Wow. I just posted my first idea on
IdeaJam.
This idea occurred to me the other day while researching enterprise solutions for social networking. The most valuable aspects of things like Facebook and Twitter, to me at least, seem to be the ability to see what everyone I follow is doing or working on. So why can't we have that functionality in Sametime?
Sametime is already locked down for internal use only in most cases so there's not really the fear of people wasting time like there is with Facebook or MySpace. This would allow users to feel more connected to what the Lotus Notes Developers are working on, for example. It would also allow managers to immediately see what their team is working on without having a meeting or multiple emails on project status. In a more strictly social networking sense, this would allow employees to get a feel for each other's personalities. I also sometimes get the feeling that we in IT are viewed as either know-it-all gods or out-of-touch elitists by the people we support. Those who wish to utilize it might find themselves more accessible to their user community in a less formal manner than say, opening a trouble ticket.
Please promote my idea if you think it has merit or better yet, tell the technology already exists! Of course all constructive critism is welcome too. I may be dreaming of something that the application just can't accomplish.
Comments (3)
Actually you can do that already:
Just edit your status message.
There are also (besides Mikkel's excellent Twitter plug-in) some
internal plugins are in the making to connect to a private
twitterlike server. Lotus 911 is coming up with a tool.. and you
could have a teambot you tell what you do or who tells you what the
team does.
Thanks for the comment, Stephan. I know you can edit the status message already but what I'm looking for is something a little more... dynamic.
Sometime is vastly underutilized in our organization; mainly I
believe because most people see it as a waste of time. A toy. I'm
trying to change that perception.
I'll go search for Mikkel's plug-in but can you tell me more about
the teambot?
I just looked atTwitNotes
but that won't work for us. Twitter is blocked by security and I
don't see that changing any time soon. However TwitNotes is the
"form" I'm looking for. Except I would like it to use the status
field in Sametime instead of Twitter.