MMORPG and others

One of the software solutions that have direct relation to Groupware are online games, especially MMO games. World of Warcraft for example unites millions (more than 12 millions according to Wikipedia) users worldwide and gives them various ways of communication. Of course MMO games (massive multiplayer online) cannot be exactly called a collaboration tool but they still involve users in the process of interaction that is beneficial for the group (team or clan).

Other, emerging online games include, for example, Minecraft. Minecraft is a sandbox game in which users are not limited (almost) in ways they can modify the game world. They are welcome to build castles, cities, moats, railroads and even spaceships.

Reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft

Awareness of Lotus Notes 8.5

Due to a private leave, I missed some important and useful course lectures. Thankfully, Ms. Ovaska reminded me to do self-learning via the slides and materials in Moodle, then I can follow up the study on Groupware.

The last slides introduce many popular tools for simplifying people's working, and Lotus Notes is one of those. I used Lotus Notes for many years. So I want to talk about this software at this time.

I would like to give a brief introduction about this software firstly. Lotus Notes, which is developed by IBM, is the client side of a client-server, collaborative application. In the IBM's offical websites, it is defined as an "integrated desktop client option for accessing business e-mail, calendars and applications." And the Lotus Notes usually consists of four parts: Lotus Notes client application, Lotus Notes legacy client, Lotus Domino server, and Lotus Domino Designer.

In our organization, we use Lotus Notes 8.5 as the main a tool to facilitate our paperless environment. Lotus Notes 8.5 is the latest release and has many new features. The developers in our organization also developed a lot of new plug-in(s) for Lotus Notes 8.5. Here are some examples.





From those pictures, we can see that Lotus Notes 8.5 has many features and it is very flexible and easy for customization. Firstly, we use it as a timekeeper to record the hours that people work(Shown in Figure 1). Secondly, it can be used as an email client(Shown in Figure 2). Thirdly, it has the function for documentation management(Shown in Figure 3). Last but not least, our organization's blog can be integrated smoothly into Lotus Notes 8.5(Shown in Figure 4).

Lotus Notes is a handy tool for me.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Notes
http://www.ibm.com/us

Moodle as groupware

When thinking of a subject to my last post of this course I started to think about what groupware tool or site I use the most in my studies. Then I came to think of Moodle itself.

It is an open source course management system that is also known as virtual learning environment. It is used as a tool for creating dynamic web pages for students. Moodle is used all around the world by universities, schools, companies and independent teachers. It needs to be installed on a web server and it is pretty easy to learn.

What makes Moodle more collaborative software are its activity modules, such as forums, databases and wikis. They build communities around a certain subject to promote collaborative learning. I've used Moodle's forums actively only in few courses, but it's good to be there in case one has a question that they want to be answered. Some courses only use Moodle to deliver content to students and help learning with different assignments and quizzes.

I like Moodle because it puts all course information in one place and I always know where I should go to find course materials.

References:
http://moodle.com/?moodlead=moodle.general
http://moodle.org/about/

Wikipedia and Mediawiki: Collaboration Platforms

Wikipedia is an example of the online community where users are united to achieve a common goal. In Wikipedia users are organized into different groups. There are readers, who are the majority of the Wikipedia population and the there are contributors. While from the first glance it seems that all of the editors have equal right (peer review) it is not so because Wikipedia has too large of an userbase and it's role is too important. Wikipedia also has a special class of users that review the articles and "mark" them legit, add their own comments or start a discussion on the topic.

If you want to have a platform like that to store your data and collaborate with others you don't have to go to Wikipedia. The open-source solution called Mediawiki is there for your aid. It is easy installable and resembles the Wikipedia in almost any way.

How Google use recommendations?

In this post, I would like to talk about the recommender systems, and give a brief introduction of how Google use recommendations. The definition of recommender systems is to form or work from a specific type of information filtering system technique that attempts to recommend information items(movies, TV program/show/episode, video on demand, music, books, news, images, web pages, scientific literature such as research papers etc.) that are likely to be of interest to the user.

