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Group Efforts
Growing companies take groupware beyond messaging and scheduling features
Reprinted from NetworkWorld
by Aaron Ricadela
Groupware has long been a staple for fast-growing
companies because of its messaging and scheduling
functions. But some emerging enterprises are beginning
to spice up their groupware installations, taking advantage
of powerful electronic-business and collaborative workflow
features more commonly in use at larger companies.
These businesses have begun to recognize that products
such as Lotus Development Corp.'s Domino platform,
Microsoft's Exchange, and Novell's GroupWise are
valuable tools for managing complex projects, updating
online storefronts, and interpreting customer data.
The software has become a key player in midsize
companies' knowledge-management strategies as they
figure out how to share stores of data from disparate
locations. "Information flow and groupware in particular
have begun to put the smaller enterprise on the map, and
let them play with the big boys," says Christopher
Stephenson, VP of technology services at iCorps
Technologies, an IT consulting firm that services
companies with 15 to 120 employees. "A good part of the
information decade was spent gathering and storing
information. Now we're realizing we have to share it."
For Atlas Venture, a Boston venture-capital firm that
outsources its IT operations to iCorps, knowledge
management was "absolutely critical," says Webmaster
Alex Trigaux. The 40-person firm, which has offices in six
cities in the United States and Europe and manages $850
million in funds, implemented Exchange to manage its deal-flow system.
Share it all: Atlas Venture implemented Exchange to let
its employees pool
information in real time, say Trigaux (right) and iCorps
VP Stephenson.
Atlas raises money from investors, then takes positions in
startup high-tech and life-sciences companies. Information
pertinent to a project is generated by many employees in
offices across several time zones. Storing the staggering
amount of data pertinent to each deal in separate files in a
network folder would be an inefficient way to share that
information, Trigaux says. Atlas hired iCorps to build a
series of public folders within Exchange so that
employees can share information that is both updated
instantaneously and viewable by multiple users in real
time. The system logs transcripts of telephone calls and
legal documents, as well as forms showing a deal's
source, status, and origin. "It was crucial for us to have an
application where everyone could pool all of their
information in real time," Trigaux says, to avoid duplication
of effort.
Analysts say companies working on time-sensitive
projects via remote teams get most excited by the
collaborative features of Exchange, Domino, and
GroupWise. "File sharing isn't going to do it for you, and
E-mail isn't going to do it for you," says Tom Austin, a VP
at Gartner Group. Austin estimates 20% to 40% of
enterprises that have implemented these systems are
using some form of advanced collaboration beyond
messaging, calendaring, or Web publishing.
Atlas is migrating to Exchange 5.5, the most recent
version of the software, and expects the product to further
boost access to information among its far-flung teams.
The Web Access feature in the Outlook client will let users
access E-mail and schedules from any PC via a Web
browser.
Trigaux expects the next version of Exchange,
code-named Platinum and due next year, to help Atlas
enhance collaboration features through its increased
support for unified messaging. "With Platinum, you'd be
able to take a voice mail and put it into the deal flow,"
Trigaux says. "The voice mails on these phones are every
bit as valuable as the documents that reside in
Exchange."
Platinum hinges on Microsoft's Exchange Web Store
technology, which is designed to pull together E-mail, files,
and intranet pages into a common storage medium. Bob
Muglia, senior VP of Microsoft's business productivity
group, says "artificial bounds" between information "add a
burden to IT and disempowers end users." With Platinum,
the vendor aims to "establish a corporate memory that
exists outside the individual," Muglia says. "There's no
good process in place for central corporate information to
live."
Platinum will also provide increased interoperability
across applications. Office documents, for instance, will
have similarly detailed attributes--such as document
author, editor, and due date--as Outlook. A Digital
Dashboard feature promises to be of interest to
midmarket companies as they begin to implement
enterprise resource planning systems in greater numbers.
Digital Dashboard serves as a Web interface for
presenting information from these applications, and
Microsoft is working with ERP vendors to develop
connectors to Exchange. Muglia says it's easier to
manipulate data for presentation in an Exchange template
than "to integrate systems that were never meant to be
integrated."
Gartner Group's Austin says Platinum will bring
Exchange's document-management and workflow
capabilities closer to those of Domino.
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