Collaboration and information sharing--the next frontier
People are tired of endless meetings which may often be unproductive and want to find ways to collaborate and share knowledge that do not require the time to sit in such meetings. There is an expanding set of software that fills this need and has the potential of making great productivity improvements in any organization. One class of such software is generally referred to as content management software. This genre generally attempts to make it easy to manage web based content either for an intranet or public internet, and has some powerful capabilities for making it easier to share information among a large community of interest. Typically, CMS software allows authors to generate materials that are stored in a database and formatted upon display in a web site so that the authoring does not require any technical or graphic design skills.
Bill Machrone, whose column has appeared in PC Magazine for over 20 years, writes in his August 9 column about the correlation between collaboration and information sharing functions often provided by expensive content management software and the same capabilities provided by blogging software. He describes the typical needs for collaboration including "built-in reader commentary, RSS syndication, template-based article entry, and the ability to make style changes without having to find and replace across every HTML page." and points out that most blogging software fills the bill.
There are powerful features of enterprise class blogging software tools that go beyond Machrone's observations and begin to build the basic collaboration and information sharing capability that members of any particular community of interest seek. At the IJIS Institute, we adopted a secure enterprise blogging software package made by Traction Software which we use for multiple important purposes. First, it totally defines our web site using a customized “skin” that we had Traction create for us. While our web site looks and acts like a conventional web site, it is actually built with the blogging software and everything on the public web site is just composed of articles (posts) in the Traction software. This makes the update and maintenance of the pages trivial, as MS Word documents can simply be copied into the web pages and uploaded with a mouse click eliminating all the work of HTML encoding and placement (although it is very easy to add HTML formatting).
The even bigger value in this kind of software is the ease of collaboration among workgroups. Particularly because of the highly flexible security administration, we set up secure workspaces for each of our 16 different committees and projects, and give read, write, and comment capability only to the members of the group. Group members can then post articles freely and easily, comment on each other’s work at the paragraph level leaving in-line comments for all to read, and never worry about partially developed ideas getting too much exposure before they can be refined. Once a white paper or other work product is complete, they can publish it to the higher level audience of all of our member companies, or with one more mouse click publish it to the news page of our public web site. We have several hundred people involved in our committees and work projects and they have taken to using this medium to communicate and share ideas and avoid endless meetings and teleconferences by doing it this way.
What makes all of these kinds of applications work the best is the ability to implement the “publish and subscribe” model. This is the information sharing part. People can use RSS or ATOM to subscribe to their individual committee work and/or the larger group news pages and avoid the task of having to go to the site to see what has changed or been added since their last visit. With our software, there is also an Executive Digest that automatically generates a newspaper-like, e-mail message unique to each user with an account, presenting headlines of what new has been added since the last notification. By default, we set this up to run at 1:00 a.m. every Sunday morning, so when users come to work Monday morning they have on their desktop a news summary of what happened during the last week in every part of the enterprise to which they have the authority to be so advised. The Executive Digest approach is more readily accepted by the large percentage of users who just can’t be bothered with setting up an RSS aggregator.
The combination of the ease of collaboration, the security of controlling access to your work by others before it is ready for release, and the ease and convenience of subscription to changing information is what allows us to define this as our “Knowledge Management System” and effectively serve a large number of direct enrolled users as well as the public at large.
This kind of software is going to find increasing settings for its use in law enforcement and justice as well as many other domains as users insist on having this capability to replace the endless round of meetings.
11:02:22 PM 
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