Knowledge workers collaboration and productivity

May 10, 2016/0 Comments/in Further Reading, KnowledgeBase /by LvT

Increase Productivity by 20%: Knowledge workers collaboration via social technologies

Knowledge Workers Collaboration Tools

New technologies for social collaboration: A McKinsey report discusses the potential value in using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises.

The most powerful applications of social technologies in the global economy are largely untapped. By using social technologies, companies can raise the productivity of knowledge workers by 20 to 25 percent.

The article conludes that organizations must transform their structures, processes, and cultures: they will need to become more open and nonhierarchical and to create a culture of trust. Ultimately, the power of social technologies hinges on the full and enthusiastic participation of employees who are not afraid to share their thoughts and trust that their contributions will be respected.

Knowledge Workers Collaboration

Finally, creating these conditions will be far more challenging than implementing new technologies like Noggle. So, the McKinsey report underlines the conceptual background of Noggle: It needs to be accepted within the sphere of knowledge management that experts in the gig economy do not want to give away their “knowledge” (in the form of documents) to centralized places, thereby losing control of what or who can access the knowledge. Knowledge managers need to be aware that knowledge is not only the information or document itself—knowledge is also about finding the people behind bits of information or documents. Today, we must empower the gig economy instead of fighting it with rigid centralized storage-process guidelines. In supporting decentral knowledge sharing, we will increase productivity among organizations. We must accept that centralized document-management approaches, which have been the focus of most knowledge-management projects, constantly fail to deliver value in the long run.

The following link includes a downloadable executive summary and the full report with more data about the study:

Knowledge Workers – How to raise productivity

Full Article

Knowledge sharing practice – It is time to act

May 10, 2016/0 Comments/in Further Reading, KnowledgeBase /by LvT

The GigEconomy: We share everything but struggle to share knowledge.

What about your knowledge sharing practice today?

In an LinkedIn Pulse article, the motivation for Noggle was outline in regards to the upcoming requirements to put knowledge sharing into practice in the Era of the Gig Economy.

Knowledge sharing is part of our human nature to connect and collaborate with others. We are social beings, and as such have been bound to share what we know with others. Today, we applaud the arrival of the collaborative economy, in which we have started to share increasing aspects of our lives. Examples are carsharing, roomsharing, co-working and office-space sharing, and peer-to-peer lending or crowdfunding. However, what about knowledge sharing practice today? It is one of the great ironies that we share almost everything but still struggle to share knowledge.

What abour your knowledge sharing practice?

While the importance of knowledge sharing practice increases, the personal skills of managing it seem to fade.

In times when storage space is nearly unlimited at nearly zero cost, we save ever more documents in scattered file shares. Nobody cares about disk space anymore. So, our cherished new technologies, like big data and the cloud, simply fan the flames of information overload. We still struggle to find information that matters.

The growth of computing has brought renewed attention to the ideas of Vannevar Bush about processing and storing information, including the “Memex,” an information-storage concept detailed in Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think,” in The Atlantic Monthly. (Vannevar Bush – “As We May Think”)

Some may think that the ideas and concepts postulated in ‘As We May Think’ are old or without much value. But, it seems that the idea of association and its value for augmenting human understanding and cognition continues even today. So what of the man, what of the paper, and why does this work still continue to resonate 70 years after it was first published?

Please read the full article and follow-up here:
LinkedIn Pulse Article “Knowledge Management”

Document Library – How to search and find documents

April 14, 2016/0 Comments/in KnowledgeBase, Libraries /by LvT

How to create a document library for searching documents

Settings – Admin Tab

April 5, 2016/0 Comments/in Customizing, KnowledgeBase /by LvT

Online Help – Settings Admin TAB

The System tab is your main hub for application information and general settings. The panel allows you to configure and customize your Noggle experience.

Settings Panel

Network Team Libraries

March 29, 2016/0 Comments/in KnowledgeBase, Setup & Installation /by LvT

Network Team Libraries are libraries which are stored in a central network folder. This allows users to directly connect to the library without downloading local libraries. The downside is that libraries from network devices slow down the indexing and searching process. So it is not recommended to use team network libraries.

If you create a team network library via the advanced settings panel during library creation, you must make sure that the selected network path for the library file is available for all people with whom you want share this library later. Otherwise the colleagues will not be able to connect to this library.

A valid UNC network path looks like: \\server\share

Cloud Document Search – Full-Text Search

March 26, 2016/0 Comments/in KnowledgeBase, Searching /by LvT

Cloud Document Search: Quickly find any document, anywhere in the cloud.

With billions of files, the cloud has become one of the world’s largest stores of private documents, and it’s still growing. As users add more and more files it becomes harder for them to stay organized. Users spend endless times browsing file stores to retrieve their files manually. In other words, the more content users store in the cloud, the more important it is for them to have a powerful cloud document search tool available.

Cloud document search – Users need unified search tools

With this motivation in mind, we set out to deploy an instant, full-text cloud document search. Noggle replaces browsing with a single search interface as the primary way to find and retrieve content in one single place.

Today, Noggle powers cloud search for all large solution providers like Dropbox, Google drive or SharePoint.

