You may remember all the hype about 'groupware' that was at its peak about seven or eight years ago. Groupware was about 'team' productivity. When you boiled it down, it really meant e-mail, diary systems, to do lists, shared contact lists and just about everything that now comes bundled together in Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Novell's GroupWise. Now, almost all businesses use e-mail and the benefits that groupware delivered are spread widely.

Groupware was the IT industry's first attempt at helping with collaborative working. At the same time it was the first major enhancement to office applications, after the invention of the word processor and the spreadsheet, allowing PC users to pass files around by e-mail attachment and co-ordinate their activities in a convenient way. However time has moved on, and there is now a second wave of technology which can genuinely claim to enhance what the industry delivered not so long ago. It goes by the name of collaboration software.

By definition, collaboration is about people working together, and the new products and services in this area deal with much closer collaboration than the earlier groupware products. It is no longer about passing files around. It is about sharing files and working together on them even if you are thousands of miles apart. It is no longer about e-mail. It is about chat capability which provides immediate interaction. It is about electronic meetings, web conferences and webinars. It is about on-line communities and the collaborative web site building that accompanies it. So, it is also about enabling virtual teams. Think in terms of geographically separated teams or teams assembled from different organizations, in a supply chain perhaps, and you have it.

The key to collaborative activities is the organization and sharing of files - or as we should prefer to call them, electronic documents. For years, the IT industry never delivered a well-managed way of organizing and sharing even word processing files, never mind the other files (spreadsheets, presentations, DTP files, CAD files, images, HTML files, etc.) that teams of people work with. Collaboration software is beginning to address this problem, and if it achieves nothing more than preventing files getting lost or old versions of files being used by mistake, it will achieve much.

The real payload, however, is in working faster. Just as the original office software was about productivity, collaborative software is about productivity - the productivity of teams and virtual teams, rather than the individual. The early signs are that it is already beginning to deliver.

» posted by jnaze

Baroudi Bloor

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