Internship Summary

The internship I chose was with Altus Learning Systems in Los Gatos. The company basically creates corporate training portals for its clients. Sales meeting or training modules are captured from the local sites and put up on a custom created web portal for employees to access and download in a variety of formats. The focus of my internship was to assess the usage of current web 2.0 technologies and research new tools that would better advance our company.

The issue that I found present was that ALS seems to be a web 2.0 company which continues to rely on web 1.0 technology. The collaboration aspect is one that we market for our clients but do not use it in house. I found this to be a big issue especially since our main office is separated from the location in which I am stationed. Communications and collaboration seemed to be a big cause of confusion and inefficiency. At the beginning of the internship I was approached by my supervisor which instated the task of researching possible solutions for this issue.
My goal was to try and tackle some small issues and try to implement some changes in order to start simple collaboration within the company. Once this was accomplished, I would then work on other types of collaboration with new technologies that I would research. The process started off well as from taking ITEC 830, I have learned how to use Google Docs and Google Sites as a good collaboration beginning. I immediately proposed this as a way to keep in house information updated. This seemed to work well with my team of co-workers. Unfortunately for the great part of the company, co-workers were so used to the web 1.0 technology that they were reluctant to change. I do believe that we have proven that the collaboration tools I have introduced have worked. The Wiki that ALS had been using was bought out by Google. Google decided to scrap JotSpot as it was old and not as flexible as Google Docs was. Since JotSpot was going to cease and the data stored was going to be deleted, I was able to quickly move the information over to Google Docs and inform IT to approve this. ALS is currently using Google Sites for its Wiki site and Google Docs for in house information. I then was able to look at other collaboration technologies to help the company. The details of this was reflected on my blog. I believe I spent a good amount of hours working on this. Per week before events started to happen, I was able to spend an hour a day per work week doing research. Once we got into our heavy event schedule, I wasn’t able to do much research but I did run across an issue which used some problem solving to use new collaboration tools such as the EditShare.

The lesson I have learned from this internship is that nothing works perfectly in the real world. The key to being successful and keeping employers or clients happy is to keep flexible. There is always going to be political or liking issues which will lend itself to be difficult. Learning to use the different new technologies and finding ways to accommodate various people or come to a compromise is the best solution. Overall I have had a blast documenting my progress at ALS. It really was like stepping outside the box and taking a look at my current work flow. There is a ton of room for improvement but as I mentioned, it is the compromise and ability to be flexible that will lend a bigger hand. There isn’t much use to fight a losing battle. It will be better to find a way to implement new effective tools in which everyone can benefit collaboratively.