What Internet or Intranet-based Collaborative Tools Do You Use for Your Job?

Loraine Kasprzak

Managing Director
Advantage Marketing Consulting Services


Loraine Kasprzak, Advantage Marketing’s Founder and Managing Director, is a Certified Management Consultant (CMC),  MBA and ChemE with over 17 years of hands-on experience in marketing communications and strategy. One of Loraine’s strengths is her ability to help her clients clarify their thinking so that they can focus and fine-tune their message for the marketplace.

Prior to beginning her management consulting career in 1995, Loraine worked for 12 years in corporate America, advancing through various engineering, marketing and management roles. She started as an R&D engineer at Hercules Chemical Company, Wilmington, DE, then joined Con Edison’s Management Intern Program, and worked in the company's R&D department.

Loraine rounded out her corporate career at BOC Gases, Murray Hill, NJ, where she held commercial development, product management, business planning, and marketing services positions.

As a consultant, Loraine has facilitated the strategic development and implementation of communications programs for a variety of professional service and small business clients, including engineering and environmental firms, healthcare and information technology companies, and startups.

Her clients have included Aujas Networks, the Entech Group, MXI Environmental Services, Monarch Electric, and Quest Diagnostics.

Loraine served on the Social Media Committee and was National Marketing Chair for the Institute of Management Consultants USA (IMC USA), as well as executive editor for IMC USA's monthly Connector newsletter. She has also served as vice president of public relations as well as a board member and certification chair for the IMC New Jersey chapter. She received IMC’s 2009 Distinguished Service Award for continuous outstanding service.

Loraine blogs at The Marketing Advantage is a frequent public speaker. She has authored a social media for professionals article series  for the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Chemical Engineering Progress magazine and now writes CEP's Career Corner column.

She has presented talks on social media, marketing and branding at regional and local business conferences and was a guest lecturer for the Prudential Young Entrepreneurs Program. Loraine was a business columnist for Union County Voice magazine and has written for the Princeton Packet Business Journal.

Loraine holds a degree in Chemical Engineering from Manhattan College and an MBA in Marketing from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

http://advantage-marketingblog.com/

Chemical engineers collaborate to brainstorm new product ideas, solve technical problems, manage projects, and more. I'm writing a series of articles for Chemical Engineering Progress magazine on the online tools that ChemEs are using to collaborate. I'd love to hear what you're using - so please share your experiences and insights. What tools are you using? What benefits do you and your fellow collaborators get out of them? Are they easy to learn and use? (Those who read CEP's Career Catalyst know I often quote people from this group!)

Share your thoughts below.

Image: Ed Yourdon

Comments

Submitted by Douglas (not verified) on Wed, 05/09/2012 - 13:28

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Here at ChEnected, we certainly take advantage of Dropbox to share documents all the time. We also occasionally use Google Docs & Calendar when when we're working on something together or want to keep a group calendar for coordinating conference blogging, etc. And of course, we share and exchange photos with others through our Flickr account (http://www.flickr.com/photos/chenected/).

Submitted by Alessandra (not verified) on Wed, 05/09/2012 - 17:14

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At work and through various professional and volunteer organizations for which I serve, some of the more useful platforms I've used (besides the one Douglas has already referenced) include Yammer (which allows for conversations, pages, calendars, file uploads and groups), Basecamp (similar to Yammer), Wiggio (a free online work collaboration platform, also like Yammer or Basecamp) and SharePoint (which many companies may be more familiar with). Of the platforms I've used, Yammer has allowed for more seamless coordination and collaboration in my projects to date, and has been very easy to learn and use!

Submitted by ehorahan (not verified) on Wed, 05/09/2012 - 22:42

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We use Outlook and the Microsoft Communicator. Sharepoint is great for keeping our project groups organized. Also - the good old-fashioned telephone.

Submitted by Robert S (not verified) on Thu, 05/10/2012 - 07:25

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We use Sharepoint and I have even been involved in some work putting together the platform that we using. There is tremendous value in these concepts (I don't think that matters which one it is) in terms of sharing and storing information. This is extra valuable to someone in my role where I will go into a project and do a lot of groundwork for people that will be coming in blind at a later point in time and need to know what is going on and be productive the moment they get on site. That being said, I have two main challenges as the person responsible for providing content to these tools, one philosophical and one technical. These tools are completely passive, there is no way to bring people to the content and there is no way for me to know who is reading and if the people that need to be are reading it. It can be challenging to maintain motivation to put a lot of work into the content and not knowing if anyone is listening. Though when it pays off and ideas come together fast and furious it is very nice. Second, with all these tools migrating to the cloud it is very dependent on available bandwidth. Working in the office connected to the network is great. But I work in some remote areas with limited connectivity and the time I spend on doing one little task can be astronomical...not good for productivity or frustration levels. And if it goes out, I can be completely stranded from resources. And a minor challenge is that these have the same issues of a social network. Their usefulness is proportional to their participation rates. Personally I use google - I think they have the simplest way to do all of it, which I value given my previously stated arguments. But I get access that through our firewall.

Submitted by advantagemarketing (not verified) on Thu, 05/10/2012 - 12:01

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Thanks to everyone for sharing which tools you use. I can appreciate Robert S's comments about the challenges in using these tools. One thing that is becoming clear to me is that not every project is suitable for online collaboration. And that online collaboration can require a different way of working than what we may be used to. Three cheers to ehorahan for mentioning the good old telephone! I think it can add the third dimension - that of relationship building - back to online collaboration.