Web 2.0 Beyond the Organizational Walls
I don't believe in Web 2.0 as replacements for traditional desktop applications such as word processors and spreadsheet apps. Not in a long while, anyway. No, the natural talent of web 2.0 apps lies in connecting people and facilitating communication - without being bound to an organization and its application infrastructure. Web 2.0 apps really can shine when it comes to facilitating collaboration over organizational borders.
Several of the ASP (now SaaS) solutions that have survived the crash of the dot-com bubble have done just that - connected people and facilitated collaboration. The Swedish projectplace.com is just one such example. It is a quite booring user experience, but extremely useful. I used it in several projects during the late 90's and early 00's and in a few projects during the last years. I am not at all surprised that it survived the tough years after the crash, but what surprises me is how many organizations that still lack these kinds of collaboration tools. And what is more surprising is that they often don't realize their value or what it costs not to have such tools. I have struggled in many projects to get an acceptance within the organization for using tools such as projectplace.com, but suffered defeat several times. "Our security policy forbids us to store business information externally". As a consultant in solution development I usually don’t have a say in changing existing IT policies. So I have had to accept the situation and continue to collaborate via mail instead. How secure is that? It certainly is not efficient for collaboration.
To me, the best thing with the web 2.0 movement is that business people - or even more important IT department people - are gradually beginning to understand the importance of being able to efficiently communicate and collaborate, both internally and with people outside of the corporate walls.
UPDATE July 3 2013: Projectplace.com asked me to remove the link to their web site, I quote:
"Thank you for linking to www.projectplace.com and that you like the company and our service. At the moment we are going through all incoming links and are asking for removal of some. This because we have got a warning from Google that we have to many unnatural links coming to our site (links that don’t follow the policy Google has for a link) and our page rank are now affected. Unfortunately your links can be considered unnatural and therefore I would like you to remove all links to Projectplace coming from:"
So. There's no link to projectplace.com from this post anymore.
Several of the ASP (now SaaS) solutions that have survived the crash of the dot-com bubble have done just that - connected people and facilitated collaboration. The Swedish projectplace.com is just one such example. It is a quite booring user experience, but extremely useful. I used it in several projects during the late 90's and early 00's and in a few projects during the last years. I am not at all surprised that it survived the tough years after the crash, but what surprises me is how many organizations that still lack these kinds of collaboration tools. And what is more surprising is that they often don't realize their value or what it costs not to have such tools. I have struggled in many projects to get an acceptance within the organization for using tools such as projectplace.com, but suffered defeat several times. "Our security policy forbids us to store business information externally". As a consultant in solution development I usually don’t have a say in changing existing IT policies. So I have had to accept the situation and continue to collaborate via mail instead. How secure is that? It certainly is not efficient for collaboration.
To me, the best thing with the web 2.0 movement is that business people - or even more important IT department people - are gradually beginning to understand the importance of being able to efficiently communicate and collaborate, both internally and with people outside of the corporate walls.
UPDATE July 3 2013: Projectplace.com asked me to remove the link to their web site, I quote:
"Thank you for linking to www.projectplace.com and that you like the company and our service. At the moment we are going through all incoming links and are asking for removal of some. This because we have got a warning from Google that we have to many unnatural links coming to our site (links that don’t follow the policy Google has for a link) and our page rank are now affected. Unfortunately your links can be considered unnatural and therefore I would like you to remove all links to Projectplace coming from:"
So. There's no link to projectplace.com from this post anymore.