It’s late at night, and I’m trying to set up a Live Meeting for a call that I’m holding in a couple of weeks. The steps leading up to this event were a good sign of how collaboration can happen at J&J - if you know where to look… I used a nascent tool called LINK (Leveraging Internal Knowledge) which runs on Tacit - LINK trawls your, and other participants’, email to come up with a match for the query that you have.
So I used LINK to find out who around the company is struggling with eroom migrations (see my blog post on the Intranet Benchmarking Forum’s blog: J&J Collaboration: SharePoint migration plans).
I got some great responses from around the globe and we agreed to hold a meeting using LiveMeeting to exchange information.
That’s where the trouble started.
Apparently the Live Meeting instance for J&J (run by Intercall) is set up such that only the North American address directory is accessed during the meeting set up process. No problem, I thought, I’ll just copy and paste the distribution list of people I’ve invited to the meeting through my own Outlook (no, Live Meeting is not integrated with Outlook just yet…).
ah ha - but Live Meeting, for some reason, will not accept the Outlooked format of J&J email addresses (for example, mine is “Abigail Lewis-Bowen [JJCUS]” … so I have to manually turn all these addresses into smtp format (alewis33@its.jnj.com). For goodness sakes! And I can’t use the lookup function as part of the Live meeting set up because I can’t find my European colleagues who are attending. Now I am getting irritated.
So I guess any time someone runs a big Live Meeting at J&J they have to go through contortions to find each individual email address and carefully paste it all together … no wonder Live Meeting is not in rampant use at the company.
With getting these enterprise collaboration tools adopted it’s all about understanding these types of details. As nitpicky as it may seem - I’m about to throw in the towel simply out of frustration - not to mention an hour of my time wasted tonight! (at least I got a blog post out of it).
