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Grog: the Green Moon Blog
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Grog - Green Moon Blog
Jan
23
Written by:
John Dukovich
Friday, January 23, 2009 7:00 PM
I have been attending technology conferences, reading articles, following blogs, and working with my own clients and if I had to make a prediction for the best use of technology for organizational efficiency in 2009 it would be in the area of collaboration.
Hot on the nonprofit technology arena are ideas for collaboration. I cannot tell you how many of my clients e-mail Word documents around and ask people to review and update them. Most don't take advantage of Word's "track changes" features (which allow multiple people to comment on and edit a document, color-coding their changes, and provide for a central person to accept or reject their changes). It becomes a nightmare of figuring out what the changes are and how to resolve conflicting changes.
Some organizations have embraced Google Documents (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, forms). Once a document is created (or uploaded), it can be shared with others. However, each individual sharing/collaborating on the document must establish a Google account. The word processing and spreadsheet documents are also quite limited in their complexity. If you have an Excel file that requires Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code for some of its functionality (most of the spreadsheet work that Green Moon does has such code involved), that won't translate to Google. If you have a Word document that relies on styles for formatting, the formatting will translate to a Google Document, but the styles disappear. Also, if the document is greater than 500 KB in size (1 MB for spreadsheets, and 10 MB for presentations), it cannot be uploaded. Images, equations, and footnotes cause strange viewing and formatting experiences if a Word file containing them is uploaded to Google Documents. Finally, each document that is set up must have the sharing set up for it each time -- although Google has a folder system, people cannot be given permission to share at the folder level. Therefore, if you have very basic documents that need to be shared, Google Documents could work for you -- but if you have large and/or sophisticated documents to share, Google can't currently handle them.
Many organizations have been using Wikis for collaboration. Wikis are great for documents such as user guides, since they have built in page hierarchy structures and by nature can easily cross-reference to related pages via hypertext links. The better wikis also have "recent changes" pages, to allow the main author or integrator to view changes made to wiki pages and keep them or restore the previous version if they don't agree with the changes. Most wikis also offer search features. Wikis are designed to live on the Web, so if an organization wants to use them to create a document that will eventually be converted back into print media, a lot of reformatting will be required to convert the wiki into a format such as Word.
Instead of e-mailing documents from colleague to colleague, or requiring everyone to log in to a Google account or a wiki, there is a desktop solution called Groove. In 2007, Microsoft bought Groove Networks and folded Groove into its Office 2007 suite. However, Groove can be purchased separately and can be used for sharing and collaborating on any type of document. Once Groove is installed, you can set up a workspace and invite anyone with an email address to join (they will also need to have Groove installed). All file sharing is done using encryption and the system is very secure. Within the workspace, folders can be set up. As soon as a file is added to a workspace, it updates everyone else who is part of that workspace. If they are offline, they will receive the update the next time they go online. In addition to file sharing, Groove comes with a chat feature, whiteboard, discussion board, and many other tools.
Microsoft has also recently introduced Office Live. It comes in two flavors: Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business. Both are free. Within each system, once you can create workspaces and invite others to join in. Everyone will need to have a Microsoft Windows Live ID, which can be based on an existing e-mail address. (I am hoping they move toward accepting OpenID in the near future.) Once you have a Windows Live ID, you have access to SkyDrive, which is web-based storage of up to 1 GB for free. Once signed up, Office Live allows people to share documents, manage schedules, add notes, and to-do lists, among other features. If you use Microsoft Office products on your desktop, you can save documents to the workspace directly from your PC. The Small Business suite includes the previously-mentioned features, plus it includes time lines, chat tools, issue-tracking tools, and a free web site.
A bit more elaborate is Microsoft Sharepoint. The platform (Sharepoint Services) comes with Windows Server (2003 & 2008). The glitzy functionality comes with Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services, which can be quite costly depending on the package purchased. For non-profits with large technology budgets, Sharepoint provides corporate-level, enterprise solutions for collaboration. Forms, workflows, sophisticated tracking, and other features are part of Sharepoint. In addition to it being expensive software, it requires a smart technology engineer to set up customized solutions. This tool is not for every organization, but for those that can afford it, it provides advanced features that can make collaboration much smoother.
Finally, I would like to briefly mention Cloud Services or Cloud Computing. The previous two links describe the concept in detail, but essentially "the cloud" is hundreds or thousands of servers at various locations that you can leverage for their computing and storage power. Several of the giants, for a small fee, provide their servers to developers and organizations. You can take advantage of their vast storage space and computing power and you have no infrastructure costs. The major cloud service providers are listed here: Each cloud service is somewhat different, has different capabilities, hosts different technologies, and has different pricing structures. This InfoWorld article compares several of them. I will look into these in more detail in the future, from the perspective of applications to the non-profit sector.
As you can see, there are many options for collaboration. There are free options and expensive solutions. There are simple web-based systems, complicated client-server set-ups, and desktop tools. In 2009 we have a wide variety of capabilities for collaboration. Non-profit organizations need to gauge their needs and the complexity of the collaboration they need, and then choose the appropriate tool for their needs.
net2thinktank
Copyright ©2009 Green Moon Solutions, LLC
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