Attached are the overdue minutes from our May 13 meeting on "The Power
Of Collaborative Software."

Let me know if there are any questions/comments.

JZ


>>>>>>>>>>>

Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group
Minutes of the 13 May 2008 meeting, "The Power of Collaborative Software"

About 20 people attended tonight's meeting. Josh Zapin facilitated and
Jeremy Kohler recorded the minutes.

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MEETING SPONSORS

Microstaff (www.microstaff.com) provides refreshments, Copy Diva
(www.copydiva.com) provides the audio-visual equipment, NCAR
(www.ncar.ucar.edu) provides the facility, and ONEWARE
(www.oneware.com) sponsors these minutes.


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ANNOUNCEMENTS
Please note the next (July) RMIUG meeting will take place on a
Wednesday, not Tuesday as usual, due to a scheduling issue.

If you have suggestions for topics and/or speakers for any upcoming
meeting, please send them to Josh Zapin.

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INTRODUCTION (Josh Zapin)

Everyone uses digital things to collaborate, like Google Documents and
Skype. Consider Metcalf's Law: as more people use something, it
increases in value exponentially. This applies almost directly to
collaborative software--basically the lifeblood of the internet. Email
is the original collaborative system, and a good example of Metcalf's
Law. But it's clear email has its detriments: it's siloed, trapped
info, not readily searchable, not easy to share like a Google
document. And not secure--it's easily hackable. It's also not a
document manager and it's not great at communicating priority.

We've seen a massive growth in collaborative software. Lotus Notes is
an early example, the first foray. It allowed you to check documents
in and out. Microsoft is growing phenomenally in this area--they even
hired the Lotus Notes inventor. Collaborative software is a big part
of where Microsoft is moving. Their SharePoint product has seen
massive growth, with over 100 million licenses, making it the fastest
growing software product in Microsoft history.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mark Richtermeyer (mrichtermeyer@...) is President and
CEO of the Spitfire Group, a professional consultancy specializing in
helping clients achieve alignment between business objectives and
technology initiatives. Mark leads the team, ensuring excellence in
client delivery and operational efficiency at every level. Mark has
over 15 years of leadership experience in enterprise consulting with
Hitachi Consulting, iXL, and Managed Business Solutions, leaving him
firmly placed at the top of his field.

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LINKS

www.spitfiregroup.com
The Bad in Email (or Why we need Collaboration Software)



------------------------
MARK RICHTERMEYER

The Spitfire Group has been around about 4 years. I started the
company to deal with midmarket clients in the rocky mountain region.
We configure and customize Microsoft SharePoint, using it as a
platform for custom applications.

What's collaboration? Wikipedia says it's people working together
toward a common goal--but in reality, people tend to work toward their
own goals.

Collaboration is in all areas of life. Small local businesses and
worldwide corporations do it. Even musicians do it. But now the old
collaborative tools like the telephone and email have come together.
Collaboration today creates a space where we can all play together in
the same place using the same tools, like a virtual playground or a
common workspace.

Toolset integration is what gives collaborative software its label.
Now, for example, we can integrate SharePoint with Outlook and with
the phone system to see who's available at any given time. That makes
for better customer service and a faster business process.

It also deals with the aging workforce. Baby boomers are retiring with
decades of corporate knowledge in their heads. But now the tools are
automatically recording this corporate knowledge. It has the same
benefit for dealing with our transient workforce: We can capture their
knowledge too and access it whenever we might need it in the future.

Collaborative software provides enterprisewide oversight: It can
gather lots of siloed information. For example, you can use it to pull
together all information relating to a particular product or event.
This can be especially helpful for looking across silos to grab stuff
for litigation support.

Challenges

It also provides some challenges. How do you deal with change
management that cuts across information silos? Matrixed organization
charts can also give mixed priorities.

Participants will have varying levels of technical experience or
interest, and it can be hard to get people to use the same tool in the
same way. This makes it difficult to maintain consistency. But it's
not about the tool--it's about the process surrounding the tool and
getting the people into it and training them properly. You have to
establish and maintain best practices, otherwise your effort to
collaborate will just create a big mess.

How It Works

In business we work in portals, extranets, intranets, legacy systems,
business intelligence systems, content management systems,
intellectual capital management systems, and of course, real-time
communications systems. All of this comes together in
collaboration--you pull components of each into one place, which makes
it pretty powerful.

Collaborative technologies include messaging, conferencing, calendars,
social networking, mobile devices, etc. all working with each other.

Benefits

The way companies are using collaborative technology is in support of
business processes, like recruiting, for example. It brings together
teams that are not co-located; facilitates web content creation;
provides project management tools; and helps connect with customers
and business partners.

Benefits include:
- increased revenue from improved sales support
- savings through providing customer self-service tools, which are
derived from the collaboration tools
- reduced travel costs (it goes beyond teleconferencing because you
can not only talk, you can share documents in real time)
- higher quality products
- greener work habits (more telecommuting)
- better knowledge tracking and auditing compliance (archiving
requirements and providing security)

SharePoint

SharePoint 2007 is a key player in the collaborative space
It's hard to describe it at first because it doesn't fit in one
bucket. In certain areas, other tools do even better and they can
integrate with SharePoint.

