Just knowing that collaboration is easy to screw up isn’t of much use though. What would be truly helpful would be a specific taxonomy of the mistakes that frequently hobble teams, including the emotional and irrational complexities that can bedevil collaboration, as well as a benchmark survey of how the best teams manage to get everyone working together well. Handily, that’s just what a new study by Collaborative Coaching and Resonance Strategies aims to find out.

Through two small pilot studies the partners have developed a survey that digs down into what separates mere team members from true team players by asking participants to detail the differences between their ideal team and their actual experiences working in supposedly collaborative groups. Participants also signal their emotional impressions of teamwork by choosing from an array of sketched facial expressions. “These facial expressions are true in all cultures,” explains Yosh Beier, co-founder of Collaborative Coaching. The word disgust, say, may carry different resonance n India and Indiana, so using pictures takes away the danger that differences in culture or language could skew the results.

And even after examining a small sample of just over a hundred responses, Beier explains, he and his research partners are starting to see intriguing patterns emerge, including generational differences, common complaints about the current reality of teams (lack of recognition and excessive workload prominent among them) and similar notions of what moves a team from bearable to exciting.

What we find is there is a certain amount of results that people want to accomplish, so if a team doesn’t even manage to achieve its goals then that is very frustrating and dominates the experience. But it’s a little bit like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The moment teams reach a critical amount of ability to really produce results then results aren’t that important any more and other factors dominate such as connection and cohesion. People wonder: Do I see purpose? Is this meaningful for me? How much of a challenge is this?

There is also a generational theme. So far, the younger the respondents, the less happy they are with the current state of affairs on their teams.

It’s too early yet to determine if the youngest team members are the most frustrated simply because they have the highest expectations, Beier says, and an insufficient number of remote workers have so far taken the survey to conclusively determine if being virtual changes teams’ interactions or expectations. So the researchers are rolling out the survey to a number of firms, including consultancy W.L. Gore, and are also making it available online to anyone interested in participating. The only criterion for eligibility is experience working collaboratively. So if you feel like aiding an investigation of how to make teams truly gel and explore your own feelings about collaboration, 15 minutes is all you need to complete it. We’ll keep you posted on the results.

In your experience, what are the key factors that make a team really click so they can be effective collaborators?

Image courtesy of Flickr user woodleywonderworks.

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So how does the fact that “no one has ‘a room of one’s own’” these days affect the coworking movement, which is predicated on the notion that getting together in social spaces improves work? Are coworking spaces the enemy of the “more nuanced approach to creativity,” Cain advocates for, an approach that encourages “casual, cafe-style interactions” but allows people “to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone”? Or can spaces accommodate both needs? We asked a number of coworking space owners for their thoughts.

Don Ball, the co-founder of CoCo coworking in St. Paul, Minn., was unruffled by Cain’s piece, seeing it as directed more toward “ham-fisted” corporate collaboration efforts than the environment at coworking spaces like his. Like several members of the coworking movement who emailed in, Ball felt coworking was actually well positioned to allow the balance of solitude and sociability Cain is championing:

Some of the writer’s assertions actually jibe with our experience at CoCo. Our most popular membership option is what we call a part-time membership, in which members work in our space one day per week to get their social group time. And then stay at home (or who knows where else) to get their heads-down time. So, it’s a sanity insurance policy, if you will.

David Moffitt, the founder of Coworking Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., was equally unruffled, agreeing that coworking allows an ideal situation for workers to regulate their own need for human contact (or lack thereof):

From observing our members in the context of coworking, the thing that strikes me is that people here are able to self-regulate their level of intro/extrovert or community involvement.  Some members will pull others into discussion and spend half an hour on tangents ranging from database architecture to preferred coffee or beer brewing methods, while others are perfectly content to make their desks their own bubble or personal island.

But he does stress that it is incumbent on coworking spaces to help members get away by providing private spaces. Cain may feel that the current fad for open-plan offices and collaboration may be bad news for introverts, but Liz Elam of Link Coworking in Austin, Texas, feels that while quiet-craving personalities may be common, those that desire to work in complete isolation aren’t.

