Oh, come on... look at the date of this issue!

The KIT No. 19 started off with an article about a Sharepoint usage and governance survey, which elicited feedback from two Schlumberger people I used to work with. Both remarked that with 28 out of 233 respondents saying that their Sharepoint environment was "out of control," this should have hardly been spun into an attention-grabbing headline.

For people used to exchanging Excel and Word documents by e-mail, Sharepoint offers at least an organized and versioned repository. Going further, Michael Moody wrote that he likes having a platform to create project spaces for himself as well as a collaboration environment for his team. The fact that IT provides the platform but does not control the applications he creates is, to Michael, the perfect level of control -- or lack thereof. Similarly, the second reader wrote that "Sharepoint the platform certainly needs strong governance, what users produce with this platform does not."

The last point is subtle and can easily be misinterpreted. A lightweight catalog of user-generated applications can lower the risks of duplicate designs as well as disruptions during upgrades. Still, the distinction made by these two readers is useful; thank you both for these your constructive feedback.

In the KIT No. 20, we mentioned the HaptiMap project and raised the question of using touch displays on the go in cold climates. Eric Tabet of Winch Communication wrote back that this had already been considered, and sent the link to an article and video clip about the Dots iPhone-compatible gloves.

Said like that, it is pretty obviously wrong -- our work is based on communication. But many companies have a hard time seeing the benefits of "social media" activity by their employees. In his blog entry " Nine ways to convince the CEO to use social media and enter the 21st century," Jeff Bullas makes a very good case, although the last part of the title may be insulting enough to the audience to keep him from getting his fifteen minutes in the corner office!

The BoyGeniusReport broke the news that Novell's new collaboration platform, Pulse, is based on the Google Wave Federation Protocol, and therefore will offer some of the same collaborative editing facilities that were in the Google Wave pilot. And it will have some interoperability with Wave.
This doesn't directly shed any light on the "ETA" of a  Wave product by Google itself, and it certainly does not imply that Novell will be able to gain significant market share in this space, having failed before; but it suggests that multiple products could interoperate using GWFP while offering their own differentiating features at the application level.

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them."

-- Attributed to Richard Soley, OMG President,
and repeated multiple times at the last OMG meeting
(and yes, this is intended as a sarcastic comment)