5 tips for smarter collaboration in a mobile and cloud world

I’m sure you’ve been through this frustration: You have a meeting, and your smartphone gives you a warning to dial in or head to the conference room — except where in $@! is that number or location? Buried in the meeting details, of course. Or this frustration: Someone sends you a link to a file that when clicked or tapped requires you set up an account at yet another service or with a service that you have associated with a different email address. Good luck in getting to that file!

So many technologies are out there for our use — on our PCs or Macs, on our mobile devices, via our browsers — that we face a new challenge of having them work well among disparate groups.

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Don’t get me wrong: I love the fact that I can access my calendar from any number of devices, not just a Windows laptop. And I can get files almost anywhere I am and on almost any device I happen to have with me. I love that I can see all my emails in one email client, yet keep them separate for security reasons. But this new world requires some changes in how we use the tools so that they work better across the new heterogeneous landscape.

Here are five tips to make life easier for your colleagues and friends in this new world — and ultimately for yourself.

1. Send out calendar invitations, not emails, to get on people’s calendars Any modern calendar program in Windows, OS X, iOS, or Android can send out an invitation to anyone for whom you have an email address or is in your corporate address book. Use that method. It’ll save people the hassle of having to take the info from their email and manually enter it in their calendars. In better calendar clients, it’ll let them preview their schedules so they can see if they’re even free before accepting or declining the invite.

You benefit as well: The appointment is added to your calendar, and you can see who accepted it — without having to wade through a long string of emails to see who said yes. Plus, if you need to change the meeting’s date and time, the update is sent to everyone automatically.

Note that if you still use IBM’s Lotus Notes, it’s not great about creating such invitations, nor about entering actual email addresses in its invitee list. Those outside your company may have trouble getting your invites to work or seeing who’s also participating, so you may be at a disadvantage. Also, Apple’s and Google’s calendar apps don’t handle complex repeating-event patterns such as those in Notes or Attachmate’s GroupWise, so those users may get inaccurate invites. Depending how common such users are, you may need to simplify your recurring-event schedules.

2. Put meeting location and numbers in the Location field of your calendar entry Many of us manage our meetings on our smartphones or tablets. On those screens, you get less detail than on a 22-inch computer monitor. If the location or dial-in information is buried in the appointment’s Note section — as is often the case — it’s hard to join the meeting when driving, walking, or otherwise not at a computer. But if that detail is in the Location field, it’s immediately visible. That field is often clickable, such as to let your phone dial the number or, in the case of iOS and OS X Mavericks, for the Calendars app to estimate drive time to the address for the meeting. (If only it could show you where that conference room is in your building!)

Speaking of dial-in numbers, be sure to put the access code after the number, and add # or whatever the confirmation key will be required by your dial-in line. Also, many meetings today are hosted via services like GoToMeeting and Lync. These usually require sign-in details that are hard to parse or are embedded in a URL that the services’ websites don’t pass onto their mobile apps. To the extent possible, put the info in the Location field for both desktop and mobile access.

The real solution, of course, needs to come from those vendors to better integrate their access codes across all their clients. (They should also stop requiring a new download on my Mac each and every time I use them.) Until then, there are apps that claim to parse invites to enter that info for you, such as when you are driving; I haven’t tested them yet, but they’re worth investigating.

3. Don’t use (only) cloud-sharing services if you deal with mixed groups I love using Dropbox for keeping my work files accessible to almost any device I happen to have at hand, but I dislike using the service to share files with others. Its desktop and mobile apps, for example, send a link to the file rather than the file itself, so the people I want to share it with also need a Dropbox account. (Like most such services, Dropbox does this to force growth of its user base.)

Worse, when those file-sharing links go to my work email, Dropbox doesn’t know I have a Dropbox account via my personal email; it gets confused and tries to make me sign up for a new account. Plus, it won’t let me access the file from my existing Dropbox account.

Google Drive is also confused when you get an invite to an account other than your Gmail account, though it lets you switch accounts more easily than in Dropbox — but it’s still too complex. (There’s no way I would want work files in my personal Google Drive, and neither should my company, given how Google’s business is to scan everything that traverses its services.) I suspect Box and SkyDrive (which is being renamed OneDrive) have the same issue, but I don’t use them enough to know their intricacies to say for sure.

Thus, restrict your use of cloud storage services to your own access and to people you know use the same service — such as your workgroup at the office that has decided to standardize on one service for its members. Otherwise, send out a file attachment. If the file is too sensitive to send that way, you probably shouldn’t be sharing via a public cloud service anyhow.

4. Turn off autoposting in your social services Services like Foursquare push members to tweet or otherwise post every time they check in some place, order something, or like something. Anyone following you thus gets spammed with useless information, which is both annoying and unprofessional. Many of these services enable autoposting without clearly informing the user, and I’ve had many business associates discover to their embarrassment that they’ve been telling everyone that they were at IHOP at 11 a.m., Denny’s at 2 p.m., and Starbucks at 4:30 p.m. (Do they actually work? And don’t they have better taste?)

5. Remember the time zone Being based on the West Coast, I’ve noticed that many people on the East Coast assume everyone else is on the East Coast, too. How else to explain that they rarely indicate or check for a time zone when they want to set up an appointment or call you? (As you go further west, people seem to understand the United States in fact has six time zones, more if you add its territories like Puerto Rico and the Pacific islands beyond Hawaii.)

If you use a calendar invite, the time zone translation is taken care of for you, but you should still indicate time zone in any emails leading up to an appointment — and you certainly should know someone’s time zone before you call him or her.

Remember: An area code no longer is a clear indication of where someone is located. With mobile phones, people could be anywhere, and not just for business trips or during vacations. Many people who move keep their old number (and area code) on their cellphones, which often are their only phones, steadily degrading the geographical meaning of an area code.

This article, “5 tips for smarter collaboration in a mobile and cloud world,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.