Collaboration / Beta Testing Discussion Boards

Can the following idea succeed ? Would you collaborate ?

Companies rely on enterprise messaging applications like Skype and Communicator.
However, I worked on two big companies and realized a need that not quite accomplished by such software...

In fact, one often need to ask for something, as not evrything is documented. You know for sure that someone has the answer, but to find it it requires you to know them all and be able to talk to them directly...
This is not so true, as evry worker has a limited circle of collegues whom he can address easily.

Even with those close collegues, it is not appropriate to send a group chat and disturb them with that. Especially, when this becomes frequent.

With this in mind, I had the following idea, please share your point of view :

Imagine a small app, that you somehow share to all collegues and convince them to install ; Then you configure a list of "Topics" and each one can decide to subscribe to a topic. If someone posts a question/discussion about a topic that gets broadcasted to all list of subscribers who see a Tray notification. they can click the icon and reply in real time.

This would be useful, wouldn't it ?

Push Framework - now released !
http://www.pushframework.com

Ahmed Charfeddine wrote:
Imagine a small app, that you somehow share to all collegues and convince them to install ; Then you configure a list of "Topics" and each one can decide to subscribe to a topic. If someone posts a question/discussion about a topic that gets broadcasted to all list of subscribers who see a Tray notification. they can click the icon and reply in real time.

Just something additional to think about, not directly a verdict; the experience below is based on a single company, and others will react in a different way.

We tried something similar at a previous employer; we used email - it's quite easy to select the intended recipients, and the infrastructure was already there. Popups were provided by Outlook and/or the Messenger service. Sounded like a great idea, but it ended a disaster.

What happened is that some of the devs answered "immediately", or that the manager came in when answering "took to long". The popup was distracting, and responsibility for features or problems was moved using the system. Within two days, I routed the mails to a label, only looking at them during a lunchbreak or whenever I refilled the coffee. Killed the mobile phone, closed the door, gained back my productivity. The tray-icon nowadays does not even show the virus-scanner; I've had it with software that yanks me out of flow by stealing the focus.

I've often longed for software where we could "share" knowledge internally, and where people can participate in discussions. From my previous experience, I'd rather go for an internally hosted blog, and have people participate voluntarily, when it suits them.

To be fair; it was not the technology that made it a disaster, only the way we used it. It could have worked, if the mails would be treated the way we treated the mails from the bugreporting-system.

Bastard Programmer from Hell Suspicious | :suss:

if you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

I could see how using Outlook would be distracting... some people see the pop-ups and have this urge to address it immediately. I keep my Outlook closed most of the time for that very reason, to avoid the distraction.

The forum idea is good, although I've seen other people already doing something like that. I believe someone posted screen captures of theirs here on CP.

I think I would agree with Eddie's comments on the usefulness of something that becomes a distraction and that people eventually learn to ignore. The forum idea is probably a better choice and it wouldn't require anyone installing anything (ideal for people/offices that work with multiple operating systems).