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I just got back from GWAVAcon in San Diego, where Brian Six and I gave a session called "Connect Users with Teaming + Conferencing." This is the second GWAVACon where this presentation has been requested (the prior one was in Berlin, in October, 2007). What to people want to know about connecting users? Here are some of my assumptions

-IT managers want to play a more important role in the organization. They don't just want to be the people behind the scenes to make stuff work or catch hell if it doesn't.

-Developing new systems means doing some work engineering requirements. This, in turn, means understanding what users do.

-T + C has lots of different applications to deal with lots of business challenges, and you need to know what business problem you're trying to solve first.

So, given these assumptions, here's the flow of the presentation on connecting users:

1. There are three areas to consider as you look at connecting your users: the management hierarchy, users, and the IT team. Each group has a set of needs, and sees the world differently.

2. Pick the area that matters to your senior management. If they're worried about creating an organization that has more good ideas, that's what you need to focus on. If it's cost cutting, that's the area you need to go for.

3. Users are all different. Your tools need to help people bring out more of what is good in them. The graphics people can do more graphics. The writers put out better copy. The salespersons sell more. People can invent, edit, refine, network, critique, or whatever it is that the do.

4. Teams need to bring it all together, so that each individual contribution becomes part of the whole.

5. When teams are effective, organizations succeed.

6. T + C can help you support this broad range of management issues. Then we go into the features of the product and how they help.

Anyway, that's the idea. I'd love to refine this presentation, assuming it's one that people can use, and share it with customers and partners so they can use it in their training. If there are ways to improve it, I'd love to know them.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.