Definitely a tool to keep an eye on: ThoughtFarmer. In contrast to SharePoint, this seems like a really easy-to-use and intuitive portal and collaboration suite. And on a related note, this must be one of the neatest intranet rollouts i have ever seen.
SharePoint links for today:
- Dig yourself a hole: Top SharePoint Pitfalls [Link]
- Some user experience concepts, applicable to SharePoint, but not exclusively [Link]
- Toby Ward on SharePoint Planning and Governance [Link, via]
With their heads in the cloud, the old dogs of technology are bent on learning some new tricks
I really like the title of this article about cloud computing.
Apart from individual use or hype that hardly relates to your average company, the value and ROI of Enterprise 2.0 tools in organizations is still questionable. The main problems can be found outlined in these articles:
- Dion Hinchcliffe: How to measure the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 tools [Link]
- Also take a look at his slides from the Web 2.0 Expo [Link, via]
- A more realistic and pragmatic viewpoint comes from Dennis Howlett [Link]
What makes me wonder is that, coming from a sociological background, i don’t see any insurmountable problems in measuring, and consequently determining, ROI of so-called ’soft’ correlations. The social sciences have developed a strong and proven tool set for exactly this type of phenomena. Of course, the adapting of these tool sets to the enterprise could require more resources than management is willing to provide, but i think that, on a more manageable level, sound results can be found by even small teams and small initiatives.
After cleaning up the CSS here at marksimon.de i sure would like to try out such refined techniques as CSS Sprites. Although there might be no actual purpose to it and, from an aesthetic point of view, i still prefer a graphics-free approach to writing stylesheets. But that’s just my personal taste, i guess.
I tried out a tool for scheduled shutdowns on my Ubuntu machine yesterday. Firefox was still running in the background, and after the shutdown it turns out that my whole profile (bookmarks, add-ons, etc.) was lost. To make matters worse, Firefox would randomly crash at every second click, be it on the toolbar or on a link. Removing and reinstalling the packages didn’t help, but fortunately i found a solution here. So if this happens to you, all you have to do is a) duplicating the Firefox profile folder and b) editing the path to it in the profile.ini – see the first answer for a detailed description.
