Enterprise Collaboration Trends

Increasing globalization, new technologies and rapid changes in rules and regulations constantly reshape the competitive landscape, even for industries that once seemed stable, such as the automotive industry. To respond to this chaotic and continuously changing environment, organizations are placing a premium on innovation. Collaboration can accelerate the pace of innovation in three key ways: by promoting real-time organizational awareness of opportunities for innovation, by shortening the cycle time for experiment conception and design, and by tapping the power of grassroots participation to drive acceptance, adoption and expansion of ideas.¹’

A McKinsey & Company report asserts the high value of employee contribution through collaboration. The figure below depicts a networking map which illustrates potential opportunities which were missed as a result of absence of collaboration with expertise people. 

The term ‘Knowledge Worker’ was coined by Peter Drucker almost half a century ago. In the current globalized world, the whole buzz is to employ ‘Knowledge Worker’ and stay ahead of competitors through highly innovated ideas. As the need of the this type of workforce within the enterprise is steadily raising so does the tools and technologies that keep them abreast of information is also on rise.

The raising popularity of web 2.0 and social networking technologies confirms the high importance of collaboration and knowledge sharing. One of the reasons for this raise in Web 2.0 and social networking is due to fall in communication costs. A report states that a 3 minute phone call from New York to London in 1960 was $60.42 and in 1980 it was $6.32 and in 2000 it was 40 cents. This fall in communication costs was due to fiber optics glut in the late 1990s.A recent statistics about the interaction in social medias are overwhelming.

Few facts about content shared across social medias 

· 250 million tweets per day in Twitter

· 4 billion content shared on Facebook each day

· 24 hours of video uploaded every minute in YouTube

· More than 3.5 million articles in English language and more than 17 million articles across all languages in Wikipedia.

· 43 % of US companies will be blogging by 2012

· Over 210 billion emails are sent out daily 

‘Social networking entering the workplace is becoming 'industrialised' in process, and integrated into the collaboration mix, what increases the potential for productive creativity and accelerates business decision-making and responsiveness.²’ 

Although these are the compelling facts for enterprises to adopt enterprise collaboration, they still face daunting challenges that has to be addressed to implement a successful collaboration framework within their enterprise.

Performance Test the Share point Website

Tools like Fiddler, neXpert, Visual Round Trip Analyzer, Jmeter, SharePoint Capacity Planning tool from Microsoft can be used

Fiddler - This is the performance analysis tool for the share point websites

neXpert - Its an add-on to the fiddler which produces the HTML report on the issues found in fiddler
Visual Round Trip Analyzer - Web page performance analyzer and visualizer
Jmeter - Used to generate loads to the share point server and helps in making the server capacity planning

Together with these tools there are also Capacity planning tool provided by Microsoft

Why Document management via Share Point

1. Store and Share Files :

Share point enables us to store and share files effectively either to the whole set of users or to the closed group of users within an office space. 

2. Version control :

It’s been easy to control different version of file using the version control available within share point portal. Using this versioning features the tracking of the documents is made simpler

3. Ease of access to files:

Simple three steps are followed to access the files within share point they are store, grant access to users, access and use the file.

4. Centralised BI :

Addition of performance point to the share point enterprise version enables BI to be in the hands of many and democratize business intelligence

5. Distributed Access :

Share Point enables access of documents from different location, enables to collaborate and co ordinate with different individuals to bring standard business solutions.

6. Smart Search :

About 20 to 30% of the time of an employee is spent in searching for documents and other resources required for his task. This share point in integration with fast search would enable to reduce the time of finding the files for completing the task thus increasing the productivity of the company. This robust search functionality would find the information and expertise buried in the thousands, or hundreds of thousands of files a company generates in the course of business. 

7. Create Site :

It’s really a tedious and time consuming process to create and maintain many sites based on the user group within a concern. This share point would enable to create and maintain many sites based on different department or based on any internal segregation (Projects) persisting within an organization. There are also advanced document libraries, meetings sites, survey sites, or discussion boards in share point.

User not able to access sharepoint portal

Users were not able to access the share point portal and get “Access Denied” message some time. The predictable error which could have occurred is that the person who accesses the AD settings page if any would have saved the profile without giving the password once again.

Every time when you ought to change any details of the users in the AD page via application you need to give the password of the person before saving the updated details.

Steps to set the password:

Ø Navigate to AD settings page of the application using Admin account

Ø Edit the user whom you want to modify

Ø Modify the details, give the actual password in the “Password” and “Confirm Password” field then save the user details

This is just a common mistake which we faced when we accessed and worked with our Collab product which is an intranet collaboration portal.

Share point - Browser Compatibility Features

In general all the features of Microsoft share point works perfectly as intended in only Internet Explorer browser. Below are the major variations which I came across among the various browsers in which I tested.

Feature	Internet Explorer	Fire Fox	Safari
Lync Integration to the Application	Yes	No	No
Upload Multiple file Option	Yes	No	No
“Sign in as a different user” Option	Yes	Yes	Not available in older version

Upload multiple documents into Document library

How do we upload multiple documents into Document library in Share Point? 

In the Share point application upload multiple options appears only in Internet Application. It is very important to have these features because to upload a huge number of files into the application is very tedious and repetitive process. To avoid this “Upload Multiple Files” would be very useful.

Steps:

1. Click on the “Upload” or “Add new” option from the document library

2. Below the browse field there will be an option to “Upload Multiple Files”

3. Drag and drop multiple content in the popup shown

4. Click on “Add”

SOCIAL INTRANET COLLAB

COLLAB is a Social Intranet designed to help organizations realize their goals of interacting with employees, customers, and partners, providing engaging collaborative experiences, and rapidly responding to business needs by using the Social Computing solution. This AVASOFT Offering provides a proven set of deliverables and methodologies, as well as AVASOFT best practices from multiple successful customer engagements, to aid in the planning and deployment of SharePoint as a Social Computing solution.

COLLAB from AVASOFT uses Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 to help organizations realize their goals of collaborating on ideas and documents, as well as overall connectivity within the organization. This informal connectivity is meant to give employees the ability to create and develop informal ideas that might impact the business in profound ways. The Offering will provide guidance for the envisioning and planning of an enterprise Social Computing environment, and will provide support for envisioning, planning, build, and deploy.

This Offering focuses on four leading scenarios:

Finding and connecting people, teams and expertise, collaborating socially, and organization structure awareness

· Enterprise community sites – blogging, wikis, discussion forums, organizational communications

· Virtual workspaces, Ideation, Policy Management and Line of Business Application Integration with SAP, Dynamics, EMC Documentum

· Search as a social experience (who created what, how are they connected to me, relevance adjustment if they are closer or farther from me)

Our Expert consultants apply breadth of experience with enterprise customers and technologies to help customers preemptively mitigate implementation risks and ensure an integrated, extendable, and secure COLLAB as an Enterprise Portal and Collaboration solution that transforms the way people and organizations work together to speed market responsiveness and foster innovation.