Google is the one of most successful Internet companies in this area, and uses recommendation technologies to improve its search product. There are several ways that Google does this:

1.Google customizes your search results "when possible" based on your location and/or recent search activity;
2.When you're signed in to your Google Account, you "may see even more relevant, useful results based on your web history";
3.Google's search algorithm PageRank basically depends on social recommendations - i.e. who links to a webpage;
4.Google also does item recommendations with its "Did you mean" feature.

Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Basics about mailing lists

I didn't find any posts about mailing lists, but I'm not absolutely sure that this subject has not been talked before. There are so many posts already that it's very hard to stay on track of every subject.

Mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or organization to send material to multiple recipients. When internet came more used, electronic mailing lists became popular. It means that a person can send an e-mail to many recipients by using a certain mailing list address. Everyone who's subscribed to the list or has been added by others get the e-mail.

Electronic mailing list usually contains four things: list of e-mail addresses, people or subscribers receiving mail at those addresses, e-mail messages sent to those addresses and a reflector, which is an e-mail address that sends copies of a message it received to all subscribers. They are mostly automated through a special mailing list software and a reflector address that are set up on a server. Messages that are sent to the reflector address are processed by the software and either forwarded to all e-mails in the list or dealt separately (in case that the message contains commands to the software itself).

There are two common types of mailing lists: announcement list and discussion list. Announcement list is also referred as newsletter. Only selected people may post to this list. Discussion list means a list where any subscriber can post messages.

Some mailing lists are open to anyone but some need an approval from the list owner. Biggest security problem that faces mailing lists is spamming. Discussion lists often require that every message is approved by a moderator before it is sent to the list.

In university most courses have mailing lists, as do also for example student organizations. Student groups can create mailing list by going to this website (in Finnish) http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/tkk/asiakaspalvelu/asiakaspalvelupiste/sahkopostilistat.html.

References:

http://www.usabilityfirst.com/about-usability/web-application-design/collaborative-software-groupware/typical-collaborative-software-applications/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mailing_list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list

Listening Economy: Genesis of Social Web

Recent years have seen a shift in the type of content created/available on the web. During the first decade of the web’s presence i.e. from the early 1990s onwards—most online content resembled traditional published material: the majority of web users were consumers of content, created by a relatively small amount of publishers. From the early 2000s, user-generated content has become increasingly popular on the web. More and more users participate in content creation, rather than just consumption. Popular user generated content (or social media) domains include blogs and web forums, social bookmarking sites, photo and video sharing communities, as well as social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, which offers a combination of all of these with an emphasis on the relationships among the users of the community (Agichtein, Castillo, Donato, Gionis, & Mishne, 2008).

Over last few years the web has fundamentally changed and moved towards what is called as “user-driven technologies” such as blogs, social networks, video sharing platforms to name a few. These technologies have enabled a revolution in global online communities; user generated content and publishing consumer opinions now tagged under the umbrella of social media. This also redefines how people use Internet which has led to sites like facebook, youtube, myspace and twitter to move into mainstream.

Social media exhibits a rich variety of information sources both content and non-content. The non-content information available on such platforms can range from, links, votes, quality ratings and action based social submission to the social sites like, digg, stumbleupon, linkedin, facebook, and twitter to name a few.

Works Cited

Agichtein, E., Castillo, C., Donato, D., Gionis, A., & Mishne, G. (2008). Finding High-Quality Content in Social Media. Proceedings of the international conference on Web search and web data mining (pp. 183-194). Palo Alto, California: ACM.

Nokia meeting rooms

In one of the university courses we had to make several visits to various companies both primarily local ones and ones with international background. In these visits we were concentrating mostly on how cultural differences are being dealt with in those companies and in case of local companies how they are keeping the local spirit and traditions.

One of our visits was to Nokia premises in Hervanta. We have seen a presentation about the corporate culture and what is being done to increase the productivity of the company's employees. One of very important innovations that we were told about was Nokia teleconferencing solution. While developing this solution Nokia engineers were collecting the opinions of the people who have used teleconferencing a lot and were implementing their suggestions while also testing new approaches.

