Tagged with 'collaboration'

Well, Duo is moving its office one more time. But I can tell you it’s not because, as some have noted, that we’re tired of the restaurants around our office. Nor is it because we’re overdue for a nice friends, family and clients openhouse. Over our ten year history, we’ve enjoyed steady measured growth. Now, once again, we find ourselves a little cramped for space in our 7,500 sq. ft. and moving to 12,000 sq. ft.

But our move is not just about more space but, rather, different space. At Duo, we place a high value on collaboration. Our new location will provide us the additional rooms we need to meet with our clients in person as well as through webinars and phone conferences.  But the real advantage is that our project teams, what we call “studios,” will now have space dedicated to collaborating on projects.

Our new space will have permanent studio rooms where our teams of interaction designers, developers, online marketers and project managers can gather to share our skills and achieve some synergy as we execute client projects. Some may view our extra space as a luxury in a business environment where austerity is the watchword. But in truth, properly done, collaboration achieves a higher level of efficiency and a better product for our client. So if we can invest in a little extra space to produce a better client product more efficiently, I think it is worth it.

Everyone is on board with the plan. So on Friday, February 20, Duo will relocate to  20 W. Kinzie in the River North neighborhood in Chicago. I hear the restaurants are better over there.

“On what are you working?” might be the more grammatically correct phrasing of this question, or perhaps the slightly awkward, “What work are you doing?” But the point is, you can let your coworkers and colleagues know your status updates internally only using Yammer, much like Twitter but with a co-worker limitation on conversations.

Sign up with an email address that matches your company’s domain name, and then answer any one of these work-related questions in 140 characters or less, and you are experiencing Yammer, the winner of the Techcrunch 50 and its $50,000 prize.

Yammer (www.yammer.com) lets you share status updates with users internal to your company only. With an iPhone application, a BlackBerry application, and a Desktop application, Yammer can be everywhere employees go to get their work done.

Yammer screenshot from their video demo

One nice feature lets you put a pound sign next to a word in an update, (like #newspace) then Yammer collects the status update and groups updates about that project, much like Twemes do for the Twitter site. Check out twemes.com/wc08 for examples from a recent Web Content 2008 conference. Yammer’s tag implementation lets you follow the aggregation of the updates as well, which makes following project statuses as easy as following people’s statuses. Nice.

For those of us who have been on Twitter for a while, a company directory limitation to followers “feels” a little awkward. It’s as if we need lifestreaming and workstreaming, but having to follow two streams depending on your current focus seems like splitting attention too finely.

Anne Zelenka defines workstreaming well in a  WebWorkerDaily post, “Workstreaming: The New Face Time.” She says “Workstreaming is related to lifestreaming, producing an RSS feed of all the bits and pieces of your online self in date-time order. But lifestreaming incorporates everything from the personal to the professional to the trivial, while workstreaming is only about showing what you’ve just accomplished, what you’re working on now, and what you’re planning to do in the future.”

An alternative to Yammer may be a separate, work-related-only Twitter account, with limitations on who can follow that account.

You could look at Yammer as a microblogging tool, an internal instant messaging tool, a project status tool, or a people status tool. Overall I would call it the next generation collaboration tool for the enterprise.