This is the fifth in a series of posts on how I lead my team in avoiding email.

Note: This post is somewhat irrelevant since it was announed that development of Google Wave is being discontinued.  It was a sad day when I read it was being canned since it was a powerful tool.  None-the-less, here’s how we were using it.

Google Wave is very powerful for containing information around projects and on-going conversations.

When a project is at the idea stage, Wave is great for threading conversations and allowing for side conversations to spin-off inline.  I love that it would walk me through the order in which comments were made.  This saves a lot of time trying to piece together the flow of a conversation in your inbox.

It’s excellent for collaborating on documents.  Instead of emailing revisions back and forth everything is right in the wave and edits can be made in real time.  I wrote a report with multi-departmental team across four timezones using Wave.

I love Wave for capturing meeting minutes.  Be...

More »

Leave a Comment

I’m slowly becoming a fan of Google wave. If you haven’t heard of it, you can read more here, but basically it’s a tool for real-time communication and collaboration. I’ve used it about 4 times now and I’m slowly getting the hang of it and understanding the power of it. Plus it’s kind of fun (and creepy) to watch someone in another state type on your screen.

The best use I’ve found for it so far is project collaboration amongst our staff. But I know there could even be more uses. It’s a tool that has the potential to be immensely helpful for our large organization. I think we should get to know it.

Has anyone else used Google Wave in a way that’s been helpful? What’s the value of this web 2.0 tool?

FYI: You have to have an invite to use it. Let me know if you’d like one to start waving.

Other LTI posts kinda like this one:

1. Google Maps
2. Geography is our friend – Google Mashup
3. Collaboration across the organization

Leave a Comment

I’m experimenting with Google Wave more and more lately.

Use case:  Scheduling and collaborating on a meeting.

In my example I’ve created a wave to accomplish multiple objectives.

1. Set a date and time for the meeting. No annoying ‘reply-all’ emails to try and figure out when people are free.  Here it’s very clear who can attend and who can’t.

2. To communicate the purpose and agenda for the meeting. You can’t see it here, but below the purpose statement is an agenda.  (Nothing worse than getting invited to a meeting if you don’t know what it is about.  Certainly the purpose determines if you are ‘available’ to meet.)  This often isn’t communicated in your standard Outlook meeting invitation.

3. To record people’s thoughts and input. For this particular meeting, participants will be discussing a number of questions.  We’ll all be able to collaboratively capture the input in real-time as others speak in the conference call.

There you have it, everything I need to know about this meeting all kept in ...

More »

Leave a Comment