Our new collaboration environment, uSpace has gone live this week. You can use it to blog, to create wikis, discussion groups, collaborate on documents and join groups and spaces for discussion and social networking. Research groups with members from outside of the University can also use if for collaboration as we can allow external users access. We're quite excited about it and the pilots we've been running have identified a number of uses, in teaching and learning (it is being linked to our VLE), for research and for general collaboration and communication. Obviously this could be seen as just another service to overload our users with information and another place to search for information as it's another repository. We now need to produce guidance on what system to use for what - portal groups, shared areas on fileservers, document management system. Hopefully we will be moving to reducing the number of systems or at least integrating them so they are seamless to the user. My big concern is how many pleaces I now have to update my status. Wonder if we can integrate uSpace and Twitter.....
4 comments:
Integration with twitter is quite easy as Twitter handily provides you with a RSS feed for your tweets (available from the twitter web site). Then you can just paste this feed into the external RSS widget within uSpace.
It seems like a duplication of what already exists. Would it not make more sense to integrate what people are already using rather than take a high risk strategy of attempting to corner a market that is already full?
Just a thought.
Thanks for the hint re twitter -will give it a try. perhaps we could also the CiCS twitter feed into the CiCS space?
And anonymous - thanks for the comment. We didn't set out to duplicate anything as we weren't providing a mechanism for blogs, wikis etc. Although we had MUSE groups, they're not very good and don't allow collaboration on documents or outsiders to join. We are integrating uSpace with as many of our systems as possible and don't really consider this a high risk strategy - certainly not on the feedback so far. But happy to have everyone's views.
Looks great - look forward to using it. It's nice to have some good collaboration tools especially if we an use them with colleagues in other places
Post a Comment