Table of Contents

   Editor's Note
   Upcoming Events
   Quick Hits
   News and Announcements
   Guru's Corner: New Directions in Context Based Collaboration .
  Guest Editorial: Three Reasons Why Less is More for SMB Collaboration

Editor's Note

It is that time of year, just after LotusSphere and just before the Super Bowl. It is a time of year known for killer snow storms and SAD (Seasonal Affect Disorder).  But, in the collaboration space the New Year started with a bang! I started getting phone calls from investors in First Virtual Corporation (www.fvc.com), the makers of Click-to-Meet, a real-time technology that has been around for years. FVC it seems, filed for chaptor 11. bankruptcy a week or so ago, and furloughed all of their employees. It is our expectation that  one of their competitors will pick up the "Click-to-Meet" at a fire sale price during the course of the bankruptcy. With so many vendors in the RTC space (we count over 80) they can't all make money! As of today FVC received two million dollars in DIP (Deptor-In-Possession) financing that will enable them to keep the company going until the assets can be sold. It looks like Radvision is the lead horse in the race for these assets.

Two of the many vendors we talked with this month were Adobe and Advanced Reality. Adobe, takes a document-centric approach to collaboration while Advanced Reality takes an application-based approach to collaboration. To read more about both of these interesting collaboration technologies see the Guru's corner article this month. Our Guest Editorial this month is by Roger Greene, the developer and founder of Ipswitch, an e-mail vendor that has recently added additional collaborative functions for SMBs. Roger's article called "Three Reasons Why Less is More for SMB Collaboration" looks at the differences in collaboration"styles" between SMBs and an enterprise.

New Look New Functions

The New-Year brings many new changes, and no where do these changes focus on collaboration than at Collaborative Strategies. Beginning soon, we will introduce a new Blog, called the Collaboration Blog, which is more of a daily/weekly compilation of my thoughts. They are a bit more off-the-cuff, and are more interactive (in a Blog like a threaded discussion you can respond to the posting). This really is the goal of all this technology and content to make you think about collaboration and the best way to do it. To this end we are also doing a monthly survey, around some aspect of collaboration. If you participate in the survey, you can also see the results in real-time. We will leave each survey up for a month, and then do our comments and analysis in next month’s newsletter. 

Look for the "Collaboration Blog" as we update our web site in February. Through RSS you can get more CS information, analysis and opinion more frequently, and it also provides a way for you to express your opinion, and comment on some of the Blog topics. I will be blogging on collaboration a few times a week, and look forward to the online interaction with all of you.

We will constantly be updating our Technologies to Watch list, since we get briefed on 15-20 new collaboration technologies each month. In addition, we are creating a section on "Technologies we use."  This section will not change as much but will list the collaboration technologies we use internally here at CS.  We try to rotate those technologies on a reasonable basis, i.e. we used Groove in 2003 and Intranets in 2004. There will be some other surprises as we give the web site a face lift, and we at CS look forward to interacting with you more through our web site as the new year progresses.

More Improvements

Over the last few months we have expanded our news and announcements section into two sections. The first section " Quick Hits " covers much of what happens in the collaboration market in a very concise format with just the news headline and a URL for more information. News and Announcements on the other hand takes a look at some of the more pivotal announcements that occur each month in more depth and also include the CS analysis of the event.

CS Collaborative Technologies Taxonomy

Collaborative Strategies has revised its functional taxonomy in 2004 as you can see we are seeing some profound changes in the technology landscape.  We see a convergence around the DPM/Virtual Team and Process Tools area (middle box) and we see that more and more some of the functionality of collaboration is being driven into the infrastructure layer. This is not only being done by larger vendors like Microsoft and IBM/Lotus, but also by smaller vendors to help leverage their departmental deployments into enterprise deployments.

If you are a vendor of collaboration technologies and you have not briefed us in the last 6 months please get in touch with us ASAP and bring us up to date on your collaboration tools.

While technology plays a critical role in terms of how organizations collaborate today, technology is, in general, an en abler of the interpersonal interactions that comprise collaboration. Economics, corporate culture (behavior), and internal politics (leadership) also significantly impact the efficacy of such implementations. Most news events in the e-collaboration and KM spaces focus on products and services rather than the more complex human issues associated with these tools. We believe that a true ROI for collaborative technologies requires a holistic or systemic approach and need to examine three areas: people, process and technology.

CS Service Offerings:

CS currently has four types of service offerings for collaboration vendors:

• Strategic Engagement: This is often how we get started working with a collaboration vendor, and is a short-term engagement that focuses on one specific issue or problem.
• Selling Collaboration: This is a longer-term engagement focused on the creation of specific sales process content for a vendor's sales force to be able to use immediately for qualifying prospects, identifying the economic buyer, controlling the sales conversation, establishing credibility and closing the sale.
• Partnering Program: This service is for those organizations that want to leverage CS's knowledge of the collaboration market, technology expertise and relationships. This knowledge and relationships can be used to help create marketing partnerships, develop sales channels, or for M&A. This program is longer term and is based on a small retainer with a performance bonus.
• Demand Generation: The Demand Generation Program is about filling your sales pipeline. As a marketing professional there are a variety of methods, services and campaigns that you use to help with this process. Collaborative Strategies, as an independent third party can help with this process by offering this service to increase credibility, provide additional information, and  create a unique perspective that can help drive bigger audiences for your message. Our Demand Generation Service is composed of several options, taken together, they provide  and integrated approach to educating your prospects and creating new sales opportunities .

