I've been playing with HyperV as an {Insiders} on the IT Momemtum initiative, thanks to Dennis Chung. When I travelled to Redmond to attend MVP summit, I did a video interview with Adam Carter, and the video is released @ http://edge.technet.com/Media/Loke-Kit-Kai-on-Hyper-V/.
Never did video interview before, and because of the summit schedule, I didn't prepare for it. Thanks to Adam Bomb, who tried to make the interview casual, but I still pretty much made mistakes. Don't know when I will get another opportunity, but will definitely improve if given another chance... :)
Been playing with SCVMM, and will be blogging about that soon. But that would be after I've published on CodePlex the enhanced email-enabled library.
Social Computing, distractions or a useful tool? From my limited opportunities in using and hearing this technology, I think most people associates this with facebook, twitter. Probably there are already some corporate environment that already implement this in some form using SharePoint, achieving part of it using mysites. Not very sure about what other vendors are doing in this space, but none seems as loud as Microsoft is, through Knowledge Network in SharePoint 2007 beta 2 timeframe. I believe many organization associates social networking sites as distractions to the employees, which implies lower productivity. Thus many companies including the one I work for deny employee access to this kind of web sites. Some companies even blocks instant messaging, which gave me lots of grieves because I no longer have quick access to my network of friends who are smes in their own fields. If companies block access to public social network sites, that I can understand. Though facebook helps me get connected to long lost friends, it proves to be more of a distraction with all the games it has in it. Currently, I'm addicted with Knighthood, a medieval strategy game of balancing our resources... But if companies just refuse to just take a look at what social network because of the distractions that it brings. But what does social network bring? Who would benefit most with a social network implemented in the corporate network? I don't read a lot about social network, its not part of my job scope yet, so the points below derived from my experience with facebook, community, and imagination.
1. Social network helps me get connected with people, and especially useful in helping me discover relationship in my network of friends. Being in facebook surfaced relationship like my friend is actually my colleague's wife, or my partner's wife is my friend's sister. How does it help in my work? Very often, people tend go an extra mile to help those they know personally, and help strangers when they have free time. There are exceptions of course, but I believe this applies more strongly in this part of the world where IT professionals are mostly overworked. So discovering this relationships to subject matter experts (sme) will allow you to ask your colleague to introduce you to the sme in question to ask for advise. You get higher chance of him helping you especially when it is not part of his kpi to help.
2. Social network also help you keep updated with what your colleagues are doing. MySite in SharePoint does inform you when your colleagues update their profiles. NewsGator is doing some fantastic work on social networking with Social Sites (http://www.newsgator.com/Business/SocialSites/Default_what.aspx), where they are able to not only bring in news feeds from external sites, but tag it as well. What's more important is the content that your colleagues are contributing in their daily work gets surfaced through social network. I mean, with file systems, you only get hold of content that may be useful to you when you either
○ Have a problem on hand, and does a search
○ Actively contributing to the content
○ Notified But with social network, and tagging, information that you are interested in gets surfaced to you.
3. Because of the discovery aspect, it helps to motivate people to contribute content into the social network. Company policies to encourage sharing will definitely help, but intangible benefits like slowing giving someone the chance to grow into a SME while he shares what he has learnt on the job, and distributed more widely by community tagging and subscription.
4. You are unconsciously learning and growing with the network. This is personal experience, where because SharePoint is so huge, that no one in the world, (I bet even product team) can master every aspect of the product. With RSS feeds, I get to discover and learn from other people's experiences and store them behind my head, waiting to be used some day. With a more personal distribution list, I get to learn what other experts are facing and with a community in place, every one benefits as every one shares different opinions of solving the problem.
There are probably more benefits, and I believe companies that will definitely benefit most are companies that depends on their staffs to give the edge over their competitors. Companies that depends on knowledge stored, but not hidden. There are also many reasons why companies resists this. But there is one particular reason that will get strong reasons from me. Companies that are afraid of social network as it may become a distraction. My question to them would be, don't they have performance KPI in place? No human being with a sound mind would spend time and do anything that doesn't benefit them. Of course, for these to succeed, company policies and culture have to support.