“Steve King and I discussed yesterday ‘Hermitpreneurs’ — people who like working from home because it allows them to avoid other people. We guesstimate this is less than 5 percent of the population,” she says. “Most people are not Hermitpreneurs.” Like Ball and Moffitt, Elam thinks coworking provides a good balance for the remaining 95 percent of the population. “Many of my Link Members are introverts but they work from a Coworking space because it allows them to be amongst people and they can interact when they want/need to,” she says.

Like Ball, Moffitt underlines the point that while corporate mania for collaboration obligates introverts to attend more meetings and listen to more office chatter than they would naturally want to, coworking allows complete control over your level of interaction.

At least as long as you have a good pair of headphones. “I think noise cancelling headsets are wonderful,” says Elam. “Why do you need walls to isolate? You can choose to isolate in the workplace.”

Do you think coworking is a symptom of our mania for collaboration or a solution to it?

Image courtesy of Flickr user clagnut

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At GigaOM’s Net:Work conference on Thursday, executives from HIGEAR and Spiceworks discussed why startups tend to collaborate better than their enterprise brethren. The short answer is that they’re smaller, which means they’re more likely to know each other. “I don’t think humans are wired to deal with large groups of people,” HIGEAR President Murtaza Hussain said at the conference. HIGEAR currently numbers about 10 employees.

As for the tools they use — when it comes time to pick an application, the best advice is to adopt those which are easiest to use. Hussain said that HIGEAR leans heavily on Skype for chat and messaging, and employees tend to use Google docs. Why? Because they fit the lowest common denominator for access and usage.

Few organizations have success when a senior-level executive decides which tools or applications are best. Hussain said the industry is full of examples where a C-level executive feels that one particular piece software is great and pushes it down to the rest of the company to use. “The last thing people want to want to do is learn a new piece of software,” he said.

But one potential drawback to that strategy is that letting employees pick their own tools can relate in data silos across an organization, according to Spiceworks VP of Products Tabrez Syed.

At the end of the day, the best type of collaborative efforts are those that happen face to face, which is one reason why Hussain is a big believer in employee happy hours. “When a new employee comes in, we take them out for beers,” he said. “I don’t think there are any tools or technology to make that kind of collaboration happen.”

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LiveOps and Rypple both make tools to help connect enterprises with workers. Both also provide analytics tools to measure the performance of the workers and the teams that are using those products. Providing feedback, more than anything else, is the best way to incentivize collaborative workers and enterprises to improve performance.

“Our focus is on performance,” said Sanjay Mathur, VP of Product Management at LiveOps. The goal is to determine if its agents know what they need to do, and to provide metrics to show how agents are doing against the team, how the team is doing and even how LiveOps and its agents are doing relative to those who are hired through other collaborative tools.

Maksim Ovsyannikov, VP of Product Management for Rypple, agreed. Rypple seeks to pass along feedback so workers can find out how they did and perform better the next time they’re used. Of course, he said later, it helps if you have clearly defined goals and expectations, as well as metrics in mind to measure performance.

The key to what makes these systems work is that potential collaborators are incentivized to respond positively and improve performance. “An agent’s reputation is very important,” Mathur said. “They can only get more work if they’ve proven they can get the job done.”

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“A hotel is a microcosm of a corporation,” he said explaining how the company has a variety of different technology needs. However, he’s sensitive to the fact that InterContinental doesn’t own most of the hotels it manages, which means he doesn’t force technology down the throats of the hotel owners. Instead he lets different hotels act as incubators for ideas, believing that successful ideas will get adopted.

“We have research friendly hotels that want to the latest trick and that gets people’s attention,” Conophy said. From there it can spread like wildfire as one hotel owner talks to another. He went on to explain to any entrepreneurs hoping to get their foot in the door at the hotel chain, that they should be prepared to explain how they are different from their competitor and send someone who isn’t a “junior level salesman.”

He also predicted that the bandwidth in hotels would increase over time, although he didn’t get specific or explain if hotels would keep charging exorbitant rates for that access.

