A Collaboration State of Mind

Collaboration has been on my mind recently. And on the minds of the folks I work with too. (They always get worried when I start thinking.)

For one thing, the upcoming August 2007 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal is about collaboration, particularly in terms of globally distributed software development teams.

In the August issue, for instance, Jack Repenning, CTO of CollabNet (a company that knows something about collaboration) talked about "on-demand" collaboration and the close affinity between collaboration and open source, Khurram Nizami of IBM Rational focused on teamwork (clearly one of the most important topics in collaboration), and Steffan Surdek, also of IBM Rational, added a note on the challenges of distributed development.

And speaking of Rational, I also got an earful of collaboration at the Rational Software Development Conference last week, when the likes of Erich Gamma and Grady Booch, among others, shared their take on the topic. Grady, you recall, wrote a seminal article for Dr. Dobb's Journal entitled Collaborative Development Environments. And Erich demoed Jazz.net, an open commercial community project designed to improve team agility and collaboration.

But just when I thought I had put all this deep-thinking into collaboration behind me, Mindquarry, an open source collaborative software house I'd not run across before, released Mindquarry 1.1 -- a platform for file sharing, task management, team collaboration, and Wiki editing that's available for free download.

Version 1.1 features include:

• A "time machine" activity timeline that lets teams view older versions of files, Wiki pages, and tasks as a first step toward an ultimate undo/redo for all team content.
• An "interlink" that links to all files, tasks or other Wiki pages from within the Wiki. The link window also contains a search option to find items to interlink.
• The ability of team partners to insert tables and images into Wiki pages as easily as inserting these files in office documents.
• An Easy Tasks and Files Manager that lets users work online or offline on a Mac, Windows, or Linux. The feature synchronizes files and tasks as soon as users are back online.

"Mindquarry has reached a mature level of software quality allowing us to continuously extend our tool set for information sharing within teams," adds Mindquarry's Stephan Voigt. "Our goal is to empower dynamic teams to collaborate anytime, anywhere with anyone."

From what my co-workers tell me, that's about all the deep thinking I'm allowed for today. So in the spirit of teamwork and collaboration, maybe its time for a nap.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 01:47 PM  Permalink