The team of the Center for Enterprise Information Research (CEIR) presented five conference papers at the 15th International Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems (CENTERIS), an AIS affiliated conference that took place in Porto, Portugal.
Read moreThis year the 50th DACHNUG took place from June 13th to June 15th at the Rhein-Sieg-Forum in Siegburg, Germany. At this conference, users and providers of software related to HCL (the developer of HCL Connections and therefore also UniConnect) meet once a year. CEIR was present as part of the UCT project with a booth right next to the HCL booth. The booth was a big success and allowed us to have a series of very interesting conversations and ad hoc demonstrations of technology for interested participants.
Once again, our team attended the annual ENGAGE user group conference and presented some of our research findings. Theo Heselsmans, Chair of the Engage User Group, invited us to the beautiful city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where more than 300 practitioners and power users met at the conference venue Felix Meritis, one of the oldest former observatories in Europe.
Read moreAs mentioned in our blog post about the UniConnect update to HCL Connections version 7.0; not only did we update to Connections Version 7 but we also expanded our collaboration platform with the integration of various tools from Belsoft. The Belsoft Community Manager is already being used productively as new users of UniConnect are now being automatically added to the “UniConnect Community” when they register. This community is used to communciate important information to our users (e.g., planned maintenance work and updates). In the past, following registration to UniConnect users had to be manually added one by one to this community by our admins; this is now being handled automatically. Further, for over ten years, without extensive analysis of our databases we had no practical way to verify that everyone was (still) a member of this community. Thanks to the Belsoft Community Manager, we can now easily ensure that all users automatically become and stay members of the community and remain informed. In addition, the tool is saving a lot of time as invitations to join the community no longer have to be sent manually.
We thank our friends from Belsoft for their generous support. As soon as we have gained practical experience with the Belsoft Notifier, we will provide a further update. We believe the Belsoft Notifier will also help us improve our communication with users and improve knowledge sharing on UniConnect.
The need for digital alternatives for training and development workshops has increased due to digital transformation, advances in digital workplaces, and the increasing number of people working from home or in distributed teams. This demand proved to be even more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, when physical workshops were not possible, and digital solutions had to be found to provide remote access to business meetings as well as for delivering engaging and interactive workshops. Since working with a whiteboard is an essential part of most workshops and in the daily work of many employees, there is a need for a deeper investigation of visual collaboration tools that can be described as digital whiteboards. These tools offer graphical elements to visualise ideas and methods for facilitating collaborative work on a shared canvas or workspace enabling multiple collaborators to work together synchronously or asynchronously. This research is part of the DFG-funded project 2C-NOW (Collaboration and Coordination in Networks of Work) and the overarching CEIR research program. In the scope of 2C-NOW, the CEIR team is investigating transformations to work processes and practices in large-scale, heterogeneous enterprise collaboration platforms to obtain a deeper theoretical and practical understanding of how collaborative work takes place within the digital workplace in organisations.
The team of the Center for Enterprise Information Research (CEIR) successfully submitted some of their latest work to the 20th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW), a single track conference on CSCW that took place in Coimbra, Portugal.
Read moreAfter a very long time of online video conferences and online meetings, we finally had the opportunity to attend a physical conference again! Petra Schubert, Susan Williams, Söhnke Grams, Martin Just and Julian Mosen took the long way to Bruges in Belgium to attend the annual conference of the ENGAGE User Group. Theo Heselsmans, Chair of the ENGAGE User Group, invited participants to the brand-new Bruges Meeting & Convention Centre (BMCC) and prepared an impressive agenda with lots of great speakers from all over the world.
Our CEIR team was of course part of the great speakers and we presented two sessions: In the first session, Sue and Julian looked at the challenges of the long-term management of workspaces and collaborative content across their entire lifecycle from creation to destruction. How these challenges can be addressed, was shown with the help of an application we developed to support our team with the long-term management and persistent access to important online content. This application and a social bot called “Wiki Replicator” helps our team to keep track of wikis in HCL Connections. The session was concluded with a lively, interactive audience discussion about other participants experiences and their organisation’s requirements for support for the long-term management of digital workspaces and collaborative content.
Read more“We have to evolve to avoid being disrupted” was the message Richard Jefts (General Manager at HCL Digital Solutions) delivered at the opening session of Engage 2020 – a two-day conference on collaboration technologies that took place in the Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem, Netherlands. Through 86 sessions more than 100 speakers and 400 attendees shared recent topics and insights into how to evolve collaboration in companies and how to leverage with the latest technologies and trends.
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We are proud to announce that the team of the Center for Enterprise Information Research (CEIR) successfully started the year 2020 by presenting six publications at the 53rdHawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). All original six submissions were accepted and two of them were even nominated for “best paper” in their mini tracks. HICSS is known worldwide as the longest-standing scientific conference for Information Systems and Information Technology and is the number one (most cited) in its field. This year, 1100 attendees from over 40 countries attended the conference. The conference venue was located on the beautiful island of Maui (Hawaii, US) from 7th to 10th January, where the CEIR team presented their latest work in the research field of Enterprise Collaboration Platforms.
Our team’s submissions were accepted in 5 different tracks, ranging from “Distributed Collaboration in Organizations and Networks”, “Collaboration for Data Science”, “Business Intelligence, Business Analytics and Big Data” to “Social Information Systems” and “Digital and Social Media in Enterprise”. Related to the topic of Social Documents, three consecutive papers were presented by Julian Mosen and Florian Schwade at the conference. In these papers, Prof. Dr. Susan Williams, Julian Mosen, Prof. Dr. Petra Schubert and Florian Schwade describe the structure of social documents [1], its visualization [2] and the calculation of metrics on social documents [3] for understanding collaboration and joint work in enterprise collaboration platforms. Florian Schwade’s also presented his joint work on the development of a catalogue describing elements and characteristics of task management in enterprise collaboration platforms [4]. Clara Nitschke’s and Prof. Dr. Susan Williams’ work on capturing and monitoring how outcomes and benefits of enterprise collaboration platforms are changing over time is described by the MoBeC framework [5]. In addition Clara Nitschke published her joint work on the identification of coordination mechanisms in social software enabled digital workplaces [6].
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Social Connections is the international user group for HCL Connections and is the place-to-be to discuss topics such as the future of work, social collaboration and enterprise social networks. This year sees the 15th Social Connections, which is taking place in Munich this time.
It is also the first important meeting of this user group after HCL became the official owner of the former IBM Collaboration portfolio. We are looking forward to hearing the official announcements and presentations that were postponed over the last weeks and months during the takeover. This includes information about how HCL plans to support Universities in terms of (cost-free) academic software licences and especially the continuation of the University Competence Center for Collaboration Technology (UCT). Does HCL want us to continue our research projects on UniConnect, such as IndustryConnect and our many Domino student projects? Do they want us to keep putting our resources into the complex hosting activities required to provide access to their collaboration product portfolio for other universities? We will meet and inform everyone as soon as we know more.
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