Coming together

Effective collaboration is now one of the most important areas for many regional enterprises to focus on, and yet significant numbers are still using ad-hoc methods. ACN looks at some of the latest dedicated collaboration systems on the market.

The Nightmare Of The Lost e-mail is a scenario that is bitterly familiar to most business people around the world: that vital communiqué, which contained an attachment with the latest revised specifications of a new product, or the detailed notes from a recent meeting - and so on and so on.

Thanks to the rise of electronic communications, enterprises are used to flinging important documents and information around at speed.


IBM’s big advantage is the ability to offer collaboration functions in one package, including oversight tools such as policy capabilities, making users’ lives easier

But with a slip of a finger at the wrong moment - or, more disastrously, with a system failure or security issue - an individual can see months or years of accumulated data wiped out, and no guaranteed way to recover it, especially if said data was urgent.

Hence the rise of dedicated collaboration systems - software or platforms that allow groups of people to interact in a controlled fashion. This not only removes the worries of ad-hoc communication methods such as e-mail, but makes it easier for managers to keep track of a project, or to take control if necessary, should team members drop out, for example.
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Most of the big enterprise software players now offer some form of collaboration system, but these are now in competition with the growing number of niche tools on the market - and, more significantly, freely-available options from companies such as Google, with its editable-online offering Google Docs.

Here, ACN rounds up a few of the available systems, and looks at some of their critical features. It should be noted, these are not product reviews, and the descriptions below are based on information provided by the vendors concerned - no endorsement of the below products should be implied.

If you have had experience of any of the offerings here - or any other collaboration systems - ACN would like to hear from you: write to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it with your stories.

IBM Lotus

IBM's range of office and productivity systems has fallen out of favour in recent years (decades), thanks to the dominance of Microsoft's Office suite, but Big Blue is biting back. IBM® Lotus® Sametime® Standard software - to give it its official name - is part of the vendor's unified collaboration and communication (UC²TM) platform, and is aimed squarely at the large enterprise market.

According to IBM, Sametime offers "integrated, enterprise instant messaging, VOIP, video chats, and web conferencing capabilities with the security features required for business use" - a fairly comprehensive list of features when looked at one way, but also a set of capabilities that could be easily replicated - often for free - by programs such as Google Talk or Microsoft's range of Messenger offerings.

IBM's big advantage - as with other similar enterprise offerings - is first the ability to offer all these functions in one package, which also includes oversight tools such as policy capabilities, making the lives of users and IT departments easier.

The second advantage is a guarantee of service - the risk of IBM's offering failing at a crucial moment is significantly less than its freely available IM competitors.

This year is set to see an evolution of Sametime, as it gets a number of significant updates. Currently on the cards for a mid-2008 release are enduring chat rooms designed to let users communicate in groups easily, as well as a "Skilltap" function which will apparently allow employees to get expert advice, "even from people you don't know" according to IBM.

Later in the year Sametime will also see unified telephony functions which will allow organisations to manage disparate telephony environments, such as office phones and mobiles.

IBM Lotus Sametime is a bread and butter collaboration offering aimed at general use, and while it won't deliver highly specialised facilities, it will give large enterprises core communication tools.

IFS/Project Delivery

IFS is a new arrival to the Middle East market, and pitches enterprise software offerings on the basis of their open standards. IFS claims this approach allows IFS software to integrate with other systems, giving organisations the best of both worlds.

IFS/Project Delivery (we're not sure what the slash means either) claims to help enterprises manage a project - specifically in the manufacturing sector - throughout its whole lifecycle, allowing the various involved parties to come together and bring whatever applicable information is necessary to the table - the vendor says enterprises can "tear down the walls between your engineering, manufacturing, and service departments".

The software gives firms the ability to itemise every aspect of a project, down to the individual parts and their specifications, and then offers integrated document management tools to deal with any applicable paperwork associated with the designs.

This should give an enterprise a single point of reference for the whole project, and cut down the confusion created by disparate groups of employees working on the project.

Having presented a reasonably compelling pitch for the back end, IFS has gone on to offer the capability of putting its systems on mobile devices such as PDAs and smart phones.

IFS's mobile software is Java-based, so the list of compatible devices will be lengthy - but in case enterprises want a hardware-inclusive offering, the vendor also offers its own mobile devices, sourced from companies such as Symbol.

IFS has also teamed up with IBM to beef up its mobile offerings, giving "online when available" capabilities that allow the software to be used even without a network or internet connection.

For manufacturing or industrial projects, especially in environments which could benefit from mobile device functionality, IFS's offerings may be worth a look.

Team Desk

Team Desk offers a number of on-demand collaboration offerings - priced per user per month or year - based around its core online database system. This means, in addition to Team Desk's own programs, customers have access to third party systems built on the platform.

Team Desk also offers firms the ability to create their own customised applications, and have them hosted on its servers. The vendor is very much in the "Web 2.0" vein with this philosophy - and also its practice of displaying reviews and ratings of applications on its website (although only a few are currently visible online).

Giving yet more evidence of the Web 2.0 phenomenon's move up the business value chain, Team Desk started offering an ‘Enterprise' version of its platform last month, giving customers annual pricing, unlimited numbers of applications, customised branding on the application, and options for either a corporate subdomain on Team Desk's site, or - for a charge - a customer's own web domain.

The 40 or so applications available are currently all from Team Desk, but cover a wide range of functions, from overall project management to industry- and task-specific options, all designed to facilitate the interaction of people throughout a business, or in some cases third parties such as suppliers or job applicants.

Team Desk offers a number of interesting options for enterprises willing to venture into the hosted applications space, and prepared to look at customisation.

HyperOffice

Another web-based on-demand offering comes courtesy of HyperOffice, which can provide e-mail, document management, contacts, discussion forums and opinion polls, among other functions. This makes HyperOffice potentially less of an application, and more of an online enterprise community.

In this sense, the firm is simply replicating services provided offline by the likes of IBM and Microsoft, and online by Google - although as with its competitors it does offer some useful tricks in terms of customisation, branding and user policy management, as well as Outlook synchronisation.

The other hook HyperOffice has is very current - users can access its e-mail functions through the Apple iPhone's built-in e-mail client (which presumably extends to the iPod Touch.)

Geeky gimmicks aside, HyperOffice does also offer another compelling reason to consider its services: price. For a block of 250 users, the annual price per user is around US$57, with additional users charged at $10 a month.

This makes it relatively affordable compared to the likes of IBM and Microsoft, especially when support and physical IT equipment costs are factored in.

For enterprises looking for cost-effective way to connect users securely HyperOffice's on-demand offerings may be of interest.