There’s a sea change going on – a quiet revolution in the way we work as teams. Successful virtual teams, without question, have been on the forefront of this change. But co-located teams are also beginning to reap the benefits of a new way of working.

When Meetings Ruled the Day

To decode the secret, let’s start by examining a simple concept that traditionally has been critical to teams:  meetings.

Back in the 90’s, most work, status, decisions, and deals happened in meetings.  Meetings were the way things got done. In the days or hours leading up to the meeting, we would prepare bits and pieces of collateral to present or reference in the meeting. We compiled agendas, collected status updates, drafted documents, and printed out static plans. Project managers used their powers to exert control over the process in an effort to move the ball forward.

Then at the appointed time, everyone would gather, spend a couple hours talking about what was prepared, and try to make some decisions. More often, they would end up making provisional decisions, after which they’d disband before coming back together a few weeks later with revised information and the same constituents in the room again. Picture the people as the sun - the collateral orbited around them and their gatherings.  

Virtual Team, Virtual Office

Today that scenario, for many teams, is turned on its head.  Instead of the project collateral orbiting around the people, people orbit around project collateral that is centralized in an online workspace. This configuration supports our modern workspace, which is – for a vast number of teams – virtual. People are distributed across the globe, are in different time zones, and come and go as projects are executed.

In February of this year, Phase2 Technology acquired control of the popular Drupal-based Open Atrium system from its creator, Development Seed. Open Atrium is a team collaboration solution built on the Drupal CMS. Open Atrium is often used in team situations, including intranets and project management environments. The system comes with a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

We tracked down the Phase2 Technology team to ask them about their plans for  Open Atrium. CEO Jeff Walpole and Product Manager Karen Borchert were kind enough to take the time to answer our questions.

Q. What are Phase2's plans for Open Atrium?

Phase2 is very excited to be involved with Open Atrium, but we did not want to move too quickly to change something so many people use and love without first serving the community and providing maintenance to its underlying module stack. Earlier this year, we released support packages around Atrium that allow more users the ability to implement and use Atrium with the help of our team's services. In the months since taking over Atrium, we've been delving more deeply into the involved and vibrant Atrium community to try to understand best what users are looking for in this product. We've talked to users about everything from technical needs to theming to documentation to community involvement. We've built some training around Atrium that we've conducted with some clients, and we're currently preparing a stable 1.0 release (it is officially still in "Beta" status). One thing that is certain is that we are looking to this community to be part of that road map and part of the growth of the product. We want to start by giving the community a more public place to see and find contributed Features that they might use for their own Atrium instances. And then we want to see more community involvement in building and improving Atrium in the future.

Peter Barron is an Intranet Connections Fan; he provides significant feedback on our blog, Linkedin and Facebook pages and speaks candidly about our software as it applies to his organization.  Over the past ten years, Peter has managed the Rio Rancho Public Schools intranet, which is internally called “Rionet”. With over 20 school district departments that use the rionet, Peter targets applications and widgets that make the intranet process fast and easy for thousands of users.  We recently interviewed Peter to find out what makes his intranet so successful, and today we are delighted to share his responses with our intranet community.

Here are Peter’s six tips for an efficient intranet::

1. Time: Seeing as Rio Rancho is a school district, the majority of intranet users are teachers. Teachers are incredibly busy with students during the day and they lack freedom of time to peruse their intranets. In order to overcome this timing issue, Peter leverages the notification capabilities of the “rionet” with subscriptions to departments that the teachers have invested interest in. This subscription service has been a big push for Peter and the Rio Rancho Schools because it decreases searching time on the intranet by targeting topics of interest for the user.

2. E-forms: Teachers must attend conferences, so Peter created PDF e-forms for them to request conference admittance and funding in rionet. Directly from their classroom, teachers fill out the request form, and it is processed right away.

"Help 2.0 is about letting go of old-school, preconceived notions about our role as content providers. Help 2.0 forces us to realize that by leveraging the knowledge of the crowd we can help users find the right information quickly and easily, whether we created the content ourselves or not. And perhaps most importantly, Help 2.0 is about creating support experiences in which users can help us learn what they want and need, while also allowing them to assist one another, in ways that are meaningful to them."

-Scott Abel, The Future of Technical Communication Is Socially Enabled: Understanding the Help 2.0 Revolution, Intercom.STC.org, April 2011.

"The more I learn about Enterprise 2.0, the more inclined I am to encourage companies to throw caution to the wind: buy (or build) some well-designed lightweight tools that take advantage of emergence and game mechanics, find a few leaders willing to lead by example, and go live."

- Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way,  AndrewMcAfee.org, April 7, 2011.