Grooving with Twitter

Grooving with Twitter

Twitter Updates 

One of the most useful tools that I've come across that leverages Twitter is called GroupTweet. It basically allows you to create a group contact list that amalgamates all of the 'tweets' from your team. This adds some important functionality that I mentioned was missing from Twitter and makes it much easier for the entire team to get updates on activities and priorities/issues that team members are working on. There's a great site that includes an inventory of Twitter related products that is also worth browsing for anyone exploring the use of twitter at Twitter Tools. 



Getting Your Groove On 


Something else we've been experimenting with is a way to establish a highly collaborative, document and knowledge sharing solution for the project team with the real time updates of Twitter and aggregating this into a wider project and documentation portal. One of the products we're looking at is Microsoft's Groove. Groove is part of the Office 2007 product suite and it allows you to create a project collaboration workspace with file sharing, discussion groups, shared calendars and a number of other colloboration tools. What makes it particularly powerful is that it relies on an encrypted, peer-to-peer mechanism to share information with team members and supports this with real-time synchronization. This means team members will always have the latest versions of every artifact in the project workspace and Groove syncs this data real-time and when you're disconnect it will sync the minute you're connected. This makes it very easy to share information securely across with even third parties like contractors or vendors you might be working with (without the traditional VPN/RSA burden). If you use Microsoft sharepoint you can publish artifacts to the Sharepoint library when they're ready for broader consumption and also enable file-level versioning of all project related artifacts. Now add in the real-time broadcasts of Twitter feeds (you can use theTwitterbox plug-in on your site with the GroupTweet product) and suddenly you have this remarkable colloboration framework that conveys the real 'pulse' of a project. It basically allows the major constraint of agile projects, co-located teams (see below), to be lifted. 

Refrences:

http://it.toolbox.com/people/bryan_campbell/