keeping track of multiple vendors, you deal with a single vendor with one bill to pay.
• Improving employee efficiency and customer satisfaction. Your salespeople, remote workers and mobile executives can do business from any location and never miss a call or message.

According to Hayner, there are several things you should keep in mind when shopping around for a UC solution.

“At the very least you should expect some integration between your phone system and your messaging (email) platform,” says Hayner. “Expect that your provider can offer the ability to provide voicemail, fax, email, text messaging, voice communications and calendaring in one synchronized platform.”

Also, make sure that as you evaluate UC, find out if it integrates with your CRM. Can you integrate your phone status with your IM status? When you play a voicemail in your email, does it change the status of that voicemail on your phone system?

“There are many solutions that really just pass data off and forget about it. They aren’t really unified, they’re just integrated,” says Hayner.

Threlkeld recommends checking a provider’s history of reliability, financial stability and customer support. Also make sure their services are scalable. You may also want to check for month-to-month plans if you aren’t ready to make a long-term commitment.

How have you cobbled together your communications tools or have you gone the UC route?

Image courtesy of stock.xchng user windys

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So where do we go from here? Many of us who work with virtual teams have tried adopting collaboration and communication systems that are more fully integrated and where the conversations are archived and searchable. These tools combine email capabilities (receiving and sending emails that post into the system), message boards or forums where topic-specific conversations can take place, and in some cases, IM-like, or even Twitter-like, functions. These systems also often include document uploading, sharing and collaboration, task management, and project management tools. But none of the tools I’ve experimented with try to re-imagine the way we communicate online. Enter Talkwheel, which positions itself as an integrated communications tool for enterprises and offers a novel way to capture, visualize and follow conversations.

Rethink our collaborative communications

I have to be honest; it has taken me a long time to “get” Talkwheel, and even though now I “get it,” it still doesn’t appeal to me. But it does present an interesting way of rethinking how we communicate and collaborate and what happens to our conversations in different places that are inter-related but not inter-linked.

Talkwheel’s premise is that if you install and use the platform with your team, all of the conversations you have — both in real-time and asynchronously — will be captured and organized in a way that lets you visualize them. You can form Talkwheel Groups to bring together specific groupings of people with whom you are communicating, such as a group for a specific project or a group for a particular department. When you bring people into a group, they are set up with Talkwheel accounts (you can also use Facebook to bring in your Facebook friends) and any subsequent messaging amongst group members will show up in several ways: as threaded and nested messages on the right side of the interface, and around the “talkwheel” on the left.

The wheel is meant to represent a round table, while the people in the group are represented by their icons around the wheel. Each person’s comments are symbolized by color-colored dots and the connections between the comments are illustrated as lines connecting those dots. As a very visual thinker, I want to fall in love with that wheel, but it really falls flat for me and feels unnecessary. Part of this feeling may be coming from the fairly primitive interface; it feels like somebody’s hand-drawn image of what they’d like this platform to become, rather than an elegant user interface that illustrates the idea of a “conversation wheel.”

Harness disparate conversations

Despite the shortcomings in user experience, the premise of Talkwheel is an interesting one: Bringing the different ways we are communicating into a single platform so conversations aren’t lost, and connections between conversations are made and are more explicit. But, despite its novel visual interface, Talkwheel isn’t the first to tackle this communications challenge and is up against social business tools Yammer, Salesforce Chatter and Socialtext, collaboration platforms like Glasscubes and Huddle, and perhaps even the new “Circles” feature in Google+.

What is more exciting about Talkwheel, however, are the analytical tools the company is rolling out. Right now, you can measure Sentiment of conversations. In the same way that you might want to know the positive, negative and neutral sentiments of conversations taking place on blogs, social networks and the like, Talkwheel lets you measure the sentiment of your internal and external team conversations. As more and more virtual teams form and subtle cues of in-person conversation are lost, being able to “take the emotional temperature” of a group conversation will have a lot of value for the manager of virtual teams.

Even though we are all in the habit of flitting between our emails, which may or may not e integrated with our collaboration tools and then our IMs and then message boards, we probably know deep down inside that this isn’t efficient; we’re just used to doing it. Talkwheel offers a solution, but it’s only a matter of time before we know if any of us are willing to break our bad communications habit and get a better grip on our collaborative conversations.

How are you harnessing your emails, IMs and message board posts as you collaborate with your team?

