Collaboration, Staff Portals and Intranet

In this workshop, delegates discussed topics such as requirements, business and IT engagement, the need for a business case, tools used for collaboration, the problems of migration to or within a tool, the role of taxonomy, storage, data maintenance, uptake, and the nature of governance that should or should not apply.

Collaborative software is designed to help people involved in a common task achieve their goals quickly and easily without document duplication. A collaborative working environment helps facilitate the 'action-oriented' team working together over geographic distances by providing tools that help communication, collaboration and the process of problem solving by providing the team with a common means for communicating ideas and brainstorming.
Staff portals also help with collaboration as they bring together key content and access to online data services that will save staff time in hunting out all the disparate Web and intranet locations where such services were previously accessed.
There is much diversity in the tools used but SharePoint, Lotus Notes, Domino and SAP Portal are commonly used along with wikis, forums and instant messaging. One delegate presented a short case study of a trial being carried out with Google Docs that will give the organisation experience of collaboration. The next step would be to create a shortlist of products for evaluation.
The workshop was attended by 22 delegates representing 18 organisations. These were from a wide cross-section of industries covering the manufacturing, construction, utilities, public sector/government, retailing, communications and travel sectors.