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That resource might be a person or a document, but the employee still has to find it. That’s where the machines come in. Software that learns about employees, their relationships in the company and outside the company can help humans navigate social environments more quickly, and even pull in resources that may not even be on the network. For example, Gutelius used the example of the Army realizing that one of its soldiers had figured out a new way to help deal with IEDs in Iraq. This soldier wasn’t even online, but by tracking the improvement in certain squads and soldiers the Army was able to identify this individual and promote him. He was also given a forum to teach soldiers more widely.

This example shows not only how creepy this type of software could be, but also how close it is to reality. Some people might resent having their relationships mapped at such a level. Imagine if you are in a department with a horrid boss and trying to switch roles within the company. Such software might draw unwanted attention to your wooing of the marketing department as you tried to escape product management.

Anyhow, creepy or not, Gutelius’ adaptive social computing is a few years away from widescale adoption, and no longer the stuff of science-fiction fantasies.

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The problem for most businesses — including high-tech firms as well as banks, oil companies, you name it — is they all tend to look for exactly the same attribute set whether they’re recruiting a CFO, a CPA, a creative director, or an application developer.  And that’s nuts, Delattre told attendees of the GigaOM Net:Work conference on Thursday. “You always hear it’s all about the people … the question is, do we put as much thinking into that as we do to our devices, code, tech? The answer is no.”

This cookie-cutter approach is not doing anyone any favors. The personality traits and talents needed for a great creative director will not be the same as those for a corporate comptroller, for example.

These pre-existing notions of what is needed for all these jobs leaves a huge gap between what companies think they want and what they actually need to do the best job possible, Delattre said citing Korn/Ferry research which looked at 54,000 executives across industries.

One unexpected finding was that the best high-tech executives tended to be those that did not fit this pre-conceived notion of what a successful exec should be like.

“If a company says it’s looking for small, light, lean, fast executives we found that the best execs were almost the opposite. In tech we have a lot of personalities. People whose rebellion spurred their growth,” Delattre said. Personalities often do not fit into any preconceived vision.

So obviously, when those sorts of people are brought in for their first interview, however, the initial reaction is invariably that they’re not a good fit.

“Of course not. If you’re looking to transform, you need something different.” he said.

The problem with most businesses  is that while they talk about the need for great people they spend remarkably little time actually figuring out what people they really need.

The lesson here is obviously that people are not all alike and they’re not computers. “We do not come with a restore CD and are not easily reprogammable.”

It’s high time that hiring committees realize that.

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Barr wasn’t pitching any of his own Alfresco products, just giving advice for how to change our current office and work culture that tends to revolve around constant meetings and slide deck presentations. Here are his suggestions for why you should consider incorporating tablets into them:

• Interact with tablet apps. PowerPoint presentations offer information, but with little way for the audience to engage in what’s being presented. His solution: an iPad app like Idea Flight, which puts presentations on tablets in front of each participant. “It democratizes meetings,” said Barr. “So you’re collaborating and working with peers and not just absorbing someone else’s points.”
• Avoid oversimplification. Simple isn’t always better. Some topics are just too complex for a series of bullet points or “don’t fit into 7.5 by 10 PowerPoint dimensions,” noted Barr. He suggested another app called Roambi Flow, which allows presenters to embed data in the slides they’re introducing that can be manipulated by the presenter or meeting attendees. Apps like these, he said, allow meeting participants “not to present data, but to explore the data.”
• Force them to focus. Barr noted that it’s hard to compete for attention when everyone you’re presenting to at a meeting has their laptop open, each of their screens likely a mess of browser windows, emails, documents and other files. With the way the iPad works, it forces you to focus because you’re only in one app at a time. So using and iPad app that meeting attendees can use along with  ”allows us to get out of the ADD, and allows us to focus instead of multitask,” he said.

As more companies incorporate “bring your own device” policies that allow employees to use iPads or tablets on the corporate network, or even as they start purchasing tablets for their increasingly mobile workers, Barr’s ideas seem like something to take into serious consideration.