The design they came up with was with a set of big screens in which you could see the people you have a conference with sitting behind a desk as if they were actually sitting in front of you. The presenter explained to us that this approach helped create the feeling of the real meeting which you don't get if you're just seeing a person's head on a computer screen. After some time you would actually feel that you've known the people you're chatting with for a long time, these meetings provide far more information than the usual meeting solutions can give.

References:

http://conversations.nokia.com/2008/06/06/halo-youre-my-hero/

Traditional Face-to-Face Meetings and Electronic Meeting Systems

Nowadays, the problems of traditional face-to-face meetings have been frequently discussed in many articles. An article, which is written by Herschel, summarized the disadvantages of traditional meetings as below:

• usually 20 percent of the participants dominate 80 percent of the time
• people are often afraid to say what they think, or they feel pressured to conform with the group
• good ideas can be stifled and lost while people await their turn to speak
• ideas are often judged by who said them rather than by the value of what was said
• because people feel dissatisfied with the process, they are less likely to support the outcomes

These negative characteristics reduce the effectiveness of traditional meetings, thus the Electronic Meeting Systems become more and more popular.The Electronic Meeting System is a certain floor space, use of modern technology, that facilitates creative problem solving and decision-making of groups within or across organisations. It is widely used in many enterprises, institutions and other types of office buildings.

Sevaral articles reported that the Electronic Meeting Systems can improve the effectiveness of meetings, support information access, and change group dynamics by improving communication. Compared to traditional face-to-face meetings, the benefits of the Electronic Meeting Systems include increased participation, automatic recording, and less personal prejudice.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_meeting_system#Web_applications
http://www.tonarticles.com/how-to-integrate-intelligent-electronic-meeting-system-construction-project-electronic-meeting-system-intelligent-project-smart-home-industry.html

Problems in team work

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

- Anonymous (1)

Throughout life one belongs to many groups or teams for example in school or work. Team is more than just bunch of people working together. Team consists of different people, all with different personalities. This often causes problems, which is what I'm writing in this entry (and not because I would feel that our group needs this :)).

Problems are often caused by only one person, as Bennett Gordon writes in his article: "Felps identified three personality types that can ruin a group: jerks, slackers, and depressive pessimists." (2) Gordon says that one person who fits any of those personality types can make a group perform 30-40% worse. Problem often spreads through the group. For example, in the study Gordon writes about, groups with jerks in them started being mean to each other and groups with depressive pessimists often acted more depressed (2).

Nate Desmond writes in his blog entry (1) about four big problems in team work and how to solve them. These are:

1. Self-centeredness
This means caring more for yourself than for others. This damages the interest of everyone in a team. Team should work towards a common interest, but selfishness causes that individual tries to accomplish what they think is best for themselves only. Solution to this is easier said than done: selflessness. Every member must put their own interests aside and work towards the goals of the team.

2. Half-heartedness
Person exhibiting this thinks that the group is not accomplishing anything and/or would rather be somewhere else. The lack of interests worsens the effectiveness of the team and spreads fast. Solution to this is dedication. Members should all be passionate about the goal and actually want to work towards it. Better motivation may be needed.

3. Uncooperative
Too much competition within a team will destroy its ability to work as an unit. Team members may be competing maybe for a promotion or grades and try to make themselves look better than their teammates. This spreads rapidly and the team will not accomplish nearly as much as it would in a trusting environment. Solution is collaboration. Team members should work together, not separately. This increases team's effectiveness and the team is prepared to compete with other teams as a whole.

4. Stubborness
Refusal to think of new ideas and methods is a huge problem. Team members who refuse to consider something new will destroy the cohesiveness of a team. Solution to this is flexibility. Everyone should give space for other ideas than their own. This does not mean that one should surrender long-held ideas and opinions. However good team players are willing to learn.

Group leaders and managers hold a big role in overcoming problems in a team. The best thing would be to prevent them happening in the first place. In order to accomplish this as much as possible, training is important (3). Understanding how teams evolve and work helps the team to succeed.