SharePoint provides:
- web content management: publishing workflows and version control.
- document management: approvals and workspaces.
- project and team management: ties Outlook calendars together, etc.
Note that it doesn't actually replace anything.
- knowledge management: wikis, blogs, search, plus a slew of
aftermarket add-ons.
- secure access: a nice portal tool for clients, vendors, a shared
space for partners.
- Integration with Microsoft Project.

But doing this definitely requires some business analysis to figure
out what buckets we want to put things in.

Audience comment: I think it's difficult to describe all the different
benefits to different groups because you're talking about adding to
rather than replacing.

Case Studies

IT Consulting Firm (I'm talking about Spitfire):
We do everything on SharePoint. We created a slick recruiting tool. We
recruit by having different people interviewing the candidate on
different days. SharePoint collects all the interview results. You can
prioritize what you need and the recruiters can look at the info and
know what to pursue first. It provides an interviewing calendar. As a
manager, I can know exactly where every candidate is in the process
and see comments from each of the interviewers. The system also
maintains the interviewing questions, job descriptions, etc. Finally,
we can analyze the business process that the tool is managing, see how
the recruiting went for a particular position. Managing the whole
process, it tracks everything and can tell us how long it takes to
find someone.

Community Hospital:
This was a document management system to deal with process material.
It gives nurses and doctors a place to go for compliance documents and
policies. It archives documents and routes them to appropriate people
and places as required. Some really nice document management tools
also integrate with SharePoint.

Bank Branch:
This is also related to compliance. Documents are moving back and
forth between clients and the bank, and all kinds of things have to
happen to them to keep the process active. Lots of time can go by when
a document is missing from a transaction, for example. So the portal
reminds users to submit required documents, analyzes documents to see
that they are in compliance, sends documents where they need to
go--and keeps everything secure. It also mitigates confusion by
preventing multiple people from touching stuff unnecessarily. It sends
email notifications.

Note that SharePoint has its own workflow server, but it doesn't do
things like draw visio charts; there's just a basic workflow tool in
SharePoint. And it's not a BPM tool in my opinion.

Tech Company:
Software project management. It provides sharing of all the process
documents, schedules, risks, tasks, milestones, invoices, scope
management, change requests, and budgets. Everything associated with
the project is in one place.

Collaborative software is a powerful productivity tool. Where are the
people, how do I get a hold of them? The unified communications tools
can give you a face-to-face conversation right in the tool.

It's good for management of intellectual capital because all your
documents are being stored in the process, not stuck on someone's hard
drive.

It provides archiving with control, which is critical for legal purposes.

It creates new social paradigms, a new way of how we work together and
the way we communicate and interact as people.

Requires planning, analysis, and forethought of what you want your
business to be. If you don't do this you can get into trouble. So it
also creates misperceptions about what this tool can be.


Q & A

Q: What does it take to set up SharePoint? Do you need training?
A: It took us a few hours to set up the recruiting tool, and if you're
familiar with the 2003 version, the complexity is about the same.
We've used SharePoint as a layer in a dot net application to export to
databases.

Q: Did the hospital system you built actually improve healthcare?
A: No, it just made sure people were following the right regulations
at the right time. It provided a good process for versioning.

Q: Can you customize the interface?
A: Yes, your views of the workspace are customizable.

Q: Are people writing interfaces for Bugzilla and stuff?
A: Yes. SharePoint is all based on dot net architecture, so you can
pretty much write whatever you want for it.

Q: How well is it set up to work with Office products?
A: SharePoint is very tightly integrated with the Microsoft Office suite.

Q: What about Google apps?
A: I don't know about that.

Q: Can you VPN into it?
A: Yes, and there are various ways to authenticate. You set up your
users in a SQL database in SharePoint.

Q: Let's say I'm not using Microsoft products for email, database, and
spreadsheets. Are there other products out there similar to SharePoint
that will work in non-Microsoft environments?
A: There's lots of tools out there for different
environments--Microsoft isn't the only game in town for collaborative
software.

Q: Project.Net is like an open-source version of SharePoint. And there
are competitors like LiveLink. And maybe you can get by just using
Microsoft Project?
A: Microsoft Project comes with some lower-cost capabilities.

Q: Everything gets written down with this tool, so doesn't it require
really good typing skills?
A: Note that SharePoint also captures video and audio, so it isn't all
dependent on typing.

Q: Customer service reps at my company are using wiki forms to
document and publish information to a web knowledgebase. Do your
clients use much in the way of wikis and blogs to generate constantly
updated pages?
A: Development teams use wikis a lot. It's a good way to capture
intellectual capital knowledge.

Q: What do you think of capturing development lifecycle documentation
as a wiki--like a requirements document maintained on a wiki?
A: You can do it that way, but we have a mixture of our property and
client property, so you can't easily mix it up like that.