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Part of the innovation in this new generation of products is that they are — largely — built on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) foundation, and getting up and running can be as fast as buying a book on Amazon. And because these applications are social at their core, they can be very viral. One member of a small company’s marketing team decides to manage a project using Yammer or Podio, and she immediately invites four other team members to get involved. This means that the tools are quickly adopted, at least in the small group level. (Note: I’ll talk with Soonr’s Martin Frid-Nielsen, Mavenlink’s Ray Grainger, and QuickOffice’s Alan Masarek about this topic onstage at Net:Work, on Dec. 8.)

The new “work media”

However, the more important side of this social tool innovation is that they are based on activity streams. Users’ activities within these applications are not simply captured in the metadata of directories or the states of information in databases: these activities — such as making a comment, adding a file to a project, or assigning a task to a project member — are published in streams, a la Twitter, Facebook, and a long list of other consumer applications.

To distinguish these modern business tools from earlier generations, I use the term “work media.” They share characteristics with well-known social media tools, but they are oriented toward getting work done. And like social media, work media is fluid, with streams of information finding their way to the individual user, who may opt to follow topics, projects, and other users. These applications share the core design metaphor of streams, though they differ widely in how streams are composed, displayed, and shared.

Open tools, closed data

Business has a bias toward privacy, and so work media tools support that tendency by — almost without exception — erecting a password barrier against access to a company or group’s information. Finer-grained access controls are provided for more specific information contexts, such as projects, folders, groups, or other “spaces” managed by the work media apps. In this way, a company can restrict access to a HR group so that only a few HR staff can see the resumes and pay information managed there, for example.

This tendency, along with the relative immaturity of the burgeoning work media marketplace, is rapidly leading us to a very strange outcome: a generation of business software — work media — ostensibly based on the principles of open social media, but which are inherently closed, and which are spawning a million information silos.

But the risks and costs associated with business information stored in these applications is much higher, at least form the view of the companies migrating onto these work platforms. So once a company commits to using a specific work media platform, they may find that the information stored in their projects becomes as fixed as concrete.

Streamed, not structured, data

Let’s lump the information managed in these systems into two piles:

• Concrete, structured, and relatively moveable information, stored in files of various sorts
• Fluid, unstructured, and relatively unmoveable information, such as internal links, social gestures and other application specific metadata

It’s relatively easy to imagine downloading all the files stored in a Yammer account, and uploading them into an IBM Connections instance. But other sorts of information — and semantics — won’t have the same ease of movement.

Consider a hypothetical work media tool — let’s call it Work Talk. Work Talk supports both milestones and tasks, and it also allows tasks to be optionally linked to a milestone. One of its semantic rules is that a milestone cannot be complete until all linked tasks are complete.

Imagine that Work Talk supports exporting all the structured information — files, user identities, and so on — and less-well structured information, like tasks, milestones, posts, comments, and the many relationships between them. Taking that information and figuring how to import it to a tool that is architected differently would be at the least a major programming task and, at the worst, an impossibility. And the semantics of milestones and tasks might simply fail, if the new tool doesn’t implement that capability the same way, even if all that information can be exported and imported en masse.

As the market matures, standards must evolve

We’re at the start of a new era in business software, and there is an explosion of new players and new ideas about how streaming information should be structured and streamed, and how the various bits relate to each other. This is much like the early days of email, when a single corporation might have several different email systems that couldn’t communicate to each other. That problem was solved in two ways: by the emergence of well-defined standards that enabled interoperability across different implementations, as well as the consolidation of the marketplace around a small number of vendors serving large numbers of users.

It’s not too early to see some market maturation. It seems that many of the vendors in the space are making highly similar products, but differentiated around specific market needs (such as integration with specific external tools), focus on specific business functions (marketing versus software development, for example), or emphasizing the size of the company best suited for the tools. I see very little activity on the software standards side, but that usually occurs as the intersection of successful applications, as happened with email and SQL. So, there is no immediate solution in sight, and I wager that a large number of headaches are going to arise from the proliferation of work media tools, especially when vendors go out of business, or when companies outgrow the tool they selected. And there is no simple advice to give to prospective or current users of these work media tools. It is inevitable that these tools will diverge in functionality, and even if two systems are very similar that doesn’t mean that it will be possible to easily and cheaply port from one to the other.

