Notes on Productivity Home Page

My colleague, Michael Sampson, has just published the first part of his two-part white paper: Collaboration Software Clients: Email, IM, Presence, RSS & Collaborative Workspaces Should Be Integrated for Business Communication.

In his paper, Michael returns to "first principles," as he discusses the types of software-facilitated interactions the information professional deals with on a day-to-day basis. I think Michael does a great job of identifying the key requirements for functional collaboration while proposing how things, in his view, "should" work.

Michael's paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of:
Email
Instant Messaging
Presence
RSS Newsreader
Collaborative Workspaces

I've known Michael for many years and he does amazing work. We first collaborated together in 1997 on a presentation for the Electronic Messaging Association,  (EMA), on the topic of "Smart Messaging." At that time, Michael was a strategist for Telecom, New Zealand, and I was CTO of Peloria Technology Corp. I moderated a presentation with Michael and another colleague, Eva Wylie, of Unisys Corporation. Together, the three of us spoke about the present and future needs of collaboration in the area of multimedia messaging. It's been fun these past years to see some of our predictions come to pass.

There is obviously still a long way to go, and Michael seeks to address these issues.

A neat thing to know about Michael, is that he writes these reports and his daily Shared Spaces blog as a way of staying sharp in his field. No doubt, he generates new business from some companies, who read his work and choose to engage him for strategic consulting, but the driver, as he once explained to me, is the public accountability that his blog and these reports create for him.  Michael's already published that he will post part II of his paper in September, so he's already got a stake in the ground.  (You will want to add it to your "Waiting For List"). I'm sure he won't disappoint us.

Nice work, Michael!

I've got a busy week ahead; I'll probably have more to say about Michael's report soon. For now, I encourage you to download it and have a look.