Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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sharepointforcollaboration expensive server-based solutions like what Microsoft and IBM/Lotus offer. Google is getting good traction with its Premiere Apps and enterprise services. At $50/pp/year with little set-up (does not require an I.T. guy), storage, back- up, etc. are all taken care of by Google. Premiere Apps have been adding new features (for no extra cost) by buying technologies from smaller companies. Because of the attractive pricing and the current economic climate, five state gov- ernments have migrated from SharePoint over to Premiere Apps. Although Microsoft partners do offer SharePoint as a cloud service, they are not seeing the same traction as Google. Is the business or the I.T. department making decisions about the business's technology needs. Without any bad inten- tions, most I.T. departments take the path of least resistance (in this case SharePoint). The smart ones look at adop- tion and usage six months later. What often is easiest for I.T. is not the best for the business. But because the collaborative solution I.T. chooses does perform some 42 May / June 2011 of the functions needed by the business, the enterprise will often adopt SharePoint because it has I.T.'s blessing. These days, I.T. is an appropriate resource for ERP applications, but absolutely the wrong resource for what I call "situational applications" — that is, applications you need right away for spe- cific purposes and that may be used for only a short time or a specific situation. Many of today's 2000-plus collaboration tools fall into this category, and many of them are free to try and inexpensive to subscribe to. This moves collaboration from a line item in a budget to a monthly expense. So many groups, departments and teams in the enterprise are finding their own collaborative solutions that fit their needs rather than following the choice of I.T. SharePoint still only runs on Windows, and it was not originally built as a collabo- ration tool, but Microsoft keeps bolting on collaborative functions and calling it a col- laborative tool. As I said, the marketing is pretty convincing — but you make your own decision. —David Coleman is an expert in collabora- tion and has been studying and working in this market for over 20 years. He has written four books and offers a variety of Webinars, classes and workshops. If you are having col- laboration challenges, visit the Website www.collaborate.com, phone (650) 342-9197, e-mail davidc@collaborate.com, or visit dcole- man100 on G-mail and Twitter. Team Collaboration? Join David Coleman Sept 27th for "The Collaboratory," an interactive hands-on lab to train teams on effective work processes, tools and collabo- ration practices to achieve results. Learn more at: www.elceshow.com See pre-cons. Challenged with Government Elearning!