Simon Barratt

Activity Explorer - Changing the way you think about collaboration

Activity Explorer is a very interesting concept to enhance the process of collaboration.  I saw a prototype of this product in the research lab last year, and now it is an available product.

Simply put, it allows people to instantly collaborate on demand and pulls together all the necessary objects required to complete the activity.  Most collaborative steps usually start as an email, maybe generate some IMs and then require some documents to work on or produce.  This free form tool allows you to manage this is a very dynamic manner.  You do not need to worry about what tool you need, you just bring in the various tools as needed!  Very cool!

Bring collaboration to formal processes
Bring process to ad hoc collaboration

Business Activy
writing a specification
closing a sale
completeing an rfp

An activity is a set of related tasks and objects

Acivity lists (inbox of activites)
persistant chat - new invitees to the chat will see the chat history
shared folder - place holder for multiple objects
shared files
shared notes - rich text editor, links to urls
shared screen - allows you to save area of the screen, which can then be annotated.

drag content onto a person name and share it!!!
added to the server and the name you dropped it on to is added to the list of authorised users
the recipient will be notified of the new activity, as soon as the recipient open the content the activity creator will know
persistent chat concept - all chat sessions are tracked and associated with the activity

you can create an activity


Alerts are generated as they happen, there is is no polling