A lot of asynchronous text style conversations are going on in different media types in my digital workplace daily experience:
- mail conversation
- Comments in ESN to whichever object (blog, wiki, forum, status update)
- Comments to business objects like invoice, contract or purchase request from my ERP solution (offered in ESN style in an xPage app at Vössing, embedded in connections)
What if there would be a button in all of these conversational places that offers to just „Go live“ in synchronous mode with a single click?
As a result, a Sametime window would pop up with all the participants in the async conversation already invited and notified so we can instantly start chatting? The result of the chat could then go back to the previous conversation, be it sent as a transscript to the mail group or sent as a new comment to the comments feed we started off.
From within ST you can always go audio, video or screen sharing so even a recording could be added as a linked content to the conversation.
This would allow ST to offer a unique selling point in the HCL collaboration portfolio, something no other team solution can do.
(And I feel we urgently need some USP for it, otherwise it will only be the 5th boring chat on my workplace).
Improvements on the basic idea:
- let user select which participants to invite (prefilled tag list of people in the conversation)
- let user select which part of the chat/audio/video/screen sharing conversation shall go back to the feed (e. g. time slider, channel selector (text, audio, video, screen)
- prefill the ST chat with all previous content of the conversation on Startup
Make ST a horizontal service layer, available everywhere in the portfolio, aware of the current context and the participants in that context.
In v12 LiveName widget provides this support with the ability to hover over and select quick chat, invite to meeting, chat and contact info. These APIs are being used to update other HCL Software products and are available for custom application consumption. If you have questions about this, please open a support case.
Another approach would be to replace all existing commenting in notes and connections and also verse with Sametime technology and so to embed the chatty experience with presence indicators, typing indictators and threaded conversations everywhere in the HCL collab portfolio