However, neither team managers or members can properly anticipate all problems that could occur. When problem comes up, team that faces it head-on, solve it and learn from it have the biggest chances to avoid the same in the future and succeed. Managers should make sure that no problem goes unnoticed. In Gordon's article he says: "There was just one guy who was a particularly good leader. And what he would do was he would ask questions and he would engage all the team members and diffuse conflicts." Recognizing the problem is the first step to the solution and when a good leader sees that the team is failing to cooperate, they call up a meeting and discuss the problem.

Being a team manager is hard and responsible work. I'm currently in software project management course and our team has already faced many problems. In my experience in student projects it's common that lack of motivation is a problem, as no one's actually getting paid for the work, other than ECTS ;). Often people just want to complete the course but don't really mind about the grade.

Let us all keep doing the good work in our team :)

References:

(1) http://www.practicalmanliness.com/5-problems-that-destroy-teamwork-and-how-to-solve-them/
(2) http://www.utne.com/Science-Technology/The-Problem-with-Teamwork-How-to-Lose-Friends-and-Negatively-Influence-People.aspx
(3) http://www.articlesbase.com/team-building-articles/the-keys-to-dealing-with-teamwork-problems-1739998.html

Meetme Meeting Feature of Doodle

Doodle is one of the easiest tool to setup meetings and events online and is absolutely un-intrusive. Doodle is a wonderful web app for scheduling. Users can create an event, add a list of potential dates and times, and send it around to other participants to vote on a final time slot for the event.

However, now you can also have a one-to-one meeting using doodle with it's new service called as MeetMe.
With multiple single signon support like Gmail, OpenID, Facebook and Yahoo, it's one click step to setting up one-to-one meeting.

MeetMe

Doodle

Miscommunication in CMC

There are numerous issues that can go wrong in the human communication and CMC introduced more of those. In CMC people are usually distanced from their opponents by the computer screens and limited to text as the only communication method. Of course there are systems that make video conferencing possible but most of the CMC is still happening in the text-only systems.

So, what are the main problems we have in CMC: there are people flaming, trolling, lurking and even those who use fake identities to deceive people. When you are not face-to-face with another person you cannot know for sure if the person is actually telling you the truth or is it who you think it is.

I will not fill this blog entry with copypasta, you can look all the terms definition on the appropriate wiki or dramatica web pages. I would like to mention though, that modern CMC may also be very ambiguous if you don't know at least the most popular memes, especially if you are on the Anonymous-occupied board like 4chan.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_(internet)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Copypasta

PS:

A nice reading piece on miscommunication:

http://www.neurovr.org/emerging/book3/3CHAPT_09.PDF

Monitors and Camera Zooms Affect Dominance in Video-Mediated Communication

Last week, we mentioned about the Video-Mediated Communication. The Video-Mediated Communication become more and more popular as a way of supporting informail remote interaction. Compared to Face-to-Face interaction, it makes the connection among remote offices and cities, and can make people working together as if they were in the same place. However, monitors and camera zooms can affect domiannce in Video-Mediated Communication.

“Camera Angle Affects Dominance in Video-Mediated Communication”, an article written by Wei Huang, Judith S. Olson, and Gary M. Olson, introduces a very interesting experiment. In this experiment, the researchers designed an interact through a Video-Mediated Communication while engaged in a group decision-making task. The researchers set the monitor and camera angle high in one room and low in another to simulate a situation where a “tall” person is talking to a “short” person.

To prevent the effects of age, gender and other factors, the participants were all white American men. The participants were told to work a problem seperately, and then negotiated a final solution with another by the Video-Mediated Communication. After that, they filled out a post-test scale in order to evaluate their perceived influence on the final decision.

From this experiment, the researchers made a conlusion that “tall” person are significantly more influential than “short” person. This conlusion has geart significant: The monitor placement and the camera zoom setting can affect the person's dominance in a Video-Mediated Communication. Similarly, there are a lot of other factors can affect the person's dominance, and these are under studying.

Reference:
http://www.crew.umich.edu/publications/02-09.pdf

Importance of common ground in communication

Common ground and grounding was an important topic in the lecture so I thought I'd write something about it in this weeks post.

It was said in the lecture that common ground in communication means that people share meaning and are talking about the same thing so conversation constantly negotiates meaning. According to Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Brennan common ground refers to the "mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions that is essential for communication between two people”.

If people are talking face to face, it is easy for them to find common ground for their messages and get understood well. However, when thinking of other ways of communication like telephone or different chat systems, it is usually more difficult to find that grounding. This fact poses additional challenges for groupware systems so that misunderstandings due to the lack of common ground can be avoided.

The question of how we use language and the theory of human-human communication is discussed in Andrew Monk's text ”Common Ground in Electronically Mediated Conversation”. This is an intersting text to read and helps to understand the issues that electronically mediated communication might have.

References:

Clark, Herbert H.; Brennan, Susan E. (1991), "Grounding in communication"

Monk, Andrew (2009), ”Common Ground in Electronically Mediated Conversation”

Why use Blogger

There are many possible blog services available in the internet. For example Vuodatus, Blogit and Blogger's perhaps toughest challenger Wordpress are commonly used. In this post I would like to tell a bit about why I like Blogger. Unfortunately I'm unable to compare Blogger and Wordpress, as I've never used Wordpress. However I've seen many beautiful webpages and blogs created with it and I'm actually quite keen to try it someday.

I read many blogs that have to do with my interests and hobbies. I'm also a frequent blog writer (other that this blog ;). When I started my own blog, I wanted a blog that would not contain big advertisements, would be simple to use and had password protection. Unfortunately I did not find any service that would have all those features. Vuodatus had too big advertisements, Wordpress seemed too complicated to start and Blogger had not password protection. I decided to choose Blogger, because even though it does not have password protection, you can invite people to read your blog by their Google accounts. Nowadays most people do have (at least one) Google account, so that would not cause too much trouble. Also it seemed simple that I would use my blog with my Google account that I already had.

In Blogger I like that you can add many different widgets to your blog. Some that I use most are:

1. Archive
   Here you can see all posts that have been written. You can decide how much you want to show from each post in the list, what order they are etc. For example in this course I think it is very good if a blog has all topics of the posts listed, so people can scroll and see what others have written.
   


2. Labels
   Here you can see all labels that have been marked in the posts. In this Groupare course it is very useful, since people can quickly see in each blog what have people written about.


3. Blog list
   In this widget you can list all of your favourite blogs. The widget updates regularly and when you go to your own blog you can always see which blogs have been updated. This is very handy as you don't have go to each blog separately to see if there are new posts.
   


4. Previous comments
   This widget lists the newest comments that have been written in your blog. You don't have to spam your mail box with all new comments, when you can see them from your own blog no matter in which posts the comments are.


5. HTML, picture, text etc.
   In these simple widgets you can write your own HTML-code, upload pictures or write plain text. Very good to introduce yourself and write a bit about your blog.

I don't know if other blog services have similar features or not, but so far I've been very satisfied with Blogger. Maybe someday I will switch to Wordpress just out of curiosity.

Social streaming and broadcasting services

With the advent of web 2.0 , online video viewing has become a rage and is now actually a daily routine of our lives. The statistics show the decline in television and the major share of that can be attributed to viewing on videos, events, channels, shows etc online. Here is small guide providing alternatives for users who struggle to find resources to watch different events online.

Softwares to watch online events/channels

1. Sopcast : SopCast is a simple, free way to broadcast video and audio or watch the video and listen to radio on the Internet. Adopting P2P(Peer-to-Peer) technology, It is very efficient and easy to use. Let anyone become a broadcaster without the costs of a powerful server and vast bandwidth. It is one of the widely used softwares to view live shows, events, sports etc. Some of the main features of the player are :

State-of-the-art P2P technology. Share the data among all viewers, make the channel more available and stable.

• Minimal delay in the P2P streaming market.
• Fast buffering. 10-30seconds.
• Firewall and NAT traversal technology to pass 90% P2P barriers.
• Build your own channels and broadcast it over the Internet.
• Streaming real time streams. Support for many streaming transport protocol. mms, http, etc.
• Streaming media files. Many file types: asf, wmv, rm, rmvb, mp3, etc.
• Support for loop file playing.
• Extremely low memory footprint and CPU load.
• Standard channel URL: click on any sop:// URL to play.
• Real time monitor of broadcasting source quality and network quality to help viewers to select a appropriate channel.
• Record the clips when you are watching it.
• Can play the stream with your favorite player, such as Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, VLC, etc.
• Memory buffering, no harm to the hard disk.
• Support for authentication for both the broadcasters and the viewers. The broadcaster has full control on his channels.
• End-to-End security, encrypted messages, hi level P2P security, no hijack.
• Support multiple channels broadcast on the same server. Normally, you can run 5-10 channels on one PC.
• The Sop Player can be embedded into a webpage or any software applications. It works just like Windows Media Player.
• 
  
• The Sop Server and Sop Player can be run both on Windows and Linux. The whole system can be ported to embedded Linux.
• Freeware, not ad/spy ware.

For watching a particular stream, you just need to know the sopcast channel number there are multiple ways to get a list of broadcasting channel. To watch live events,shows, channels etc. in particular there is one website whic hcan act as a great resource : MyP2P

2. TVAnts :

This is a a p2p software very similar to the Sopcast. It works in almost the same way but is considered to be bit lighter than sopcast. Both these software stream videos through Bittorrent technology. TVAnts is one of the next generation P2P programs that allows many users to share live streams , not files. These streams can contain any sort of media however one of the most common uses for this type of software is to enable you to watch live football matches online and other sporting events on your PC.

3. PPLive : It is another one of the popular services similar to Sopcast and TVAnts. Like TVants , it is also hosted on Chinese servers and is extremely popular in China. Gradually, it has seen becoming popular with the global audience as well and now boasts of huge number of users. PPlive offers users omni-directional 3D online interactive video entertainment services comprised of website/communities , client terminals as well as online live/on-demand broadcasting and video search.The platform currently makes available approximately 100 million video clips and 10,000 video content search records,with a library of more than 200,000 licensed films and teleplays.

Online channel hosting services:

For the previous mentioned services, one has to download a software, but for those who do not wish to download a software or might be working on a different machine and do not wish to install a software in it. There are multiple websites which offer the service of watching live streaming channels directly from their website without the need to download any software. The most popular of them are :

Justin.tv : Justin.tv is the easiest way to create live video and show anyone in the world what’s happening right now. Using only a laptop, you can share your event, class, party or thoughts, live, to anyone in over 250 countries while they chat in real-time with you and with other viewers. Justin.tv makes it fun, easy and fast to gather and engage with a live audience. The range of channels, shows hosted by other people on this site is quite extraordinary and once you start searching you may find really useful resources and video streams. Many a times the service has been criticised for failing to ensure the the copyright rights being followed.

Ustream : It is another one of the most popular online resource of sharing streaming videos. It works similarly like Justin.tv and has host of channels put up by the users. Many times copyrighted channels are streamed by users and failure of ustream to curb that has led to quite criticism of these services in general.

There are more resources coming online day by day and even getting popular among users. The new age internet audience is hooked to this form of media and this is definitely set to grow further.

Tencent QQ--one of the most popular instant messaging softwares in China

This is my first time to update our blog :-) I'm Jing, and I am very pleased to be the member of our group.

The topic of our lecture today is Same Time Interaction. In this lecture, we learned about a lot of examples of synchronous interaction, such as IRC,IM,SMS and Video. In this article, I would like to intruduce a popular instant messaging software in China--Tencent QQ.

