Are IT consulting businesses looking at workflow collaboration? Absolutely.

Macehiter Ward-Dutton is a specialist IT advisory firm which combines industry research and analysis with tailored consulting services, and is focused exclusively on issues surrounding IT-business alignment.

Whereas IT was first used as a business tool to automate the storage, retrieval and analysis of structured data in the “back office”, it is now contributing directly to the business processes which touch customers and partners, where the emphasis is on the automation of information exchange and collaboration between people and companies.

There has been a proliferation of applications supporting ad-hoc collaboration within and between organisations, particularly intranets, email and more recently instant messaging, web conferencing and blogging.

You can’t get any more Cluetrain than this. Welcome to Web 2.0

This firm, located within the UK, has begun focusing on the analyst space in workflow collaboration. Quoted from Angela Aschenden’s entry on Macehiter Ward-Dutton: Blog on IT-business alignment and related things:

The other important consideration with collaboration is the practicality of changing people’s ways of working; collaboration is not just about using a particular set of tools, it’s about working together as a team, making best use of each person’s skills, and taking responsibility both individually and collectively.

I’ll be looking at what makes collaboration work within an enterprise, and what techniques and methods you can use to implement collaborative working patterns within your organisation.

Be ready for change, Tech Writers!

This is the type of person who will be hired to look at the Technical Communication products and revamp the procedure.This is also someone who will be looking at Bill’s concepts of how to make the Technical Writing process become more integrated into the entire company.

workflow collaboration,web 2.0,Technical Communication,online collaboration

silverlight,online collaboration,technical communication,flash,elearning,microsoft silverlight,adobe flash player

I’ve been getting stuff done this weekend and now I’m moving this week. So there’s not a lot of blogging time for me and as soon as I post this, I’m packing up the main system for transport.

Silverlight Released Today By Microsoft

I’m interested in the competition this gives the Flash Player and it makes good sense about why Adobe sped up their release.

I’m interested in the direction online learning / eLearning, since most standard education setups use Microsoft products already and the IE Browser wars have been played out, with their ’security setting’ blasting most entrenched Flash projects created with anything earlier than Flash 7.

Note: Don’t think that I believe that Microsoft will not have their own security issues with Silverlight, it’s just that it’s easier for them to put the fix in.

Why Should HAT Authors Know About Silverlight?

I think this is compelling for Technical Communication for several reasons. Overall, the eLearning and Technical Communcation space is going to get richer content through better streaming technologies in the near future.

Silverlight and Flash are those top contending technologies which will have broad, 95% and up penetration of the market. Silverlight is very integrated within the MSFT-included Windows Media Player, not to mention they’re partnering (somewhat) with Linux.

I work with programming teams who do some amazing and proprietary things with Flash, and I’m expecting great things from them because Silverlight is supposed to be more improved than Flash and easier for them to transition into, particularly the Visual Studio users.

Silverlight In Their Own Words

Here’s one of the Silverlight team talking about the experience:

Working on two different product releases – Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 - simultaneously is a very unique experience not easily summarized in a blog post. The kind of stuff this team has done in a matter of months is nothing short of amazing. We joke internally about how someday books will be written about these episodes; and needless to say, about the giants upon whose shoulders people like me stood.

Another Silverlight developer’s blog says it all:

that sound?  yeah, my jaw dropping.  me likey.  oh, and wicked cool halo3 hd video

Here are some excerpts from today’s new Silverlight product press release. Of specific note is the better quality and the ‘tight integration’ speak. You’re going to hear a lot of that ‘tight integration’ speech from user-focused product development teams, because the trend is to have multiple functioning software products working together.

REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 4, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today released to the Web (RTW) Silverlight™ 1.0, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering richer user experiences on the Web. In addition, Microsoft will work with Novell Inc. to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, called Moonlight, and based on the project started on mono-project.com.

Silverlight significantly reduces development and deployment costs and provides enhanced Web audio and video streaming and playback using industry-leading Windows Media® Technologies.

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