International air carrier Lufthansa has become the first company to sponsor an entire vertical category of WashingtonPost.com’s Sponsored Blogroll program.

Via MarketingVOX.

For anyone with a role, or simply a desire, to promote the introduction of blogging - or, more generally, social software - into an enterprise, large or small, or with the responsibility of actually doing the implementation, Mike Stopforth provides a must-read, ten point checklist in his post Lessons Learned From Social Software Implementations.

Via Business and Blogging.

There have been lots of blog posts in the past two years describing the limits of email with respect to project management. Recently, Michael Sampson nicely summarized the key points:

• A conversation held in email related to documents miss the context of those files and their successives updates.
• Attached documents do not comprise meta data such as version numbers or the editors’ names.
• Attached documents do not comprise any history; in the best case, only the people on the project team (in the mailing list) know that there is a historical view.
• “New people can’t peek back and see how the social interaction between people lead to certain decisions being made.”

“As a consequence, people have to work harder to link conversations in email with documents that if more appropriate tools and methods were used.”

Of course, there is a solution: shared workspace and online collaboration!

Via Michael’s Thoughts.

Irwin Lazar recently interviewed 120 enterprise IT executives representing approximately 100 companies with an average annual revenue of over $10 billion. His goal was to benchmark how enterprises are supporting an increasing virtual workforce, including the use of tools such as VOIP, collaboration (both real-time and non-real time applications), and wireless/mobility strategies.

Irwin just published some early results. For example:

• 90% of enterprises consider themselves “virtual”, that is, they operate organizations in which team members work in separate geographic locations.
• Revenue growth and boosting employee productivity were the biggest drivers for collaboration projects.
• Demand for collaboration applications is primarily end-user driven.
• Enterprises are moving toward unifying their planning for collaboration and convergence.

Read more…

The German car company Volkswagenhas released a Rabbit Widget for both Dashboard and the Yahoo! Widgets Engine that lists free public events in over a dozen US cities.

Apparently, the widget is only available on the Rabbit page. On the right, the widget displays names of the events with small icons that help categorize said event (General Interest, Theatre, Music, etc.), and clicking on any event provides a brief description and links to more information.

Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

From time to time, you find an awesome article that gives you a superb overview of what is changing in today’s world economy. “Building on trust” by Sam Palmisiano, chairman, president and chief executive of IBM, is one of these articles. Moreover, it anticipates what organisations will look like in the near future. Those that survive.

Here the keywords are: sustainable, equitable, value-based, trust, open, connected, global, innovative, collaborative.