Blog: Tool to share notes with classmates

I have heard about a lot of MBA applicants blogging their admission process and students blogging their school work. At school we use Sharepoint and the Columbia University collaboration system to collaborate. So I did not get to try out blog as a collaboraion tool in my first year.

In the mergers and aquisitions class we have a lot to read before each class. So I decided to post my notes on the readings to a separate blog on that subject. I have shared this with some of my classmates.

Organizing a blog with various subsections is a bit of a problem. I hope the blogging tool providers will address this soon. You can click here to see my blog on my mergers and aquisitions class. It is meant for a very specific group of people though.

Blog to capture methods and procedures

A colleague of mine wanted to know the procedure to record the desktop using the offline WebEx recorder. Normally I would send her an email or a document which will promptly get lost after a few days. So I decided to add that procedure to my blog so that I can direct future users to this location. It is pretty easy to add procedures along with images to a blog. More importantly, I can update the procedure easily if something changes.

I believe that Enterprise training teams could try blogs to keep track of methods and procedures, that change frequently, instead of fumbling around with elaborate web development tools. Click here to see the procedure.

Gmail : You can use it to share big files

My company is one of the largest business process outsourcing companies in the world. We develop a lot of online training courses for our customers. These course files are about 50 to 60 MB in size. We frequently send these files to customer teams. We have a large IT department that supports us with FTP sites and extranets. However there is one seemingly simple requirement that they find very hard to meet most of the time - Exchanging large files with customers for whom we don't have a dedicated extranet.

The IT departments of customer organizations face the same problem too. Setting up an FTP site is sometimes a 2 day affair. They also hesitate to set it up if the file transfer is a one time activity.

Recently one such customer solved the problem for us. They asked us to mail the 15 MB file to their gmail account. We mailed it from our gmail account to their gmail account. Gmail handles such files like a charm.

A few days later my Corporate Finance Professor from Columbia University Business School asked the entire class to mail our final exam paper to her gmail address rather than the university email addess. I was amused to note that all these people trust gmail more than their corporate email addresses.

Capturing Tacit Knowledge

A few days ago I wrote about using a video camera to capture knowledge from subject matter experts who dont have the time [or patience or motivation] to write down their knowledge. Since some products have captured my attention. The Point & Shoot Video Camcorder by Pure Digital Technologies; $129.99 is one of them.

It was covered by Walter S. Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal. [I took the picture from there] I believe cameras like the one from Pure Digital can simplyfy the process of capture and transfer to sharable media. I have not used it yet. But I will keep my eyes and ears open for feedback about the product.