CollabraSpace Featured in Workforce Solutions Review Magazine

Posted on April 25, 2012 by admin

CollabraSpace was featured in the April/May 2012 issue of Workforce Solutions Review. This magazine  features professional-written editorial content  for HR Technology with focus on the issues that are important for companies to emphasize. Both President/CEO Ray Schwemmer and Chief Technology Officer Rick Havrilla authored the feature of CollabraSpace with an depth discussion of how using collaboration products as a service     that will connect the entire enterprise of a business.

To read the featured article you may click here, or visit the IHRIM Publications website and subscribe to their online and print magazine.

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From Prototype to Production

Posted on March 27, 2012 by admin

A lot of organizations that we work with want to start off small with a prototype to see how the product works and how users react to it.  This is a great way to start and we are usually quite successful at getting things set up and the users are off and running in a day of two.  The pilot may run for 30, 60, 90, or even 120 days.

Turns out that the prototype is usually the easy part.  Where we see most organizations struggle is how to take what is working for a small segment of the population and rolling it out to the entire organization.

Interestingly, technology is not the problem.  Databases can handle the extra volume, in a virtualized environment extra CPUs and memory can be easily added when necessary, the networks are already in place, single sign on solutions exist, and services can easily be integrated into additional front-end applications.

So why is it so tough to go from a prototype to operational capability?

Many times, the prototype is done within an organization that does not control the corporate IT infrastructure.  Although successful, there must be “buy in” from the corporate IT team.  Without this “buy in” it’s often difficult to get their support to deploy the solution across the enterprise.  Otherwise, you are just bringing them more work to do. Don’t forget that they may have been looking at another solution or may be understaffed to handle the additional resources that your solution requires.  And who is going to fund that?

Even if you have the IT department on board, you still have to convince the other users that this is a worthwhile effort.  They may like the current tool that’s being used, or may have tried another one at home that they like better.  It does not matter if that is realistic for a corporate solution, they know what they want.

Starting with a prototype is a great way to see if the technology works.  You should ensure that you get the IT department on board as soon as possible so they can begin to understand what is required to scale across the enterprise.  Then you have to realize that you still need to work with each user organization to get their buy in.  To help bridge this gap, make sure that you include members in the prototype group that reach as many organizations as possible.  Select the users that actually influence the users in the organization. It’s possible that they may cause risk to the success of your prototype; however, if you can convince them chances are they’ll easily convince their peers. Once you deploy the prototype to the enterprise and  you begin to scale, others will naturally join in -especially in a collaboration capability.  You’ll be amazed at how quickly the system will expand.

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Migrating Users to a New Collaboration Environment

Posted on March 7, 2012 by srandolph

People are creatures of habit and it is often difficult to get them to change.  If you have ever tried to introduce an new application into an enterprise IT infrastructure or even a major change to an existing application you know just how hard that can be.

Case in point with collaboration.  Many people we work with already have an existing collaboration tool that they want to upgrade to take advantage of more advanced features or better integration with their infrastructure.  The question then becomes, how do you transition users to a new collaboration tool?

If you control all of the tools in the environment you can integrate the new collaboration capabilities into the user experience and shut down the old system.  Users will automatically move to the new system.  This is the approach that we discussed in our earlier blog Apple Computer’s 25 Billion iTunes Downloads and Your Collaboration Solution.

What if you do not control the entire environment but  want your organization to transition to a new collaboration capability?  Teams are already working in the existing tool and some people may resist moving to the new collaboration space.

One approach is to integrate the collaboration tools together using the one of the standard collaboration protocols such as XMPP or SIMPLE.  Again, this assumes that those controlling the existing collaboration environment are willing to allow your new system to connect with the current system.  If so, then users of your new collaboration software can see and collaborate with users of the current system. Overtime the collaboration capabilities from the new system can be integrated into additional applications and migration from the current system to the new system will begin.

How about if you those controlling the current system are not willing to enable this connectivity?  In that case, you need to select a group of users that can work easily in both collaborative environments or select a group that can work independently on a problem.  Once the group is identified, begin converting them to the new functionality.  They will either need to work completely independent of those in the current tool or they will need to work on both tools to bridge the gap. As this prototype group begins to experience the improved capabilities of the new tool, they can go to the users of the original tool and explain the benefits of switching to the new tool.

