Several of Miller’s prognostications will only be of interest to intranet professionals and those interested in a truly deep dive into the web-based internal tools organizations use to get work done, but others are fascinating for any manager or independent pro interested in the future of work. Take Miller’s ideas about the design of physical offices, for example. He predicts:

Perhaps inevitably the driving force in the Digital Workplace is real estate reductions and re-shaping of office environments. The lead times in the physical world are far longer than in the digital so organizations are trying to assess now, what they need on a physical work level in five years from now. Will anyone come to an office? If so who, when and why? The change in the physical workplace is being enabled by the rapid improvements in the Digital Workplace but lots of money is being wasted still on offices that will be virtually empty in 2016.

The impact of the rise of remote collaboration and more flexible ways of working on our built environment is a topic many organizations (and urban planners) are just starting to think about, weighing whether these changes will mean not only an absolute reduction in their real estate footprint, but also whether the mix of spaces companies and cities provide needs to evolve. Miller seems spot on that these considerations will only become more prominent in the coming years. The evidence also suggests he’s right when he argues that the rise of the digital workspace is one of the few areas where governments may get out ahead of business and lead:

London in 2012 hosts the Olympics and at a Government level there is a drive to promote flexible working for three weeks around the Games. Organizations are being required by Government to change their policies because the Digital Workplace can take the strain and these organizations will never look back after the Olympics as habits will have been changed. In Holland, Finland, US and UK government policy loves the Digital Workplace – less traffic, less sickness, reduced carbon, fewer accidents on the roads, business as usual when bad weather strikes, happier home lives – and this top down push will accelerate corporate wide shifts in how and where work happens.

Check out the complete post for Miller’s ideas about BYOD, usability and increased remote collaboration driving organizational restructuring, as well as other changes expected in the digital workplace in the coming year.

What are your predictions for how remote collaboration will develop in 2012?

Image courtesy of Flickr user garryknight.

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During sign-up, you’re asked to provide your website with a name, which is used as a subdomain of the Papyrs site for your wiki (for example, you could have https://yourcompany.papyrs.com/). Building pages is a matter of specifying the category and who can access the page — you can limit access to specific team members and people outside your company or open it up to the whole web — and then dragging and dropping widgets onto the page. Each widget has a little tool-tip explanation to explain what it does, which should prove handy for less-tech-savvy members of the team. The range of widgets means that you can build a variety of different pages using the app; there are some useful examples on the Papyrs website. Text and widgets can be edited by clicking on them, and they can be repositioned by dragging and dropping them.

The pages themselves look great, although as an admin it’s possible to customize the default theme, such as by changing the banner graphic or modifying the colors and fonts used.

Overall, Papyrs is incredibly easy to use, with virtually zero technical knowledge required. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a wiki-based intranet or collaboration product: It makes for a great alternative to Google Sites, and it is much simpler than most self-hosted wiki products. However, you should note that it is currently in beta, so you may come across the occasional problem, although I haven’t in my testing so far. Papyrs is currently free; unfortunately there’s no indication yet as to pricing when the product moves out of beta.

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For those who say yes, the favored replacement is “digital workplace.” It’s actually not a new term, but in intranet circles it’s growing in popularity as a useful idea that encompasses all of a company’s work-enhancing apps and info that web workers can access through their browsers.

But not everyone is happy to jump on the digital workplace bandwagon. Intranet expert Chris McGrath, for one, recently took to his ThoughtFarmer blog to argue that not only is the switch to digital workplace unnecessary, the term is so vague as to be nearly useless:

Over the past couple of years, as intranets have become more collaborative, folks have argued over the term “intranet.” Should we keep it? Is it a dated term? Do we need a new word to describe this evolved “thing” the intranet has become?

The answer (my answer?): No, we don’t. When “web 2.0″ came onto the scene we didn’t stop calling the internet “the internet.” Why? Because it’s still accurate. The internet is still a web between many networks. It’s the stuff we do on websites that’s evolved. Similarly, the stuff employees can do on intranets has evolved. But intranets are still internal websites that help employees get stuff done.

Some intranet people are interested in rebranding intranets as the “Digital Workplace”. But there’s no reason to do that — it takes a term that is understood (“intranet”) and replaces it with something so broad and generic as to render it meaningless….

Intranets are concrete. An intranet is a place. You can go there and when you get there you know you’ve arrived. An intranet can be social or not and can include lots of different integrated applications. But it’s still a place (as much as something on the web can be a place). When you show new employees the intranet they know it’s the intranet and they know how to get there.

