Susan P. Williams and Jens Alberts from the CEIR team attended the 12th Routines.Research.Community (RRC) workshop Linz (AT) in September 2022. The workshop was funded and hosted by the Institute for Strategic Management at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz. The workshop had which had three central themes: More Digital? More Critical? More Open?
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
Dear UniConnect community,
We are pleased to announce an upgrade of UniConnect. Thanks to the support of our partner HCL, we are upgrading UniConnect from IBM Connections Version 6.0 to HCL Connections Version 7.0. Our members can expect the following improvements and new functions:
- Various adjustments to the user interface.
- Print content to PDF.
- Community Templates: Thanks to this new feature, the UCT can offer you evaluated templates for your communities.
- Creation Wizard: Guides the user step-by-step through the process of creating a community.
- Files: Transfer ownership of your files to another user.
- Orient Me: Updates in your network are highlighted with a new design.
- Languages: Select your preferred menu language.
- Video conferences hosted in Koblenz with HCL Sametime 11.5.
- Connections Notifyer and Connections Community Manager: We would like to thank our friends at Belsoft, as their powerful admin tools make our work much easier.
- Activities Plus and Huddo boards: Thanks to our friends from ISW, you can manage and assign tasks more effectively.
Please note:
This is an extensive maintenance job. UniConnect will most likely therefore not be available for the period from February 28, 2022, 8:00 a.m. to March 13, 2022, 6:00 p.m. (CET).
If you have any questions, we will be very happy to answer them: https://uct.de/en/contact/
Best regards from Koblenz
Söhnke Grams (Managing Director UCT)
Dear UniConnect community,
We are pleased to announce a major upgrade of UniConnect, which is made possible thanks to the support of our new partner HCL. We are upgrading UniConnect from IBM Connections Version 6.0 to HCL Connections Version 6.5, which means that our members can expect many improvements and new functions:
- Connections Sidebar: The sidebar offers quick access to the network, content and users of UniConnect while working in other applications
- Connections Invite: Invite external users efficiently
- Files: Transfer ownership of your files to another user
- Activities Plus: Manage and assign tasks more effectively
Please note:
This is an extensive maintenance job. UniConnect will most likely therefore not be available for the period from Friday 15th October 2020 8:00 a.m. to Monday 19th October 2020 6:00 p.m. (CET).
If you have any questions, we will be very happy to answer them: https://uct.de/en/contact/
Best regards from Koblenz
Söhnke Grams (Managing Director UCT)
We are delighted to announce that HCL Technologies is the new partner for the University Competence Center for Collaboration Technologies (UCT). The UCT was funded for 10 years by IBM Germany and we are very grateful for the support that they gave us and for our fruitful collaboration with them over those 10 years. Special thanks go to Klaus Zimmermann and Ralf Bucksch of IBM Germany GmbH, for their commitment and support for the UCT and the tireless passion they gave to the collaboration.
The new contract with HCL Technologies was signed in March and commenced on April 1, 2020. We look forward to an equally long collaboration with HCL and to achieve further success. Several of our former IBM partners, including Tom Zeizel, Peter Schütt and Ingo Karge have joined HCL, so we have continuity and a shared history in the project. In the past few months we have also started work with new partners at HCL, among them Danielle Baptiste and André Hagemeier. We look forward to building the next stage of the UCT together with HCL.
“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.
CEIR presents six papers at the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)
[+++Click here for german version+++]
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].
Read more