Eric Mack On-Line

One of the highlights of the Collaborative Technologies Conference was the opportunity for me to attend and participate with my colleague, Michael Sampson in his 7 Pillars of IT Enabled Team Productivity workshop. Over the course of a the day, Michael walked us through each of the 7 Pillars. Throughout Michael's workshop, we split up into smaller groups to work on exercises designed to focus on specific areas of team productivity. It was great to hear what organizations, large and small, are doing to IT enable their team productivity. (There were many Notes/Domino organizations present, although IBM was notably absent).

During the section on shared spaces, Michael and I gave a live demonstration of OneNote shared sessions, using our new Tecra M4 Tablet PCs.


Michael used OneNote to mindmap the session objectives

Prior to the conference, Michael and I spent a lot of time working with OneNote shared sessions - the ability for multiple people to take notes simultaneously. Before our trip, Amy and Wendy met us in the Digital Sandbox and treated us to a live 4-way demonstration of OneNote and Michael and I followed up with several 2-way sessions. We even set up a network on the airplane just for OneNote. Our goal was to learn about and demonstrate what users can do today - using off the shelf solutions. We wanted to be able to discuss key issues that should be considered when selecting a tool for collaborating in shared spaces. Overall the shared session capability of OneNote worked well, however, there are still many opportunities for improvement in the area of joint editing and review. We've been in touch with the OneNote team, and we look forward to evaluating the next release. (Note: Michael's currently working on a paper that will summarize some of our experiences and his conclusions about OneNote as a collaborative tool. Keep an eye on his Shared Spaces blog.)

The folks at the CTC conference were kind enough to provide not one, but two 12' projection screens for this workshop, which made the demonstrations all the more impressive.


Michael and Eric in front of our giant OneNote displays

I think the only thing that would have been more impressive would be for Michael to have invited Amy and Wendy do the live demonstration of OneNote shared sessions.

Perhaps next year.