McGrath argues against the nebulous quality of “digital workspace,” complaining about the fact that the term erodes the clear and comforting notion that work gets done in a specific place (though in this case a virtual space rather than a cube) and may confuse users. Others are likely to point to that same boundary-dissolving quality as one of the chief advantages of the new term — it keeps up with the reality that work is increasingly about what you do, not where you do it. Still other experts, like BT’s intranet guy Richard Dennison, are splitting the difference and wondering whether intranets will survive as a piece of a larger digital workplace.

Which take on the digital workspace debate do you find most compelling?

Image courtesy Flickr user Johan Brook

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5050biz calls itself a “virtual office,” and includes the following components.

• A social network, with features similar to LinkedIn and other networks.
• 1 GB of redundant, multi-hosted cloud storage for documents, with systems for sharing files. There are no online editing options, though, as Google Docs and Zoho Docs have.
• Online text chat with members you have connected to, rather like Facebook Chat. This is web-only, not Jabber-based, so it can only be accessed at the 5050biz.com web site, not through any third-party chat client.
• User-created networks, similar to LinkedIn Groups.
• A system for managing shared and personal contacts. It only has a few editable fields, though, so its usefulness is limited.
• A GoToMeeting-style screen-sharing and conference room system.
• Business consulting services from 5050biz, like a calendar of workshops and a ‘Pro Team’ page, where professionals selected by 5050biz are available for consultation.

5050biz contends that its site can be used as an intranet, project management and/or CRM system. According to the folks I talked to at the site, it was designed for businesspeople who are perhaps less computer-savvy than most web workers. They think that such people will be willing to spend money for the convenience of an integrated experience.

This would be a stronger argument if the site was better organized. 5050biz suffers from an inconsistent interface between its various sections, and some parts of the site didn’t display correctly in certain browsers. Granted, the navigation in sites like LinkedIn could use some work, too, but its free version is much more feature-rich, and it has the major advantage of a huge user base.

I didn’t find any of the 5050biz site’s tools that compelling. Like a lot of “all-in-one” services, it tries to do many things, and ends up doing none of them very well. We’ve covered many of the types of tools 5050biz provides, a lot of them at little or no charge. Most web workers are already using tools in these categories, so most of us can easily assemble a suite of tools we like. 5050biz.com charges individuals $24.95 per month or $249 per year. Business groups of 5-100 people can join for $49.95 per month or $499 per year. There is a free version of the service, but its features are very limited. There is a 30-day free trial to anyone who wishes to try the service.

To be honest, I don’t know many web workers who would benefit from 5050biz. It’s possible that it might be of interest to some of our less technically-sophisticated clients. Yes, it’s nice to have several tools in one place, but for us, I don’t think that the minimal convenience is worth the cost.

What do you think of 5050biz?

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It’s designed to require little setup, and aimed at companies with little or no in-house development capability. Out of the box, Liferay offers a number of different pre-set portlet configuration options, including CMS and collaboration. The idea is that you get an easy-to-set up intranet system up and running in no time, with features that can be easily changed, added, and removed without much effort.

Liferay has a couple nice features that aren’t necessarily offered elsewhere. One is drag-and-drop editing, so that you can shift the arrangement of portal elements without digging around in any code, making otherwise time-consuming changes a snap. In practice, this worked well on the demo site provided by Liferay. Editing my public page, for instance, I could easily change the name of any individual subsection, and drag and drop them as though they were browser windows.

You can also change the look and feel by clicking on icons in the upper right-hand corner of any item displayed on your pages. Anything from choosing your fonts to advanced CSS customization is available, depending on your skill and comfort level with coding.

Making my own pages was simple. I figured out how to add applications without trouble, and again it’s a drag and drop process, with item arrangement left up to you. Applications can be added from a list of supported plugins, or, conceivably, you could write your own.

I tested Liferay’s own locally hosted demo, available here. While it may not be an indication of how easy or difficult it is to set up on your own server, the demo was very easy to use as an end-user, especially considering that I read no how-to or support documentation beforehand.  I’m considering using it to organize a collaborative writing blog I administrate, since the writers involved are not generally advanced users, and would benefit from the system’s intuitive, pick-up-and-go usability.

Collaboration features include pretty much everything you can think of, including wikis, calendars, message boards, blogs, polls, and integrated IM. Liferay Social Office, which is what they call their collaboration suite, also integrates with Microsoft Office, so that you have the option of working there on your desktop if you don’t feel like signing on to the portal. Sometimes being isolated has its benefits, after all.

Liferay has a small but impressive client list, including World Vision, Lufthansa, Cisco, and the GOP House Republican Conference. Liferay Standard Edition is a free download offered under the MIT Open Source License, and an Enterprise Edition is available for pre-order, which offers more stability and long-term support, plus additional features. The SE is probably sufficient for most uses, unless you’re working on a very large scale with a multi-national corporation.

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