It took a little effort (thanks Lourdes and Joe!), but ProjectSpaces is now available through the GSA schedule.  This will make it easy for federal agencies and contracts take advantage of our online workspace tool for cross-deparment projects, to build a community of interest, or organize internal but distributed teams.  All you need is a credit card!

The materials I was writing for CXO magazine have made it to print (and screen).  An "ask the expert" article describes how online collaboration tools and approaches are affecting our work at Forum One.  We have found ourselves using more tools in more settings and becoming more reliant on them.

In an editorial, "The collaboration revolution is coming here," I argue that we are in the beginning of the "collaboration revolution".  The thesis is that collaboration will change our economy as dramatically, but in better ways, than the assembly line changed the industrial revolution.  It talks about the motivation for online collaboration, the tools we are seeing, changes we can expect to see, and steps to take to "get in the game".

Let me know if you have any reactions, quibbles, or quarrels with your comments here.  Thanks!

ProjectSpaces now offers a WYSIWYG online document creation and editing tool called "Shared Documents".  Shared Documents are very handy for keeping joint notes, building collaborative lists, and co-authoring papers and reports.  A revision history is maintained automatically so you can always look back at older versions.  Shared Documents can be organized within the ProjectSpaces document library and are full-text searchable.

The interface for Shared Documents maintains our objective of keeping ProjectSpaces very easy to use and intuitive while supporting powerful collaboration. 

Test drive Shared Documents yourself by editing this shared document (use "guest" as the username and password) or sign up for a free trial.

In The Ten Faces of Innovation Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO, describes how to promote creativity in the face of its biggest threat, the Devil’s Advocate.  He says "the Devil’s Advocate may be the biggest innovation killer in America today…  Because the Devil’s Advocate encourages idea-wreckers to asume the most negative possible perspective…". 

Kelley describes 10 constructive roles team members can play to spur, nurture, and demonstrate innovation. Near and dear to my heart are the "collaborators" who "Stir up the pot. They bring people together to get things done."  Collaborators help create new partnerships, inspire new forms of learning, organize teams in creative ways, and build investment and support for new ideas.

I was particularly pleased to read Kelley’s description of the collaborative technology they use.  He says:

IDEO has split its business into practices, deemphasizing geography and recognizing our global capabilities… we build e-rooms, virtual spaces dedicated to projects carved out on the company’s digital network.  Team members make and manipulate a project-specific Wiki… We often do Web-enabled meetings, where we are all looking at the same presentation documents.  (p. 132)

Forum One’s ProjectSpaces team management tool is an excellent platform for virtual innovation spaces like Kelley describes.  It allows team members to share ideas, organize work, brainstorm, and keep organized despite geographic location or time zone.  For our work we pair ProjectSpaces with instant messaging (so we have team "presence" and direct access to one another) and have been using ASAP for web conferencing. 

Certainly, successful collaborators should have a suite of online collaboration tools in their toolboxes and need to know how to use them.

We finally got around to posting some of our client testimonials for ProjectSpaces. It is a great experience to go out and ask customers what they think about your work and have them react by saying nice things. For example, I just got a "PROJECTSPACES IS AWESOME!" email which was a great way to finish up the week.

Hope your week ended well too!

ProjectSpaces™  is a simple, powerful web-based tool that enables effective collaboration across organizational and geographic boundaries.  We started development on the tool about 5 years ago as a way to manage our client engagements for our consulting business.  In the past year we’ve upgraded the feature set, improved the user interface and launched ProjectSpaces as a hosted product.  We’ll be posting information here about our progress and experience with ProjectSpaces technology, users, applications, and more.