I'm working to introduce blogging, wiki-ing and other web-based communications methods at work. Much of it is going well because the web offers much better access to information than intermittantly connected shared hard drives. Email works for small groups, but does not scale well at all for sharing information when a dialog is required or when the intended audience is not explicitly known.
The biggest problem I'm facing is the generation gap. My older colleagues are used to email and MS Office. Working on the web requires a different set of skills. It's hard to post a PowerPoint presentation on a website and have it show up as something other than a file to be downloaded. Yes, I know that you can save a PowerPoint file as html, but even that is something new and different and for most colleagues, new and different is too hard.
I'm thinking of recommending that each group hire a student as their blogger-in-residence. The student would take their information and translate it onto the web. It seems to be the only real solution to the bridging the gap between the employees and the blogs.
3 comments:
"My older colleagues are used to email and MS Office."
Wow, a sentence starting with the words "My older colleagues" used to end with something like "hate and fear computers", or "have trouble logging in", or "still would rather add things up by hand and type on a typewriter". I guess progress has been made.
KT, are you using Sharepoint to do this?
Just curious, I have kind of had it shoved my way.
Houston, we use Movable Type as our blogging platform. MT 4.1 has an outstanding feature called "Universal Site" which makes it a snap to set up a corporate website with an embedded MT blog.
We're still struggling with other features, not associated with MT, because we don't want to use things hosted outside of our internal network.
Post a Comment