Despite these risks, I believe there are great benefits inherent in the use of work media, and because of those, the rapid adoption of these tools will continue at an unprecedented rate. Just like the adoption of the automobile and the airplane, though, we are going to see a few crashes.

Stowe Boyd writes and speaks about social tools and their impact on media, business and society. A GigaOM Pro analyst, Boyd also writes at stoweboyd.com and is working on a new book about the rise of a socially augmented world, called Liquid City: A Liquid, Not A Solid; A City, Not A Machine.

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As employees tote their own devices into the enterprise, Iongrid’s Nexus software promises to bring Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets to their iPads with what it calls “pixel perfect” fidelity, and in a way that won’t give the corporate compliance department a collective heart attack.

That’s no small feat. C-level execs loved Apple’s iPads from day one, almost immediately forcing their IT departments to support the devices whether they wanted to or not. That worked okay except for two things. First, PowerPoint slides et al. did not display well on iPads without a third-party reader. Second, the proliferation of  internal documents emailed or downloaded to iPads gives compliance officers fits.

Iongrid says the Nexus client-server application layers security atop existing Active Directory server-based policies to let authorized execs including salesmen who need to take presentations on the road, display their documents with great fidelity on their iPads.

Nexus, which debuts Tuesday at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, securely streams documents to the iPad for viewing.  The user can then manipulate those documents using the usual iPad gestures. The initial release allows viewing only, although within weeks users will be able to annotate or lightly edit the documents as well, said Nick Triantos, CEO and founder of Iongrid and former chief software architect for NVIDIA.  

“We keep a proxy of the document in memory and a list of changes to that document. Then, when you reconnect, we apply those changes to the original,” Triantos said.

If IT policy allows, people will also be able to  take their documents off-line in which case the local copy on the device will be encrypted, he added.

The potential opportunity is big. The iPad leads the market in tablets, and is a particular favorite among the aforementioned high-level execs. And, many, many companies store their shared Microsoft Office applications in SharePoint repositories.

Typically what happens now when execs want to take their documents on the road, they email them to Gmail and then call them up on the iPad where the documents won’t render correctly without a special reader. Or they save the Office docs to Dropbox or some other cloud-based repository but the display problem remains the same. Sometimes an assistant would convert the required document to PDF and then download that — a “ridiculously labor intensive,” process — Triantos said.

Nexus’ server component enforces existing permissions and security levels set in Active Directory but can add more layers, said Michael Rothrock, Iongrid’s VP of product.

“Active Directory doesn’t know the user location, but we do, so if a user is off campus or abroad, we can enforce a new subset of security based on IP address and the iPad’s GPS information,” he said.

Pricing is $15 per user per month with volume discounts available.

Iongrid was founded in 2010 by Triantos, Rothrock and Ben de Waal, who is CTO.  It’s privately funded by angel investors including Simon Crosby and Nigel Stokes. Crosby is CTO of Bromium (and founder and former CTO of XenSource, now part of Citrix); Stokes is chairman of AppZero and former CEO of DataMirror (acquired by IBM  in 2007.)

Analyst Peter Christy, co-founder of the Internet Research Group, said Iongrid is attacking a meaty problem. Apple iPads were designed for 20-year olds who want to share everything. Business users have different needs, and since two to four percent of laptops or tablets are lost or stolen, these users need higher security standards.

“Oftentimes a thief can turn off the radio on a device before anyone from the home office can wipe it clean,” he said. Iongrid Nexus can alleviate those security concerns.

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What is the impact of coworking on larger corporations? How are they responding?

Mark Greiner: Businesses are recognizing the importance of choice to their employees. By providing options in how and where their employees work, they’re noticing increases in workplace productivity and morale. Corporations can’t ignore employees and their individual choices anymore. If they do, it will be at their expense.

Frank Graziano: The importance of meeting with others and collaborating in a very intentional way is also rising. In the future, you’ll likely see more shared spaces, and less square footage dedicated to individual work areas.

How is Steelcase responding to this shift in work patterns?