It is a secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer document-retrieval and knowledge-sharing tool that goes far beyond the single technologies of document sharing or search applications. It is a a free application around the core conceptual principles that go back to the roots of Vannevar Bushs. In his essay “As We May Think” (1945) he visioned:

“Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”

(Source: As We May Think – Article)

Today, Noggle allows to build your own private knowledge encyclopedias and share them with your colleagues. Combining cloud document search with digital library management and full-text search tools provides new ways for peer-to-peer based knowledge retrieval.

With Noggle you can

organize information and documents better with personal digital library routines in the era of scattered document file shares.
capture information as mind works, using semantic clustering and associative document filtering and recommendations.
aim to retrieve information and access the people behind knowledge by bringing the latest technology standards to personal desktops
make it possible to share indexed libraries without disrupting access rights for the original document content.

Noggle unifies search results across desktops locations, network file shares, email, cloud storages (e.g. Dropbox), enabling you to preview and act upon information – no matter where it is stored. And even better, Noggle has embedded peer-to-peer library sharing algorithms to collaborate with your colleagues and to make knowledge retrieval as easy as to google the public internet.

You can download a short whitepaper about the features: Document Retrieval – Features Overview

Dropbox Integration – Find documents in the cloud

March 11, 2016/0 Comments/in KnowledgeBase, Libraries, Setup & Installation /by LvT

Indexing cloud drives and folders In general noggle can index and search all folders and files which are accessible via the Windows file explorer. So if you have linked a cloud account as a file share which is accessible via the windows explorer, it is also accessible for noggle. However, often the “linked” cloud folder […]

Why noggle helps to avoid collaborative overload

January 16, 2016/0 Comments/in Further Reading, KnowledgeBase /by LvT

Why noggle helps to avoid collaborative overload

In the Jan./Feb. 2016 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant wrote an article on the topic “Collaborative Overload”. They recommend to leverage technology to make informational ressource more accessible and transparent.

„Collaboration is taking over the workplace. As business becomes increasingly global and cross-functional, silos are breaking down, connectivity is increasing, and teamwork is seen as a key to organizational success. … Performance suffers as they (people) are buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice, access to resources. … Informational and social resources can be shared—often in a single exchange—.. That is, when I offer you knowledge or network awareness … An exchange that might have taken five minutes or less turns into a 30-minute calendar invite that strains personal resources on both sides of the request. … Leverage technology and physical space to make informational and social resources more accessible and transparent. … Efficient sharing of informational, social, and personal resources should also be a prerequisite for positive reviews, promotions, and pay raises. … Collaboration is indeed the answer to many of today’s most pressing business challenges.”

Exactly what Noggle provides. Noggle is a peer-to-peer “exchange” for information libraries. To make your information ressources transparent and more accessible. A productivity tool to fight against collaborative overload.

Make it happen with Noggle.

Link to the full article:
HBR Article “Collaborative Overload”

Why information sharing can make you a winning team

January 16, 2016/0 Comments/in Further Reading, KnowledgeBase /by LvT

“How Too Many Rules at Work Keep You from Getting Things Done”

TED Talk by Yves Morieux

“Organizations spend 40-80% percent of their time, wasting their time. E.g. for undoing and redoing, writing reports. When people dont coorporate, dont blame the people, look at their work situations. We need to create organizations in which it becomes individually usefull for people to coorperate. Remove interfaces, middle offices and complicated coordination structures.”

See in his talk why peer-to-peer information sharing and collaboration with Noggle can help to make you a winning team, even if others may have better information. Why? Because Noggle integrates collaboration with information sharing without complicated central coordination structures.

“Thanks to coorperations the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts. Contribute to the effort of others.”

Noggle is a productivity tool focussing on peer-to-peer information retrieval. Start contributing to the effort of others without complicated rules. Start making your team the winning team. Start focusing on getting things done with Noggle.

Text Detection & Extraction in Pictures (OCR)

December 20, 2015/0 Comments/in KnowledgeBase, Setup & Installation /by LvT

The app supports Optical Character Recognition (OCR). A tool that allows extracting text from a picture. This proves handy, especially when you need to retrieve image files in noggle like scanned business cards, scanned magazine articles, saved web-pictures or camera snapshots. After Noggle has extracted the text from the pictures in the library, you can search and find your images via the noggle text search.

It is a powerful feature, especially if you use it in combination with your favorite cloud-storage provider like dropbox.

Possible Scenarios:

1) Save images you came across while browsing the web in your dropbox folder via you smartphone. Index the dropbox folder later with your noggle client to be able to retrieve these images via a text search.

2) Scan inbound paper documents and let the scanner save the files “somewhere” in network or cloud. It doesnt matter how the documents are named and you dont even need to tag them. Just let Noggle index the network/cloud folder with these documents as pictures. You can then retrieve these inbound-scanned-paper documents via full textual serach in the noggle application.

The following short tutorial video shows some simple examples:

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_du-4yB0mU[/embedyt]

How to Enable OCR Features (jpg, png, tif)

The integrated Windows TIFF iFilter provides an opportunity to extract text from pictures during the library indexing process. The Windows TIFF iFilter function adds an optical character recognition and image processing interface which will be used while Noggle is indexing a picture.

The OCR engine is not activated by default. Customers who are looking for indexing and searching text in jpg, png or png pictures can enable the integrated Windows functions with the help of the following steps.

To install Windows TIFF IFilter with Windows: