E-collaboration workshop

I was at an 'e-collaboation' workshop in The Hague today (2nd November). There were demonstrations of the use of Skype, MSN and Dgroups for keeping in touch with partners. Although I'm familiar with Dgroups and use them a lot, the potential of Skype and MSN for work was pretty new to me.

One of the nice things you can do with MSN is having a telephone conversation, while keeping notes in the chat facility - notes that all parties (up to 5 can take part) can see. This is probably really useful if you want to make 'afspraken' with the colleagues with whom you are in contact. In addition, you can make drawings on the whiteboard and send documents at the same time.

One participant was also using MSN to help partners install new software. With the 'print page' facility - copied into Word and then forwarded - she was able to monitor what screen they we seeing and thus help them with problems.