Graziano: We often say “space matters.” And more and more, you’re starting to hear the heads of large corporations say how important their spaces are. It helps them attract and maintain the best talent.

In the past, we’ve spent quite a lot of time implementing designs to raise efficiency. Now we are also looking at how we can use design to galvanize the culture of an organization. What kinds of shared assets might we put in place that evoke new behaviors on campus and help our employees understand the larger details of the projects they are working on? I would say that we, and many of our customers, are beginning to understand that communal spaces — really well done communal spaces — are central to an organization.

Can you describe some of the types of corporate workspace experiments you’ve seen?

Greiner: One example is right here at Steelcase, where we just remodeled our cafeteria. Now we call it a “WorkCafé.” It’s not just a place to have a healthy meal; it is designed as a productive retreat throughout the day. From a range of settings and postures to a Barista serving cappuccinos; employees have lots of choices.

Graziano: We have the same things that you would have in a coworking space, but, of course, we don’t charge memberships. And the interesting thing is, our employees seem to be selecting this as one of their preferred places to work. It’s become a rich place for fostering interactions across departments.

Why do you think companies are now willing to invest in these shared spaces?

Graziano: Technology is one factor. As corporations move their desktop technology to handheld devices and the cloud, it’s now that much easier for employees to have the independence to work from anywhere. But ironically, with these new freedoms, we are still dependent on ‘place’ to situate our work.

What do you mean?

Greiner: Well, since we can work anywhere, when we do consider where to work we look for a place or space that supports us in achieving a productive outcome.

Graziano: We have to look at how individual devices work and how they can bring content to a group situation. For instance, if five of us are meeting in person, we all can’t look at your iPhone. Collaborative environments require technology that allows each of us to share our individual cloud connection so it can be reviewed by the group.

How would you describe your personal work style?

Greiner: Certainly Frank and I are both highly mobile workers. Even when I’m in Grand Rapids, I’m mobile between the various buildings of the campus, moving from a project room to a more communal space and then to my home base. I start almost every day at one of four cafes in town. I have my breakfast, I read the paper, I do some e-mail, and I plan what I’m going to do for the day. So I often arrive on the corporate campus around mid-morning.

Graziano: We refer to this as being ‘on’ work vs. ‘at’ work.

Steelcase works with hundreds of large companies. Are most of them evolving in the way you’ve described?

Greiner: Absolutely. The pattern used to be that you’d go to the office, sit at your assigned desk, go up three floors for a meeting, walk down to the cafeteria for lunch, go back to your desk, and work there the rest of the day. Now employees have a choice. And as a result we see corporations embracing many new patterns of what we have categorized as alternative work. Within this broad landscape, coworking is becoming a viable option for many.

Don Ball is the co-founder of CoCo, a co-working and collaborative space with locations in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn. He will be discussing the implications and applications of co-working for larger organizations at Net:Work on Dec. 8, 2011.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Todd Ehlers.

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Joining a coworking space is obviously a necessary first step, but it’s not enough to get the maximum benefit out of participating in the movement, according to a recent post on the blog Freelance Switch. If you want joining to really boost your career you need to approach your new workspace with a bit of networking savvy, writes Genevieve DeGuzman, the co-author of Working in the UnOffice: A Guide to Coworking, who also spoke to WWD earlier this year about her book. Among her tips:

