3 posts tagged “intranet”
I recently had the following scenario related to me by a good friend of mine: Someone sent out at our company yesterday a broadcast e-mail to everyone in the corporation asking if they had a recommendation for a specific situation. It happens occasionally. Someone else replied to all with a specific suggestion. She should have replied only to the sender, but not a big deal. Then someone else replied to all asking to be removed from this list (possibly facetiously, possibly not). Oh, my, the results were entertaining. In the end, more than 75 e-mails were sent to everyone in the company, each one a variation of: Their IT guy estimated approximately a half a million e-mails were generated internally. My friend estimated that, even if each email took only 1 second for people to look at and delete, there were still 17 working days lost cumulatively to this email chain. It really underscores how modern tools - in this case email - aren’t always all that modern anymore and are, at least in some cases, not even the right tools for the job... Imagine if employees had specific spaces on their corporate intranets where teams could outline problems with members who would likely have the knowledge and background to solve them. Imagine if employees could post a request for information in a common area devoted to the kind of knowledge they were seeking. Then other employee, who had something useful to contribute to solving the problem, could discuss the situation in a threaded discussion. Imagine if solutions could be presented in these spaces in a format that could be easily tagged, searched for, and even modified in the future as others refined the processes and added to the base of knowledge. But, of course, no imagination is really necessary. All these tools exist - and a few forward thinking companies have already implemented them. Now all those companies need are enough forward thinking employees to really make them work. Much has been made about the Web 2.0 revolution and the rapid rise of social media over the last two years. And, while the public social-media-scape makes general social relationships easier to form and maintain (and will surely generate some new Web-billionaires in the process), the real economic promise of the Web 2.0 revolution is going to come from within corporations. I truly believe internal social collaboration and sharing is the next big productivity step about to be taken by companies that rely on knowledge workers. The key, of course, is to get those knowledge workers to “get it” and contribute their private-knowledge base into the whole public-knowledge base of a corporation where it can mix with other’s contributions creating a “force-multiplying” effect. Employees need to realize that the old adage about money is now just as true about time…It takes time to make time. A little time spent by a few folks on an internal social-media site (perhaps a blog, wiki or discussion group) would have saved a company 17 days of worker productivity. Imagine the bright future for the first few companies with employees who really get that!
Setting up sharepoint on a new virtual server instance solved all sorts of problems which should not have been there in the first place...Will it be applicable to our grand wiki Intranet scheme? I can't wait to find out...
Over the past month I have installed Sharepoint 3.0 / 2007 design, SQL Server Pro, Dynamincs CRM 3.0, and Exchange 2003. The plan is to have a fantastic Utopian sandbox with which to allow our staff to create the ultimate socially generated Intranet site. Just the thought of it gives me a surge in my heart and a gleam in my eye. Oh the things we'll be able to do!!!
But, my dreams of social media paradise have been dashed, like so many prince ruperts drops, by the hidden evil that calls itself the oh-so-innocent-sounding name of "Microsoft Wizards". These wizards purport to automate a few (far too few...) of those many tasks required to set up complex back-end systems. Instead of lending a helping hand though they instead concoct a cloak of false security, which quickly falls away when you try to do anything usefull.
None of them work right on upgrades, none of them seem to get IIS settings correct, and each of them, when combined, leads to litterally a hundred hours of diagnostics. Even Exchange 2003, which I have installed many times before without incident, failed to work correctly after getting a taste of some evil CRM wizard action.
I feel better now, having vented to you, my loyal readers reader. Some of the taint has washed off my soul.
Now, back to running IIS diagnostics...the promised land is still far out of sight...
