Collaborating in Workspaces

As part of my dissertation, I have been exploring the concept of employees working in "spaces" rather than on siloed PC's or shared folder drives. I have been expanding my enterprise workshop manager idea. There are 2 reasons for this:

1. By having informal discussions with colleagues, I realised that an enterprise would want much more than a workshop manager. They were all pointing me towards some method of capturing the knowledge created in a workshop, linking to the relevant output documents and giving the content some context.


2. When I started looking at enterprise wiki solutions, I realised how powerful they are. With the emphasis on simplicity, I was able to focus more on the content instead of worrying how the small pieces would fit together.

The main product I have been looking at is Confluence from Atlassian. I had heard alot about this product from other bloggers, so I decided to have a look for myself. I have found it very easy to use so far, and most importantly, Confluence does the simple things right.

So what does the use of an enterprise wiki offer? Well I am loving the concept of working in "spaces". A space is created for a project, many pages (overviews, documents, attachments, conversations etc) are created within this space providing a better visualisation of the project for its participants.

There are the more obvious advantages also - reduction in the use of shared folder drives, better document versioning, reduction of email spaghetti. Overall, I just love the look and feel of working in a project space, allowing me to access all relevant documentation in a searchable, taggable, personalisable space.

One interesting thing I will be looking at will be the comparison of a low-cost product such as Confluence with an enterprise giant such as Lotus Quickplace.

More to come on what I am actually doing, not getting much time to blog at the mo!