• Don’t force it. “Prepare a short introductory spiel — your name, and what you’re working on,” and “don’t forget the niceties” like a warm smile and open body language, writes DeGuzman on Freelance Switch. She even suggests a box of cookies as an icebreaker. But when we spoke to her  earlier this year, she also stressed that you shouldn’t go on a self-promotion blitz. “Fun and community aside, people are coming to a coworking space to get work done.  A lot of members recommend waiting until after-hours events to put on the charm. Or ask someone to lunch or to fuel up on coffee in the kitchen. Bonding and networking this way is less obtrusive.”
• Take responsibility. Some of the biggest benefits of coworking come when you find collaborators and clients at your local space, but it’s not the job of the space to make sure those connections happen. “Coworking works best with self-starters who actively seek out others for conversation and collaboration,” write DeGuzman, so don’t shun casual chats as productivity busters. “The sooner you get to know your coworkers, the sooner you can start building the relationships that can lead to collaboration. While small talk may seem like unproductive behavior, the ten minutes here and there adds up. If people have a congenial relationship with you, they’ll be more likely to discuss ‘work-related’ matters later when you have questions or need help,” DeGuzman told WWD.
• Make your peace with the chaos. Your coworking space is probably going to be louder and busier than where you were working before. That will take some adjusting to, writes DeGuzman, as you learn the rules and locate the photocopier. She also stressed to WWD that the atmosphere may feel odd at first: “If you’ve been slaving away in the cubes or working in isolation in your home office, being exposed to so many different people can be disconcerting. Many members have to adjust to talking on the phone with people within earshot.” But DeGuzman’s research showed that when people persist, they often grow to love the bustle. For instance, a member of Gangplank told her the space “can be noisy and chaotic at times, but that’s part of what makes it work: you overhear things. You find opportunities to jump in and help someone.”

For more on DeGuzman’s tips check out her post on Freelance Switch or more from her earlier interview with WebWorkerDaily.

Veteran coworkers out there, do you have any tips for newbies looking to get the most out of their space?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Citilab-Cornella

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Kerio Workspace has some features in common with collaboration solutions such as Basecamp, but without the project management features. It has more in common with file-sharing solutions such as ShareFile and with enterprise microblogging solutions like Flowr. When I spoke with the developers, they described Kerio Workspace as an email replacement and called it, only half in jest, “SharePoint meets Facebook.”

The idea is that organizations will use Kerio Workspace to organize and track changes to documents and other content files. As one might expect, it has a system for tracking changes, and social elements like a “news feed” where co-workers can post what they’re working on. It also lets users create internal “web pages” to display documents, audio and video, and users can specify if they wish to receive alerts by email.

Workspace 1.1 has added several new features, including:

• A touch-based mobile web interface for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry smartphones.
• The ability for users to create templates by copying existing page layouts and/or content.
• Drag and drop file uploading.
• Enhanced administration and security options.

Kerio Workspace 1.1 can be hosted in-house on your organization’s servers under Windows, Mac, Linux or VMWare. Pricing starts at $150 for a 5-user license. Additional user licenses are $30 each. Hosting is also available from resellers at additional cost.

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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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I recently spoke with Binfire co-founder and CEO David Robins about his company’s philosophy behind project management. (See Amber’s product review..) The focus of the release and our discussion was leveraging the human and organizational activities of collaboration and communication with the tools.

Robins noted:

Everybody has project tools. We’ve had project management tools for many many years, but having the tools doesn’t help you make a project team more productive, they are just a tools. How you communicate, collaborate, get feedback, catalog information and then use that information that is what has been missing.

I asked Robins for an example of how Binfire’s customers are able to blend together people, technology tools, and organizational practice into effective project work. He gave me this example:

We have a customer with offices in United States and employees in South Asia: Philippines & Thailand.  They were using tools — project planning and follow up — but still had communication and collaboration problems. What the other side of the team knew wasn’t always communicated. They started using our tools and that helped them make sure everyone is on the same page. They are very enthusiastic. Instead of just the project manager thinking about planning, it’s a collaborative effort. As a team member you finish a task or give a status report and that action is always available to everyone on the team right away [part of this new release is real-time updates]. That has helped them a lot.

Another customer, Arik Gubeskys, founder of Convexicon, Inc., provided Binfire with this feedback on how working with Binfire can reduce complexity, “I work remotely with software developers located all over the world. Binfire allows us a single program in which we can centralize all of our projects and communications with developers and customers. It’s simplified the complexity of collaborating remotely.”

Binfire’s global team doubles as in-house focus group

Collaboration and communication can take a variety of forms: Visual as well as text. Robins explained how they decided to add the whiteboarding feature with real-time chat. The Binfire team has people collaborating from Israel, Romania, and the US. “Five or six of us were meeting to design what we wanted to do. We didn’t have time to bring everyone to Israel to brainstorm. With the whiteboard, we all can see it [and use the chat feature to make comments]. We realized that we needed the same thing for PDF files — not to change the document on the fly, but to visually mark the PDF in real-time and change it later.”

