Utility of Social Networking Tools

My previous company started taking social networking very seriously after they found that other companies were reaping good benefits out of it. They wanted more and more employees to interact among each other so that the productivity increased in the long run. The open network policy did not block any websites at work. This meant that one was free to orkut at anytime. The google social networking site called Orkut has a rich database of Indian users and if you’ve lost anyone in life you will find him or her at orkut.

For an organization that is divided into several departments, it becomes very difficult to ensure that employees across departments communicate. It is often not that essential. But what do you do when a little bit of communication goes a long way in eliminating problems. Let me share with you a particular problem that occurred a few days back. A course was being created in Lectora 2008 and after publishing it was found that parts of the course was not visible in the Firefox browser though it was visible in IE. Now after a few attempts at troubleshooting, a mail could have been written to Trivantis who are the creators of Lectora. Before doing this, the elearning services department interacted with members of the software production department. The senior engineer from that department found no problems within Lectora or the browser. On inspecting the codes closely, there was a query that sometimes work done on different versions of the software does not gel. Part of the course was created in the free trial version of Lectora and was then integrated in a licensed version. This happened because two graphic designers were working simultaneously on the project but only one licensed version of Lectora was available.

This was intra company communication among professionals. After this some engineers working in elearning industry was consulted and they all said that choosing lectora 2008 sometimes lead to browser problems so in the software specifications perhaps lectora 2006 should have been suggested. So just imagine this whole process of query counter query. It wasted a day and delayed the delivery of the product. Thinking about a solution to this is doing something to facilitate an easier form of communication.

---to be continued