Back in 2000 - trying to sell customers the idea of real-time collaborative web content management (today better known as Wiki) - I made up statements to explain people why they should have a bad feeling when writing Word documents.
The problem then - and I guess it still widespread today - is that people generally have a good feeling when they finished writing a Word document and hit the send button in their E-Mail tool to sent it as attachment to their coworkers/friends. They could do so much better with different technology.
But what is wrong with e-mailing Word documents as attachment?
Well - check your level of knowledge sharing:
0. Tell somebodyEver tried to pass a vocal message around a large table by having everybody forwarding the message to the person next to them - until it's back at your end? If not - try it. You will see - we are so bad repeating knowledge we heard.
1. Handwriting notesWhen is the last time you felt it would be useful to do a full text search on your paper notes? Or can your coworkers by coincidence not read your handwriting?
2. Write Word documents, store them on your harddisk - bring paper copies for everybody into meetingsThought about that somebody might like to add his brilliant idea into your document? Do you take the time to write the valuable meetings comments into the document after the meeting? Do you keep old revisions of the documents? Ever wondered which is the latest "Copy of %my document name%" you edited?
3. Write Word documents and store them on a shared network driveWelcome to the networked world. You reached the level where your knowledge might unintentionally help somebody to come up with a even cleverer idea. Did you choose a good file name? Did you got a notification when your boss added helpful comments into the document? Do you keep privat copies of the shared documents, to be able to compare old vs. changed? A desktop search engine is cool - why does my company do not allow me to index the complete network drives? How do I suppose to find recently created documents from my friends about the subject I'm working on?
4. Write E-Mails with attached documentsYour favorit Word feature is called Track Changes - although you think merging changes from 6 different people still sucks somehow.. - and oh! No! that loony again took the frist version you sent and distributed it to his team! Does your mail client allow fast full text search on all your mails including attachments? - Yes.. we already mentioned - desktop search engines are cool!
5. Write Blog postsYour internal team blog has become a vital place to share ideas and comment on topics beyond the walls of your cubicle. Does the idea you had during the morning shower inspired your team mates on the other half of the planet to optimize the process (you didn't knew they were working on)?
6. Edit Wiki pagesYour mail inbox has join forces with the RSS reader and has become a todo list with notifications to check on the latest Wiki & blog updates and comments. An instant diff view of the changes since your last visit shows you what happend. You completely forgot the install the print driver on the new notebook you got two months ago. Thank you for saving the rain forest.
7. Organize the worlds informationYou are a regular
Wikipedia contributor. You think
Microformats should have been integrated into HTML right from the start and
Technorati should have a tag recommendation service that helps you to find the best tags for your blog posts based on past tags chosen by people writing about the same topic. Well then -
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