Bake collaboration into early stages of project management

Robins described how Binfire has changed its own practice given their internal use of the technology:

I used to do project planning in my mind and then get the group together to discuss it. Now I just start the plan and rely on communication and collaboration to finish my thoughts. When a few people are thinking at the same time the result is much better than if it’s just me. The whole design of the project… the whole thinking of the project as a system has become more collaborative because of what we do.

Project as a system — that was an important take away for me. When projects are thought of as a system, rather than as a to-do list to be “managed,” I expect there is naturally a stronger focus on communication and collaboration. Tools built with the full system (human, technical, organizational) in mind are more likely to support productive project activities with stronger integration and understanding across tasks and actions.

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In a press release, Teambox said that private elements “allows users to conduct private conversations within a project that can be restricted to certain individuals. This new functionality is ideal for internal teams that want to bring outside vendors into Teambox for project and task management, but also need the flexibility of private internal conversations.”

This is an eye opening combination of a collaboration tool supporting modern organizational practice – creating circles of communication. Transparency design choices are explicitly in the project management mix with the addition of private elements. Information can be transparent across all members of project — or not — as deemed appropriate by the project administrators and the task at hand. Karl Goldfield, Teambox vice president of sales and marketing, explained it to me with an example:

Wedding planners, like an Internet marketing lead, or any other general contractor, have lots of clients and subcontractors.  When it comes to certain things, you want open collaboration. A wedding planner doesn’t always want to filter [limit] information to clients and the florists or the caterers they work with. They invite the client to a project where they understand the different subcontractors they  can work with (for example, seeing all the information for all four possible caterers) — they all get to see things and discuss. Everyone is in this open place focused on working on what the client wants.

Think about that: The client, and all the bidding florists, caterers, etc. get to see the information from the others, though this level of transparency isn’t fixed. The conversation can go private, tighter circles can be created, perhaps as the bids come in, or perhaps only after particular bids are accepted.

I asked Karl about the response from the subcontractors.  Are they comfortable with this cross-organization, cross-competitor transparency?

Karl responded with a perfect Enterprise 2.0 answer:

People can already contact a [competing] caterer and find their pricing — and if [the competitor] wants to keep it private they can just not answer. But, if I’m a good wedding planner and work with a specific set of caterers and do 100 weddings a year and 25 percent of the projects come to you — I’m the caterer’s best buddy — even if 75 percent of the business goes to others. The caterer knows the final decision (the clients’) will be personal preference. This isn’t a question of the technology system, but one of the relationship.

Makes sense to me. Yes, I’d be giving information to my competitors, but I’m also learning through the process. If this work process brings us into a community, the benefits may outweigh any costs. We all become better caterers or florists.  We learn our own competitive advantages.  We have community members to cross-sell with and or to ask for help.

But not all wedding planners, Internet marketing teams, or other Teambox users may understand these community issues straight away. I asked Karl how Teambox helps people come to understand this. How do you help users learn how to manage all these options and strategic choices?

My goal for 2012 is an education campaign. Online videos, best-case scenarios. Eight to 10 core [types of users with demos on] how to make Teambox the central resource for communication…. We want to find ways of keeping the noise off your plate.

Karl had me think of two different types of project collaborators to clarify the information noise issue. The first is a highlevel manager who doesn’t want details. This manager just wants to follow a dashboard and a timeline — no drill down — as clean and quiet an interface as possible. That manager wouldn’t be part of the private elements until he or she asked for details and then the manager could be invited in. The second type might want a more micro understanding of how the project is going. It would take too much time to play middle-man with this manager so nothing in the project should be private; let him or her see everything as it happens.

Karl also talked about the evolution of how Teambox is used and how this helps people come to understand the value in their particular setting. Initially they might manage Teambox information completely from their email inbox (using Teambox’s notification and response systems). As their use becomes greater they will find value in managing Teambox content from the activity stream. But Karl suggests that you don’t push this approach to happen overnight. Let circle techniques evolve as use grows.

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