Paul Gillin and I talk with Brent Frei of SmartSheet.com about the growing trend of crowdsourcing, the ability to farm out a series of tasks to a group of unknown contributors. Frei has put together acomprehensive report on the industry that you can download here.

Listen to our episode #103 here.

If you are in the St. Louis area, next Tuesday I will be giving a speech for the Go Network on the above topic, how to maximize LinkedIn. The seminar is free but pre-registration is required, and you get a light breakfast as well. Hope to see you there. Here is a link to the slides and here is a link to the video recording of the actual speech.

I was a guest on the Security Break Live show on Blogtalk radio here. Steve Dispensa and I talk about what this kind of attack is and how you can try to prevent it.

I will be doing this webinar tomorrow at 1 pm ET for TechTarget’s SearchSecurity.com web site, you can start at this URL.

I will present ten different ways that a midmarket IT organization can improve its threat management and network security posture. I will review a critical strategy going forward into an economic recession: making only minimum investments in new tools and finding products that don’t require a great deal of increased manpower to implement and manage. The webcast will focus on midmarket IT strategies that either don’t cost a lot of money, or at least provide fast returns on the investments.

The economic news is depressing, and yet I want to see opportunity where others see looming disaster. And I think one way we can try to make things better is become more productive and do a better job collaborating with each other. Think of it as a no-cost stimulus package that even the Republicans can love

Remember when the PC was first introduced, everyone thought it was such a great personal productivity tool? Sadly, the more powerful that PCs have become, the harder it is to use them to collaborate. This is because we get used to using them as our personal machines, and most of us don’t like sharing our computers, let alone our work products from them.

The primary collaboration tool today is still what it was ten years ago: I send you an email attachment with a Word or Excel file. You make changes and then email the file back for me to look at. This is really serial collaboration, because we alternate working on the same file. While this model is okay for two people, when you have a whole group that is trying to add their thoughts it gets very messy, to say the least. Also, one person can hold up the entire process and then the rest of the group has to wait until that person has finished their revisions. And if we don’t agree, we pretty much have to start the process from scratch. A friend of mine is ghost writing a book for two of his bosses. I can’t imagine what his editing cycle is going to be like under this model.

It is time to realize that serial email-style collaboration is so last year. Consider these trends:

First, the Internet is now ubiquitous and most of us are comfortable using it to connect to our partners, supplies, customers, and colleagues. It has also made email more powerful, and most of us have become addicted to checking our email several times a day and even during off hours too. Some of us have to check email so frequently that we start to get a bit jittery when we are offline for a few hours, let alone when we want to take a week off on some deserted beach where there isn’t any connectivity.

Contrast this with Lotus Notes, which has been around for about 20 years and supposed to be the be-all and end-all collaborative tool, or Microsoft’s SharePoint, which is more recent. Both Notes and Sharepoint require everyone to run it, and develop to its own programming interfaces. That seems so quaint and outmoded now. And both are very quirky to install and deploy, which makes them less desirable too.

Second, email is a great notification system and a great way to organize your to-do list. You don’t have to use it as the transportation system for sending documents around, though. As an example, you can set up a blog to automatically notify via email when someone posts a comment to a particular page, so people can participate in a discussion thread but don’t have to continually return to that page to find out what has been posted.

Third, free or low-cost Internet applications have come of age, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Trackvia, Tripit, Timedriver, Hourtown and Setmeeting. All of these don’t require any software to download, don’t have a lot of upfront training or even any dough to use, which means that people can experiment with them and see if they will be suitable for their needs. All of these products can offload some of the tasks that we are used to doing on email and make us more productive in scheduling meetings, sharing work product, and arranging our time. Look for a story from me in the New York Times next month on this topic.

Fourth, instant messaging has become more useful for connecting remote work teams together and can be used as another notification system that is more immediate and more potent in terms of bringing people together. Some firms are beginning to use the built-in IM features of Facebook and Twitter for this purpose too. Again, this takes some load away from looking at your inbox for starting a particular task or trying to get a colleague’s attention.

Finally, there are other tools for two-person collaboration that will work better in real time, such as LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, that allow two people to actually see each other’s computer screen while they are talking on the phone. My podcasting partner Paul Gillin likes Yuuguu.com, which allows teams of 25 to share the same desktop, no matter if they are on Linux, Mac or Windows.

We still have a long way to go when it comes to collaborating effectively, and I since we are talking about sharing do share your own stories with my audience and post your comments here. I will have more to say on this topic for a keynote speech that I am giving in Philadelphia in April for the American Hardware Manufacturer’s Association. If you want me to come talk to your organization, you can send me email, or better yet, just call me on the phone.

For those of you in the area, I will be speaking at the AITP local chapter meeting next Thursday.

Early Network Access Control and endpoint security adopters often ran into complications with these new technologies. Cost, complexity and confusion stymied some deployments. Even though NAC has overcome some of its early issues, the technology can still be complex, requiring organizations to do some careful planning before they embark on deployment. I return to AITP and update them on NAC by giving his perspective about seven common pitfalls, drawn from lessons learned by several organizations that deployed NAC that he profiled in some of his magazine articles earlier this year. David will also provide guidance for security managers about to embark on a NAC evaluation.

Secure Computing’s Secure Web Protection service offers a proxy server to protect both malware and not-worksafe Web sites. It is a simple and unbotrusiveway to protect your browsing. It isn’t useful for protecting Web servers from inbound attacks, for example, and shouldn’t substitute for a fully-featured intrusion appliance, but it can protect individuals and small networks especially with a lot of home-based and remote office users. It is based on the company’s experience with both its TrustedSource reputation management (see the separate review here) and its Secure Web security appliances. Version: 1.0Secure Computing www.securecomputing.com 55 Almaden Boulevard, Suite 500, San Jose, CA 95113Product category: Web filtering and malware protection service Pricing: 30-day free trial of the service for up to 250 users.12 month subscription for both malware and filtering is $5 a month per user for 25 users. Quantity discounts available, and just filtering is less. We tested the beta version of the service on a small network in September 2008. Pros: • Dashboard shows you status at-a-glance and easy to setup• All critical features managed by a Web browser• Uses the global intelligence features of TrustedSource.orgCons: • Service needs improvement to stop malware from entering via SSL connections

Not only after NAC technology made its debut, early adopters often ran into a number of complications: cost, complexity and confusion stymied some deployments. Even though NAC has overcome some of its early issues, the technology can still be complex, requiring organizations to do some careful planning before they embark on deployment. This webcast for SearchSecurity.com next week on 9/24 looks at five common pitfalls, drawn from lessons learned by four organizations that have deployed NAC. It also provides guidance for security managers about to embark on a NAC evaluation. 

And here is a tip on how to configure NAP on Windows Server 2008, should you ever want to try that as well.

I discuss with Sam Whitmore, who runs a nifty service called MediaSurvey geared towards PR pros, about my latest effort with Web Informant.tv. You can click here to listen to the podcast.

I had an opportunity to speak on a panel with Bob Baker and Penny Sansevieri at the Publishers Management Assn. annual meeting in Los Angeles last month. Here is a nice picture of the three of us (I am on the right). We covered a lot of ground in terms of using new technologies such as podcasts, videos, linkbacks, social networks and the like for how authors can promote their works online. The slide deck, which is very terse, can be found here as well.