QQ was developed by Tencent Inc, and the lastest version of QQ is QQ2011 Beta1. You can download this software from the website: http://im.qq.com/qq/all.shtml. QQ not only provides the instant messaging service, but also has variety of features, such as chatrooms, games, internet storage, and e-mail services.
There is no consensus whether QQ is good or not in China. Some users think that QQ is very good software, because of its variety of features and esay-to-use interface. But the other users often complain that QQ provieds fewer free services and more annoying advertisements.

In 2008, QQ began to expand its services internationally, working with partners, such as ibibo and AOL.



References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ#Open_source_and_cross-platform_clients
http://www.qq.com/

The Coordinator and other business management tools

In our last lecture we learned about The Coordinator, a system which helps managers enforce certain order in the communications within the company. The systems like Coordinator have developed quite far in past few years, now they are far more adaptive and efficient.

The new generation of business management systems often use a special language (Business Process Enterprise Language) to define the roles, actions and rights of the company's employees. Business Process Management Systems themselves are an integral component of other collaboration systems, for example they can notify the employee that he/she has to submit a certain report or that an action is required as a part of his duties.

Business processes are modeled as a graphical scheme which is tailored for the non-IT personnel. The future can be clearly seen as an integration of all business activities in one system with the ability to change and adapt business practices on the go.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_management
http://actiontech.com/
http://www.activevos.com/

Thoughts about remotely creating music

Creating music can be really challenging when you are working with people face to face but it becomes even more difficult when doing it in completely different places with someone. For example, I'm making music with my brother who lives 500 kilometers away so the changes of seeing him are rare. Because of that we have to do lot of the work without actually meeting each other by using mostly skype, e-mail and dropbox.

Sometimes it's really difficult to communicate musical ideas by using the means mentioned before. For this reason Kristallinodasoses post about “Creating music through groupware software” was really interesting. His idea of having a software that would enable people to remotely play, create and record music together in real time sounds fantastic as it could make the remote creation of music efficient and fun. Relating to this, the Reactable system that Saila mentioned in her comment about Kristallinodasoses post, seems interesting although it doesn't seem to allow remote collaboration.

My e-mail handling strategy

I was surprised to see that no one has yet written about what we talked in the lecture about strategies for handling electronic mail. Since I didn't come up with any better ideas, I thought to write about how I deal with all of my e-mail accounts and inboxes.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird to read my uta mail, which is my main mail account. Since Thunderbird is always open at my laptop, I usually read my e-mails right when I get them. In addition to uta mail, I have numerous other mail accounts: two gmail accounts (with my real name and alias), one jippii mail account for unofficial stuff and few that I only use in special occasions. When I was working I had also a work e-mail account.

At the moment my uta mail inbox has over 700 messages and few specific university related folders have 950 and 200 mails. As you can guess, my mail box strategy is somewhere between "No filers" and "Spring cleaners". During my studies I have never cleaned my inbox completely. I've only removed big attachments and other messages that take space too much. I try to delete messages when they arrive if I do not need them. However there's no doubt that I'm facing a huge cleaning in the near future.

My main problem with keeping my mailbox clean is that I never know what message I'll need and then I decide not to delete if I'm not sure. I also tend to keep messages that contain important attachments because I don't trust that my computer doesn't break. I practically save important files in my mail, because it's available from all computers. I sometimes even send myself mail that contains a file that I want to save. I've never lost anything important because of computer crash, but I'm terrified that it will happen to me sometimes, even though I save the most important information on hard disks and dvd's.

Here are "Ten quick tips to save time and effort with e-mail". Here are the main steps shortly:

Tip #1: Budget e-mail time
Tip #2: Read Once and Decide
Tip #3: Use Folders, Not the Inbox
Tip #4: Unsubscribe, or Just Don't Subscribe
Tip #5: Report Spam
Tip #6: Use Sorting Techniques
Tip #7: Use Mailing Lists
Tip #8: Keep Contact Information Current
Tip #9: E-mail Time Can be Multitask Time
Tip #10: Consolidate e-mails into files

Other interesting article is "My e-mail management strategy".

Do you have any other tips that could help my e-mail chaos? ;)