Today, during one of my team review meetings, one of my colleagues raised an idea of having a chat server hosted on intranet to allow the team members collaborate with each other for issuing and requesting updates on various incidents, problems and their progresses. A good idea to have one chat server, but few team members were probably not pro to the idea due to the ‘push’ nature of the chat and they did not want to be disturbed with many messages broadcasted to the team if they were not of any interest to them.

Then the obvious solution to this idea was to install ‘twitter’ like microblogging software on one of my intranet server and allow teams to follow rest of the team to ‘pull’ the updates as and when they need it.

To my surprise, when I explained the concept of microblogging to the team and gave an example of ‘twitter’ to the team, none of my team members seem to know ‘twitter’. This was a shock to me, especially when my team was supposed to be pro in Information Technology !!

Nevertheless, explained them the concept of microblogging to the team and asked them to explore ‘twitter’ concepts and find out how it works.

laconica Upon doing the search myself, I found Laconi.ca best suited to our needs of having an online microblogging and collaboration tool for the team.

I would still need to get the team explore this product and get a pilot installation tested on our intranet Linux server but by the looks of the product, it looks to be exactly what I needed for my team to enable better collaboration.

Anyways, few main expectations I am having from this kind of collaboration tool being used in the support project is to enable the disparately located team put up updates on a simple question @What are you doing?@.  Obviously my team is located at various locations across India & UK so having a centralized tool would certainly help us in better collaboration.

Another important usage I envisage of this tool is to give updates to customers about any major release updates or change implementation. It is obvious that while the teams are busy doing the installation of a software on the production servers, they would not like customers or any other teams asking the questions on status updates and disturb them.  So if we have this kind of tool, it would definitely enable us ‘post’ proactive updates on intranet which could be followed by various customers / teams to find out the updates themselves.

Thus, a job for me tomorrow is to find out someone in my team who could take on the job of doing the R&D and install the Laconi.ca software on my intranet server and take it from there ..