Announced beginning of last year already I now found some time during the vacation to setup and test SAP’s new approach to providing software with its StreamWork collaboration solution. So here my initial work experience report, I will add more later when we gained some experience using it…

StreamWork tries to combine different things in one business collaboration solution. The way I started using it right away was by starting a team project where I invited a few people in to discuss and work on a new sales and marketing approach for a product we market. After I launched a Decision box entering what we need to discuss and decide on in this team exercise I added some more work items such as an Evernote note which contained to do’s for a freelancer, a Stakeholder Analysis to show how we need to treat each of the target customers key people during the sales process, a PPT presentation with some sales pitches and attention grabbers.

Shown below is the Stakeholder Analysis work item I picked and quickly set up. Also available would have been a SWOT Analysis, Product Portfolio or Cost Analysis among others.

The integration with Evernote works very well. All fonts and elements were imported and displayed absolutely correctly. This was impressive.

Once you have your project started you can Add work items, Upload files or Evernote notes, Add Action Items, Add Participants and select tools from a Tools Catalog:

You can Add these work/project related items shown on the left to your collaboration group.

Next to Evernote there are also Box.net and Got Decisions partner tools in the Tools Catalog available. If you decide to use them then your data will be automatically also uploaded to these companies clouds and stored there as well.  A better integrated version would be great but is not a must have, at least not for smaller companies. I think larger corporations would certainly have an issue though with this.

A vertical feedback button on the right hand side leads to either contacting SAP support OR, and that is very well done, an idea collection forum. This I really like.

One problem I faced too. After uploading a larger PPT file I caused this issue here.

“ This file is being processed for slide extraction.” Contacting support did not help yet resolve it.

Still at first sight this looks like a very useful software. The ideas within are of course not SAP’s but copied from lots of other software solutions out there already. Even the tagline sounds like I heard it before :-). And what I like the most the vertical Feedback button I am quite sure is not even from SAP itself but they use a support community service. Also one can expect that they either acquire some of the partners that they work with in this software or, and there SAP has a not a favorable reputation, simply copy all they do and then terminate the partnerships. Unless they change also their business ethics which would be nice but is maybe not realistic to assume. Could well be that this is the reason why they only have four partners so far with Evernote, WebEx, Box.net and Auguri.

I have been using Evernote now for quite a while, primarily to organize the weekly and daily tasks. Also whenever I have a new idea I write it down as a note and sync it when there is WLAN access available, like at my home or in the office. Evernote has evolved form a simple note taking tool to an archiving system and how this looks has been described by Guy Kawasaki at length. I don’t think I will use all of these things but perhaps you will find some of them useful? Forwarding e-mails to my Evernote e-mail address and with that archiving them is something I have decided to do now.  Here’s a summary of all the things you can do:

• Forward email to your unique Evernote email address.
• Upload text, photo, or voice recordings via an iPhone, Palm Pre, or Windows Mobile phone.
• Drag-and-drop audio, images, PDFs, and files into Evernote on the desktop.
• Attach Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF documents to an email and send them to your Evernote email address.
• “Save PDF to Evernote” from the printing dialog box.
• Clip websites and blogs.
• Send documents directly from a scanner.
• Tweet text with the string “@myEN”.
• Upload from cameras directly to Evernote using the wireless EyeFi card.