A new blog(ger) @Ambientia

I have been working at Ambientia for a month now and to celebrate it I started blogging in Ambientia´s new blog. You will find my blog posts from here. And sorry for my foreign readers, I use only Finnish there, so I add a Google translation for you about the first entry. I am too lazy to update the links or to add the photo, check them from the link above.

An Ambient of the month

Hehe, I wonder what my new co-workers think about the title, but it is true: I have been working at Ambient for a month now... Before that I was working 11 years at Nokia. After such a long time it has been very refreshing to start in a new company - especially as I now work at the core business. Even if I changed companies there is a lot of familiar things too.

I work as a consultant at Social Solutions unit, whose main products are Atlassian´s Confluence and JIRA. Atlassian products can be purchased directly from them, but through us, the licenses are cheaper - and user support and customizations are in Finnish.

Confluence is a wiki platform. Three years ago I chose a wiki platform for my organization in Nokia and I have been a Mediawiki fan since then. My new boss Marko calls it a wiki for nerds which was a little provocative thing to say for me. But okay, granted, compared with Confluence it is certainly more challenging for beginners. Confluence is closer to the usual web sites, it is easier to create structures and, above all, it's easier to edit: if you can edit in Word, you can edit in Confluence.

A word about my hobby (if you google me you will find out it pretty soon): I started a dollhouse hobby 9 years ago. I did not know any of the practitioners, so I started following discussion boards. Through the hobby I learnt various Internet services, I shared my photos, set up a forum, website, blog, and, ultimately, the wiki. Three-year-old Nukkekotiwiki is very well known in Finland and this year it got an English sister. To promote the new Mini Treasures wiki I use social media tools: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

In hobby world technology is spreading faster than in companies. Maybe because people are usually so passionated about their hobbies and want to share them with others. Bringing social media tools into business world is challenging, because it does not mean only new tools but a new open way of working, it is a cultural revolution.

I brought my Nokia organization's internal communications not only wikis but also blogs. I hosted a popular blog called Hidden Treasure (and this blog is continuum for it). I was an admin and trainer, a web2.0 evangelist, but I also worked with agile software development. I was a product owner in a Scrum team and we managed our backlog in Trac. Trac and JIRA are both tools for managing tasks. JIRA is more versatile and, for example, and you can create metrics more easily. Ambientia is tailoring Jira according to customer requirements, e.g. by bringing the familiar terms and steps in it.

I am helping businesses to solve e.g. their communication problems, identify needs and implement exciting new operating environments. During the first month I have been in about twenty (!) client meetings and have seen many different use cases for Confluence and JIRA. I am also offering more common social media consultancy and training: I am giving dummy-friendly presentations a variety of the most common social media tools and I will tell about their use, technology and culture. So if you want to know more about e.g. Twitter, community management, challenges of the new open work culture, or how to used social media in job hunting, contact me.

You can find me in the following locations: Blogspot, Delicious, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Sometu.

Dear Saints (aka happy holidays)

Johanna