The social business tools available today provide great places to collaborate, and ultimately enhance overall team success. However, some thought should go into structuring your collaboration environment before you take it online.

As we talk with clients implementing OnePlace, one of the first questions we get asked is “How should I structure OnePlace to work for my team?” My response to this is: “How is your team set up now (off-line)? Setting up OnePlace usually follows the same off-line team structure.

Typically, our clients interact with a number of their own customers and need a way to collaborate, or, they might be an emerging company that doesn’t yet have a formal infrastructure. Each of these types of companies may have a very different need for their collaboration environment.

OnePlace uses hierarchical “workplaces” to organize projects, discussions, files, and tasks. For example, a marketing agency may want to set up department workplaces to collaborate internally, and each of their clients may have its own workplace for external collaboration and project management.

You can organize by department, topic, client, project or other structures that fit your organization. As your company or team grows, and needs change, your online collaboration structure will evolve. Even if the initial structure doesn’t work, you can make changes very quickly with little impact on team productivity. Actively organizing your collaboration solution will improve collaboration and overall team productivity.

So …….last Thursday through Sunday was a little challenging, as most companies running off the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service grinded to a halt for most of the day on Thursday. Many companies were without access to their business applications, and OnePlace was no exception. Both our customers and employees had to work differently that day. We were fortunate that only one full business day was effected. By Sunday all businesses were back up and running.

By now companies running social business solutions such as OnePlace have realized that E-mail isn’t an effective way to collaborate, managing file versions on a server doesn’t work very well, and having a pulse on your business is difficult when team members aren’t connected. Last Thursday we went backwards – suddenly, E-mail and file servers were used among the team and paper checklists were in vogue again. Our once collaborative environment suddenly became narrow and solitary. Though we were physically close in proximity, except for a developer working remotely from rural Wisconsin, we weren’t quite sure how to communicate or share what we were working on. But what we did confirm, as we already believed, is that OnePlace matters.

As a result of the EC2 outage, we’ll see improvements to Web-based applications to result in greater resiliency to any future outages. See The AWS Outage: The Cloud’s Shining Moment written by one of our local technologists George Reese. If a situation like this occurs again, we can expect reduced application failures, as application architecture will be improved to leverage the cloud rather than succumb to it.

I want to thank our customers for understanding the nature of the failure on Thursday; it’s hard to place a value on the disruption to businesses that day. While our team was able to function, there was a distinct impact on our business and our customers were no exception.

Compensating our customers for their lost productivity is difficult, but as a small consolation we are giving each paying customer OnePlace free for a week.

AnotherPlace - This was a sensitive word with the OnePlace founding team. They did not want to hear that their OnePlace social software for teams could easily be delegated as “AnotherPlace”. I joined the OnePlace team one year ago as a business development consultant and, of course, I had to challenge the product’s value. Collaboration is cool, but is it worth the hassle of another software application, and another subscription? As I came up to speed on Social Business Software space, I looked at dozens of applications that were developed to enhance team performance while leveraging the social aspects of popular interfaces like Facebook and Twitter, they all were AnotherPlace: each valuable in their own right, but not critical tools.

Now as a part Bluewater, 22 people are using OnePlace daily to various degrees. For some it replaces the network drive where files used to be stored. Others use it to share their daily conquests, collaborate and/or manage their daily workloads. This morning I received a team activity report from OnePlace that showed OP usage by individual and the overall team; the numbers were impressive and the range of usage by team member is wide. User adoption is very individualistic in collaborative solutions and that is okay, as long as every user sees value in participating in the discussion.

In the new software model, solutions are casually brought in by the team, and users are not forced to adopt them. Rather users now need to find value on their own terms. The new model isn’t all or nothing, instead value is driven at an individual level, and team adoption reflects that. For everyone on our team the consensus is that OnePlace isn’t AnotherPlace, rather it has become ThePlace for team social and work activity.