Google Docs - Success

An issue of training and employee collaboration has been an issue with the company I work for ever since I started. Last year while taking ITEC 830, I brought the idea of using a Ning to the table. I was asked to set one up as a trial. All of the employees seemed to like the idea but the uppers did not like it. They were worried about the look and thought it was unprofessional to use in our establishment. My argument was that the Ning would be an internal place for collaboration; no clients would ever see it. It was turned down and the ning I had set up is now in the black hole of the Internet.

I tried to introduce Google Docs in another attempt to keep collaboration going. We were using a very old wiki site called JotSpot which was set up very poorly. Information was very hard to find and the application kept crashing. Again, I was turned down. I was determined to hold on to my site. As it turns out, this week we all received a notice from IT saying that JotSpot will be closing for good. The information that we had stored there needed to be backed up or else it would be lost. There was a plea to find another solution to our wiki issue. I brought up that the Google Docs and Google Sites page I set up already had most of the information ported. Making that transition to the new site would not be hard. Unfortunately because I had used our company name for our sites page IT was unable to easily create the corporate version with the same name. Of course I was to blame for this but with a little help from our friends at Google, our company has finally adapted using a Web 2.0 tool!