What's Teeme?

Teeme is designed for effective team collaboration from small focused single teams to distributed multi-disciplinary teams (employees, partners, suppliers and even customers - in different places and time zones). It addresses key commercial concerns in managing collaboration namely trust management, transparency and traceability. Though Teeme uses social software concepts it applies them for real team work within enterprises.

Our mission is to enable Distributed Co-Creation.

The team work typically involves –

  • Content creation, classification and linkages to other relate contents.
  • Conversations on content - for clarity, coverage, editorial and brainstorming purposes.
  • Interactions among team members for example review and accuracy requests, authorization and approval requests etc.

We believe that team work is like growing a tree together! Individual contributions are captured as leaf and these contributions collectively lead to growing the tree. A leaf contains a fully expressed thought. It can be a whole section of project scope, a topic in discussions or a few words specifying a task. This is the building block of team collaboration.

A leaf not only captures content it also provides tools for –

  • Simple Tags – The content is classified using simple tagging. The leaves and trees can be tagged. The tagging is consistent throughout the whole community.
  • Action tags - Allows a user to request others to perform specific content related actions (for example review, check, verify etc.), select options, vote on an issue and seek authorization. Not only the actions but corresponding responses are captured with the tags - enabling transparency and feedback.
  • Talk – This is a conversation tool. The content related conversations can be captured right with the content using this.
  • Links – A leaf or a tree can link other related content sources or trees using this.

Thus a leaf captures content, user actions & responses, conversations and other logical linkages. These conversations and interactions can lead to contributions of newer leaves.

And thus the tree grows. Not only the tree captures the evolution of content but it also retains the conversations and user interactions which were responsible for the evolution. Any decision made by the team can be fully traced using this model – benefiting enterprises in auditing, governance and transparency.

The following 5 types of trees are provided to capture different collaborative patterns found in team situations.

  1. Document tree – this provides a way to capture and evolve content as part of documentation activity such as sales proposal, customer requirements etc. The document parts as leaves can evolve separately thus supporting micro-versioning. Macro-versioning at the document tree level is also provided.
  2. Discuss tree – This captures multi-threaded discussion as topics and comments. This tree supports both synchronous and asynchronous modes of communication so it can be used both as an email and instant messenger at the same time! This is like having a series of phone-conferences and maintaining the context among these sessions for future reference.
  3. Notes tree – This enables factual information about group activities to be captured effectively. For example client meeting, issue tracking, case management etc. Only participants of the group activity can edit content for Notes tree but others can still interact by tags, talk and links tool.
  4. Contact tree – External clients, customers and other external stake-holders are modeled as Contact trees and all the interactions with this contact is captured in the tree. The tree captures basic elements of CRM.
  5. Task tree – The task tree enables teams to develop, manage and monitor group tasks. A task can contain sub-tasks and these can be marked on Calendar. The tree is used for project monitoring and coordination purposes.

Teeme also provides features to create communities, form project teams and assign them work spaces for collaboration. The members have profiles and can send messages to each other.

Externally generated content can be imported and managed in Teeme. Teeme also supports both defined and ad-hoc collaboration model.

Teeme provides an innovative solution for collaboration among multi-disciplinary teams. Apart from the obvious productivity gains this enables businesses to make effective and transparent decisions.