Welcome! This is a spot for discussing what makes for successful online collaboration in the workspace. The simplest way to keep up with things is to subscribe to the email feed.

Hi Jay,

Just wanted to say love the insight you are providing with informal training.

I cam across your Successful Collaboration Online section and just wanted to tell you about how we have had success with online collaborations.

I am in the training department for a company that has a call centers here in Toronto and multiple across the US, in NH, MA, KY, and TX.

When I first came on board I found that each site had it own training department were working in there own silo, even though we were training people to conduct the exact same job. When I traveled to another site to train, I found out that they had some great ideas and I was able to show them they way we train certain aspects.

What this lead to creation for websites that every training department could access. On this websites we had discussion boards so people could pose questions and answers, also ideas. We are now able to share documents and creation by uploading them to this site. We have links to pictures and events that we hold and share success ideas.

Moving forward we are looking to have blogs and use podcasting as part of this and as time goes on expand it to actual in class training.

Online collaboration brings ideas and people together and often solve problems and allows you to learn at your pace.

sig Daniel, thanks for telling us. Do they collaborate and share information, e.g. on a wiki? jay

We have a lot of collabration on projects via these pages. We share idea maps and word docs. We have just started looking at having a better flow of information and are looking at putting all this information together in a Wiki

Hi Jay,

"What makes for successful online collaboration in the workspace?"
1) Unfortunately, at my current workplace, we're still collaborating physically, only! Online communication doesn't exist; I was also requested not to use the c-lab for my classes as it is unfair for other classes with instructors who don't know or like to use technology for their students.

2) However, I had a recent "successful" experience training a group of branch managers in a local bank to improve their communication skills. Although a community of learning online based on collaboration and cooperation was created, I was unable to get active as planned due to a number of factors. If interested, please let me know so that I list them in another message.

Hope this helps..

Thanks, Jay for starting this discussion!

Hi all,
Daniel, can you tell us about how you "marketed" the collaboration or what constraints you had to overcome? Thanks, D