When I was at Microsoft, I had to use Project to manage the schedules for documentation projects; it was free and the company standard. After I left, however, I found Project to be overkill for many things I was working on. I am also cheap. Turns out, there are now lots of great task and project management tools in the cloud; most have a free version that limits the number of projects and people you can work with. All are designed for collaboration, with access by several people and blogs, wikis, and even Web meetings among the features. Some of these require you to sign up for a subscription version, of course.

If you want a list of the best ones out there, check out this listing. I am trying ProWorkFlow, Nozbe, and CentralDesktop.

Labels: collaboration, methods

How many STC communities are on Twitter? All of these. There may be more, but Twitter search is down today.

stcukandi - STC UK & Ireland
stcintermtn
STCHouston
STCIndiana
STCBoston
STCPugetSound
stcchicago
STCAtlanta
stcwdc
stcaccess
stc_org
LoneWriterSIG
stcfrance
STCINDIA

To see these Twitter sites, just type http://www.twitter.com/sites-twitter-name-as-above.

For example: http://www.twitter.com/stcwdc

UUXManager will follow all of them.

Labels: collaboration, Twitter, UUX business

Peter Morville of Semantic Studios is working on a new book about search patterns, and the process inspired him to rethink UX deliverables, particularly how to collaborate with other team members, like graphic designers. This blog entry on User Experience Deliverables explains how he arrived at his list of new IA deliverables.

Labels: collaboration, tools

Russ at UserGlue today posted "Do We Really Need Associations, Anyway? Do They Need Us?

He's been pondering just how useful all of these professional associations (UPA, STC, IxDA, etc)and has come down on the side of "yes," with a caveat.

If associations do not provide what people want, people will create what they want without the association. His example is Stephen Bray's holiday weekend campaign to create UX Book Clubs via LinkedIn and other social networking sites.

To quote Russ:

Most of us work in the User Experience space (if you’re reading this blog, at least I think you are)– you/we should all be connecting these boxes and we should all be wanting to solve these problems. We should be taking advantage of this “whatever-point-oh” web/world that we’re in and FIND NEW WAYS to be excited and energized and CREATE SOMETHING BETTER.

Because if we don’t, someone else will.

Is there something STC or UUX should be doing that we are not? Create it. UUX has multiple communication tools, now, designed to help us talk to each other in whatever way works best for you.

You can comment on this blog. You can follow the UUX Twitter, you can start a thread on our mailing list.

UUX is run entirely by volunteers. You elected a leadership and we want our primary task to be enabling you to get what you need out of this organization.
There are 2033 members in UUX as of December 1. Talk to each other; make things happen.

Labels: collaboration, inspiring, UUX business

Some of you may have responded to a survey sent out in May by a research group under Dr. Mark Zachry in the Technical Communication department at the University of Washington (my alma mater). Even if you did not, the results of the survey are quite interesting.

Five years ago we did not have the easily available services, such as Google Docs, that we have today. One of my projects in grad school at the UDub was developing an interface mock-up for collaborative work amongst evening graduate students who could not easily meet between classes.

This research shows that 20% of knowledge workers use some form of publicly-available online services as part of their work. Click the graphic to download a PDF of the poster.


In UUX, we use Google Docs extensively both for the leadership to work together on reports and other documents, and to communicate with members. We also use a blog and Twitter and are working on the launch of a pilot wiki for cooperative creation of Web resource links.

The abstract is quoted below and the abstract PDF is available online:

This(research)presents the preliminary results of a national survey of knowledge workers about their use of publicly available, Web-based application services to support cooperative work. Our aim is to understand how widespread the use of such technologies is, and—further—to develop a
sense of the sorts of activities these technologies support.

Labels: collaboration

As technical communicators, we all work with editors or as editors from time to time. Any project team sooner or later has to manage reviewing slides, a spec, or some other document that represents the entire group's thoughts.

Textflow is a new entry into online editing that does more than make revision versions, let you leave comments, or mark added and deleted text.

Textflow: Collaborative Editing Made Easy - ReadWriteWeb

As this article points out, there are limitations in this beta, such as no more than 10 pages in a document. That aside, it is time people explore new ways of online editing.

Labels: collaboration, words

If you are at all like me, you have so many things going on in your work and life it is hard to remember where you are supposed to be and when you are supposed to be there!

For me, the start of the holiday season combines with the start of UW Husky Women's Basketball season and this becomes a real juggling act. I just discovered, however, that I can subscribe to an Internet calendar of U.S. holidays (including postal holidays and federal employee holidays) and the calendar of Husky conference games at icalshare. Beats entering all of those game dates manually!

Of course, there are hundreds and hundreds of calendars available. Your favorite sports team and the holidays for the country you live in are most likely there.

I'm thinking STC ought to have a shared Internet calendar to help everyone keep track of when there are Web seminars, conference proposal deadlines, elections, and so many other things.

Labels: collaboration