Page 81 - Using MIS

Q5 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools to Improve Team Communication? 49

Figure 2-9
Office 365 Lync Whiteboard
Showing Simultaneous
Contributions

3
in Figure 2-9. With such a whiteboard, team members can type, write, and draw simul-
taneously, which enables more ideas to be proposed in a given period of time than when
team members must wait in sequence to express ideas verbally. If you have access to such a
whiteboard, try it in your face-to-face meetings to see if it works for your team.
However, given today’s communication technology, most students should forgo face-to-face
meetings. They are too difficult to arrange and seldom worth the trouble. Instead, learn to use
virtual meetings in which participants do not meet in the same place and possibly not at the
same time.
If your virtual meeting is synchronous (all meet at the same time), you can use conference
calls, multiparty text chat, screen sharing, webinars, or videoconferencing. Some students find
it weird to use text chat for school projects, but why not? You can attend meetings wherever you
are, without using your voice. Google Text supports multiparty text chat, as does Microsoft Lync.
Google or Bing “multiparty text chat” to find other, similar products.
Screen-sharing applications enable users to view the same whiteboard, application, or
other display. Figure 2-9 shows an example whiteboard for an AllRoad Parts meeting. This
whiteboard, which is part of Office 365 Lync, allows multiple people to contribute simultane-
ously. To organize the simultaneous conversation, the whiteboard real estate is divided among
the members of the group, as shown. Some groups save their whiteboards as minutes of the
meeting.
A webinar is a virtual meeting in which attendees view one of the attendees’ computer
screens for a more formal and organized presentation. WebEx (www.webex.com) is a popular
commercial webinar application used in virtual sales presentations.
If everyone on your team has a camera on his or her computer, you can also do videocon-
ferencing, like that shown in Figure 2-10. You can use Skype, Google Hangouts, or Microsoft
Lync, which we will discuss in Q8. Videoconferencing is more intrusive than text chat (you have
to comb your hair), but it does have a more personal touch.
In some classes and situations, synchronous meetings, even virtual ones, are impossible
to arrange. You just cannot get everyone together at the same time. In this circumstance, when
the team must meet asynchronously, most students try to communicate via email. The problem

3 Wouter van Diggelen, Changing Face-to-Face Communication: Collaborative Tools to Support Small-Group
Discussions in the Classroom (Groningen: University of Groningen, 2011).