Both of these solutions may take more time, but once the transition starts, more users will attract their existing teams and critical mass will eventually bring everyone over to the new tool.

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Apple Computer’s 25 Billion iTunes Downloads and Your Collaboration Solution

Posted on February 23, 2012 by srandolph

Apple Computer is about to embark on a major milestone, 25 Billion downloads from the  iTunes Store.  This is just one of many milestones for this iconic company.  And like many of their other milestones, this milestone did not happen overnight.  In fact, it started over a decade ago by identifying their target audience, a user with the original ipod, a Mac computer and the iTunes application.  These were all technologies that the company fully controlled; hence affording them complete control the user experience.  Later the company continued to expand its target audience by supporting MS Windows, adding more content to the store and constantly re-inventing their hardware and software.

Adding a collaboration solution to your environment should not be much different than the Apple’s approach.  Instead of a generic one size fits all approach, identify your target audience within the organization while keeping a keen eye on the applications that support the target audience.  Try to select an application where you control the complete user experience throughout the development process. Once identified, tailor a solution that fits your user’s needs while identifying the common functionality that will serve well for other areas within the organization.  Now work to enhance the application with collaboration capabilities that will serve the users best through ease of use and intuitive functionality.  Launch this targeted application and begin to expand out to the rest of the organization.  As you continue to expand to new organizations and applications, circle back to the existing users and tweak the solution if necessary.  Track lessons learned along the way and apply them to the collaborative solutions delivered throughout your enterprise.

You can fully control the user experience by focusing on embedding collaboration services within applications that you completely control.  This in turn leads to a greater chance of success for applying collaborative capabilities to your organization.  Apple reached 25B downloads with a similar approach – bringing collaboration to 100% of your organization should be your milestone for success.

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4 Steps for Eliminating the Barrier to Entry

Posted on February 7, 2012 by srandolph

If using collaboration technology is going to become a truly integral part of your organization, it has to become second nature to your employees. It has to feel as easy and intuitive as any other form of collaboration they engage in on a daily basis, such as using their favorite social networking application to share ideas and pictures with family and friends.  The following  four simple steps can provide a viral collaborative environment:

  1. Streamline Authentication and User’s Profiles: Employees won’t want to use a system if it requires using different log-in IDs and passwords for accessing the system or manually copying their user profile information into the environment. Instead, the collaborative solution must be tightly integrated with the corporate identity management solution. The collaborative solution should access the existing information to obtain user profile information such as the users’ names, phone numbers, locations, skills, and group memberships. Since collaborative capabilities will be embedded into numerous applications, a single sign-on solution should be implemented. This type of solution requires that a user complete the authentication process once for the application, thus eliminating the need to re-authenticate for accessing each service.
  2. Integrate Collaboration with Applications: If 90 percent of your people use one application, if you can incorporate collaboration into that application, then 90 percent of your people will be connected instantly. By taking an inventory of your most-used applications and ranking them according to which get the most use, you can create a good road map for rolling out collaboration. You can start to get a sense of which applications will get the most mileage out of having collaboration integrated into them.
  3. Choose the Appropriate Functionality: Determine which collaborative capabilities should be integrated into which applications—and where in those applications. Many times, the answer is simply to add presence awareness to the most-used web page (the main launch page or the summary page, for example) and web applications. This way, when users come in on Monday morning and log into one of these applications—just as they did on Friday morning—they’ll, be able to see that their colleagues are online and available to collaborate with via the various collaborative capabilities. With the click of a button they can open a chat room or an IM session with one or more of these users.
  4. Maximize Screen Real Estate: Try to avoid using a large section of the screen real estate for collaboration services at the expense of allowing users to do their jobs with an application that is already familiar to them. Just a small section of the screen with a scroll bar that shows a thousand users are currently online or shows your Buddy List will be sufficient to get their attention.

It’s important to realize that you are trying to bring collaboration to the user, not create a collaboration tool. Now that you have everyone connected, you can begin to add additional collaborative capabilities to allow employees to work more efficiently together.

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