Collaboration software providers seems to be increasingly interested in developing a better platform for communities of practice; just last week OpenText released a solution for online communities of practice, and earlier in October Sitescape released (also) a solution for communities of practice. It seems that OpenText has taken it's solution much beyond Sitescape's, because it has added some nice features to Livelink: blogs, expert identification- apparently they have been paying close attention to competitor in the CoP business Tomoye's Simplify or upcoming Enable2. iCohere does not seem to have caught up with this, apparently.
In the meanwhile, Etienne Wenger is still working on the v2 of his 2001 Technology Survey, with John Smith and Nancy White. It would be good to catch a glimpse of their progress as well as seeing how the changes like the ones above keep changing the landscape.
Incidentally I was just reading Michael Helfrich's post in his weblog about the role of technology in collaboration projects:
The folks at the big software companies would have you believe that software is always pristine and perfect, and that organizations and their staid cultures are the barriers to reaching collaborative nirvana. Don't believe the hype. When it comes to collaboration, technology (and more precisely, technology architecture) can doom the best laid plans around enterprise collaboration.
[..]
Collaboration is about people. Collaboration needs technology frameworks that support adaptive, ad hoc interactions. Adaptive from the sense of extending functionality on the fly and securely embracing new members on the fly. Simply put, it's the swarming culture fused with adaptive technology.
This happened at 11:13:04 PM or
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