Collaboration

Interests \ Computing \ Collaboration

Collaborative and Social Computing Systems

Over the years, I've used a lot of different collaborative platforms -- even before the concept of a collaborative platform was coined. I think this goes back to the message boards on the FidoNet (yep, pre-internet). Since then, I've used a variety of these systems at work; from domino to connections and more recently the office 365 suite. Outside of work, I've used a lot of web platforms including Twitter, LinkedIn, Trello, Facebook and until it died, Google plus.

Microsoft SharePoint

At this point, SharePoint is by far my favourite of the modern workplace platforms and I particularly enjoy using pages to create an intranet. I often use blogger to publish "censored" versions of my work without company names and logos and then republish internally on SharePoint.

Here's a few articles I wrote on SharePoint (they'll probably get old quick)

Microsoft Yammer

Yammer is quite good too and I use that for our DR and Incident Management as well as communications relating to Change Management. Our overall use of Yammer has been decreasing however as Microsoft teams includes similar functionality.

Yammer has the additional problem of being useful in the moment but useless as a long term storage system. If you're not sure what I mean by this, try looking for a post that someone made a year or two ago without having an exact idea of what the contents are.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is now our "go-to" meeting and collaboration tool. The only real issue we have with teams is that external parties will often not accept it because the endpoints could be literally anywhere, making it a high security risk.

Teams is at its best when you're creating small agile teams for getting things done. In that case, we create a team specifically for that purpose and put all of the resources needed into that team. This enables us to collaborate with externals without giving them access to our primary systems where they could access information outside the project.

Facebook

I'm actually quite keen on facebook. It's fine as a personal social platform provided that you are sensible about what you post.

One area where facebook is very under-stated is in technical forums. There are some excellent and active software forums of facebook where you can learn all kinds of great things. In this regard, it's much better than LinkedIn.

LinkedIn

I used to have a great flowchart for where things should be posted and one of the key deciding factors for LinkedIn is "is it boring". Sadly, that's still the case today.

LinkedIn is very much the place where the lawyers and the marketing team moderate the posts. Personal posting on LinkedIn is minimal and most interaction on the platform is either guarded or marketing. The only thing that the platform is really good for is LinkedIn Learning.

There are plenty of great pages and forums for software but they're almost always inactive. If you want to talk about software and systems, you're better off doing it on Facebook.

Twitter

In recent times (aka Since Elon Musk), twitter has devolved considerably into a mess. Even so, I never found twitter to be terribly useful except as a service to amalgamate daily links to other sites. Sadly I can do this just as well using a service like feedly to consume RSS feeds.

Hopefully twitter will improve but for the time being it's only really good for marketing and for complaining when other services are down.