Continuing from my earlier post on using ‘twitter’ for better collaboration within IT project teams and taking it one step further, I have been contemplating on actually adopting an Enterprise 2.0 software stack for real time collaboration, better communication, effective knowledge management & idea generation amongst my team.
The obvious problem at my hands is lack of budget to actually look for and adopt any proprietary software that would solve our purpose, thus a little more intelligence & effort is needed to ensure we have a good set of working processes, software & tool to enable us become an effective project team.
Being into production support and providing critical support to few prime portals of one of world’s leading telecommunications company, the need of time is for the team to have an effective collaborative tool at their hands which would allow them to exchange short messages via web based intranet portal.
So to cater to this requirement, we decided to install Laconi.ca and try that out. Hopefully we will have something to work on by end of this week.
By the way, after my earlier post, few of my team members came back to me disputing my claim of unawareness of ‘twitter’ within them. So it was good to know as well !
Another important bit was to have a knowledge management portal and for that we installed Mediawiki solution on the LAMP server I had on the Intranet. Obviously it worked as a treat so far and hopefully it would continue to serve as a KMS solution for us.
But the problem we are having is about carrying out the backup of the Mediawiki. Obviously one simple way is to back up the database tables & then back up the file system separately. However, I was just wondering if there are any ready tools available that would execute the backups on the Mediawiki installation and give me an installation kit to restore, if eventually we need !
Few things I have installed on the server are Open Office (OpenGoo) to manage the documents online for the team. However, so far never used it for a real project purpose though. I would like to see how I could use it in my project in future though.
I have also had an installation of b2evolution lying on my server which I intended to use for the team blog for spreading the news on updates and progress on various changes / issues, but as of now it looks a long shot for the team to actually start using it. Obviously it would support the RSS / Atom feeds as well. So I would have to hold on for a while.
As a part of my objective of increasing the collaboration within the team, I have created something called Ideas wall and Questions basket that would give the team an opportunity to interact with the management & post ideas for new innovations, opportunities as well as ask questions on the processes around the project. Just for the sake of mentioning, these two are plain wiki pages in a team section for me and that worked well so far.
So far I have not felt a need of having a Social networking intranet portal for the team as the size of the team is not really big and although we have resources spread across various locations in the world, its easy to connect with each other with the existing tools. So may be I can keep that idea in reserve as of now.
As usual, if you have any comments or any ideas for me to take a look, I would welcome them. So please leave a comment on my blog or ‘twit’ me on Twitter.
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