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You can download Soonr via iTunes or from the Android Market and subscriptions come with a 30-day free trail. Prices have increased slightly since we last covered the service, but the company has added the new collaboration features and more storage space. Premium accounts are now $9.95 per month for three users with 25 GB of storage (a price increase of $2 per month, but providing 15 GB more storage), while Soonr Pro is $29.95 per month for five users and 100 GB of storage (a price increase of $10 per month, but 60 GB more storage). You can also now customize the Pro service to include more storage space or more users and the site instantly calculates your monthly cost.

Soonr supports Mac and Windows, and a variety of mobile devices including Android, iPhone and BlackBerry. You can also access Soonr via your iPad or an Android (Honeycomb) tablet.

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Alfresco Team is an open-source, professional tool for content collaboration that enters the sharing and collaboration market with enterprise-oriented social and security features not found in some Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products.

Getting more social with collaboration

Alfresco Team’s “dashboard portal” revolves around content and the development, sharing, collaboration and tracking of large amounts of content and managing workflow. Content can include business documents from  Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint; image files from Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop; and even audio and video. The portal can be used by such groups as advertising teams working on ad copy and graphics, or creative teams managing video production, from script to storyboard to final edit.

Alfresco Team includes social features to increase interactions between team members, such as: the ability to “Like” and comment on content, a threaded discussion board and an activity stream to track what has been done to a file by each team member that has access. Alfresco Team also captures the dialogue around file collaboration that can often be missed.

Alfresco Team offers real-time collaboration around content using a smooth integration with Google Docs. Files can be “checked out” to Google Docs, and team members can be given access for real-time content collaboration. When the document is checked back in to Alfresco Team, the file’s version number is updated.

Secure mobile access for iOS

As more companies are considering providing their teams with tablet computers, but are concerned about security issues, Alfresco Team has addressed this issue by releasing a native iOS app. On the iPhone, the app can take photos or make audio or video recordings and securely add them directly into the Alfresco Team system. The iPad version provides fast, secure access to documents and files on the server; iPad 2 users can also capture images, audio and video.

Alfresco Team is available for $199 per user per year, or 10 users for $1,990 per year. Teams from 10 to 200 team members get a reduced rate of $79 per year per user. Teams of five or fewer users can deploy the software for free either on their own server, on an Amazon EC2 account, or even on a computer desktop.

How are you managing the sharing, collaboration and tracking of large amounts of content amongst your team?

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After signing up (free), you can start creating your “traps” for content, based on a keyword, or series of keywords, or URL. Trap.it’s AI goes to work immediately, prompting you first to give a thumbs up or thumbs reaction to the content it initially delivers from over 50,000 original content sources on the Internet. By the fifth or sixth time you give input on the content you see, the software goes to work, refining the search results to fill your trap. You’re essentially training Trap.it to understand what you need and want.

Trap.it refines each of your traps based on both your explicit input and implicit actions, such as content you delete, to deliver the most relevant content based on your needs and tastes. You can set up as many traps as you’d like, based on everything from broad categories to extremely niche and specific information. Each trap contains a rich ontology that is unique to you, not a rehash of search results culled from other people.

You can consume your traps in three main ways:

1. A tile view where each article found is presented within a “cube” with an image and either summary text or a short excerpt of the content.
2. A list view that will be more familiar to you if you like to consume RSS feeds in a reader;
3. A page-by-page view where you can click on left or right arrows placed on either side of an article you’ve accessed to allow browsing of your trap content.

At the top of each article is the Trap.it navigation, where you can give thumbs up or down as well as save the article using the Read Later button which creates a reading list in a similar manner to Instapaper. Each trap you create can be shared publicly on Twitter or Facebook as well as shared privately by emailing a short URL generated automatically by the site.

Trap.it has worked hard to make the site and the presentation of content approachable and deceptively simple, but the technology behind the interface is sophisticated, robust and scalable.

From a work standpoint, Trap.it can distill and filter vast amounts of content produced daily on the Web into a highly targeted and constantly refined set of traps that you can access any time so you don’t just get the same old articles and posts you see retweeted in your Twitterstream. The folks at Trap.it hope you use their site for more than just professional work or research but for personal passions as well, from gardening to cooking to travel.

You can set up an account with Trap.it using Facebook Connect or Twitter OAuth, or manually by using this invite link (good for 500 new users).

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