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 IBM 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.

Updated 2025

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 Viva Engage

Yammer was quite a good tool but Microsoft broke it when they renamed it to Viva Engage. It's an amazing demonstration of how bad marketing can ruin a product.

It didn't help that Microsoft blurred the lines between teams and VE so that it really doesn't add much to the mix.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is our "go-to" chat and meeting tool. It's quite good for getting work done but it's absolutely hopeless for documentation. That's where SharePoint comes in.

There are a few issues with teams;

Many of the external parties we collaborate with will often not accept it because the endpoints could be literally anywhere, making it a high security risk.
Microsoft still won't stop mucking about with it - and most of their additional features aren't good.
Finding things on Teams is a nightmare, particularly when there are 150+ replies to a single conversation topic. It's easily solved by creating new topics but most people don't seem to know how to do this.

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.

Microsoft Loop

Personally, Loop is my favourite collaboration tool at the moment but I don't use it every day because it is an incomplete product and is still subject to a huge amount of change. It's also quite dangerous in terms of where it saves data (usually on the owner's home drive) and how it manages sharing.

I've learned not to trust loop for long-term documentation but if you need to create something, like an incident report or a plan, then Loop is the way to go. Drop a loop into your team and let everyone fill it in all at once - then when they're finished, you can email that loop to people. Sadly SharePoint embedding is barely supported.

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.

My Facebook Profile

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.

My LinkedIn Profile

X

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

My Twitter account for Real World Computing (not used much)
My Twitter account for Life with Aspergers (only used when I post an article)

Google Sites

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