CS service offerings for end-user organizations.

• Champion Development: The end user is struggling with collaboration technologies because there is a clear business need for collaboration, but there is no champion to drive adoption through the organization. The CS 5 part solution starts with assessment, identification and mapping of critical business processes, identifying points of collaborative leverage and potential champions, testing and training the champion(s), and providing ongoing support and coaching to the champion for continued success.
• Creating Collaborative Value:  The end user is having problems generating an urgent need for introducing collaborative technology throughout the organization. The CS solution to this problem involves 4 steps starting with assessment and the development for an initial ROI for the end user scenario. This scenario is then refined through mapping of critical business processes, and the selection of 1-2 processes with collaborative leverage to use in a final ROI scenario that is reflective of the end-user organization's use of collaborative technology.
• Overcoming Cultural Resistance : The adoption rate for the end-user organization has dropped and it is not immediately clear what is causing the resistance. It is possible for the end user to have a clear champion, clear business reasons for the technology, a clear ROI, a single focused solution, a clear technical plan, and still run into organizational resistance. The hardest issues to overcome in adopting collaborative technology are the people and organizational resistance because there is usually not a single simple solution that can easily be identified. The CS solution in this case has 5 parts starting with interviews of process stakeholders to determine the causes for resistance. The second step requires mapping of the critical business processes with collaborative leverage and identifying the stakeholders, current status and outcomes. The next step often requires conflict resolution, facilitated work sessions, additional action research to resolve the causes for resistance. The next step requires the development of additional materials to help overcome resistance and increase adoption. The final step provides ongoing support and coaching to the stakeholders or champion for continued success
  

If you have suggestions on services you would like to see from us, or are interested in any of the vendor services listed above, please contact David Coleman. If you are interested in any of the end-user services listed above contact David Coleman at: davidc@collaborate.com or Ann Marcus at annm@collaborate.com.

Technologies To Watch:

CS analysts are always getting briefed on new collaborative products, releases and services. In addition we are working on a directory of collaborative tools/services Which will be published on our web site. Once in a while, we see some new or emerging technology that we think is exceptional, either in concept or implementation. We decided to start a list of these vendors and products, and the May, 2003 issue of Inside Collaboration, lists the charter members for the TTW list. Since then we continue to add one or two vendors each month, that show us technology interesting and unique enough to make the list. If you believe your company or software should be on our TTW list, please contact me directly to set up a briefing with one or more of our analysts at: (davidc@collaborate.com).

•  SherpaProject, we would classify as a virtual team space, but it has a nice mix of functions, a good price and seems pretty easy to use. See:www.sherpaproject.com
• Zon, is a presence-based EIM tool on steroids, with a clean interface that shows presence in all the right places, even in phone calls and meetings. Now owned by SiteScape. www.sitescape.com
• Plumtree Collaboration Server: If you need an enterprise portal that is robust and allows you to connect to lots of content types while supporting embedded collaboration functions this is worth looking at, though expensive. http://www.plumtree.com/products/server/collaboration/
• OpenText TouchPoint is an interesting combination of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration functions that does a good job of team support. http://www.opentext.com/products/livelink/touchpoint/
• Sherpa Project- An inexpensive online project and team service that is a nice mix of asynchronous and synchronous collaboration tools in an easy to use project framework. See: www.sherpaproject.com for more information.
• Web Collaborator - A union of Wiki's and Blogs, set up for easy and free collaboration. worth taking a look at. www.webcollaborator.com
• Active Stream offers a Streaming solution for sales people to being an interaction by embedding a short presentation or demo into an e-mail. (www.actstream.com).
• Linktivity's Web Demo 4.0, offers salespeople full-featured 1-to-1 RTC at $30/month for the ASP version, but there is a Premise-based version available also (www.linktivity.com)
• GroveSite provides and interesting and inexpensive virtual team space (www.grovesite.com) that competes with AdWeb, Internet Office, and Intranets.com.
• Convoq's ASAP service combines IM, Presence and Web Meetings in a very interesting, natural and cost effective manner. This ASP service is worth looking at, see www.convoq.com
• InterWise ECP Connect, unlimited Audio/Video/Data conferencing for the extended enterprise for a fixed cost. See: www.interwise.com

VoiceCon 2005, Feb. 7-10, Disney World, Orlando Fl,

See: www.voicecon.com

DCI's Business Process Management Conference
February 15-17, 2005 Sheraton New Orleans Hotel New Orleans, LA

COLLABORATIVE CONFERENCING SUMMIT 2005, FEBRUARY 21-22, 2005 NYC Waldorf-Astoria

See: www.ccsexpo.com

Braintrust International 2005, Feb. 28- Mar. 2, Crowne Plaza Hotel, San Francisco

See: http://www.iirusa.com/braintrust/

Training 2005 & Online Learning, New Orleans February 28 through March 2

See: http://www.eshow2000.com/trainingconference/conference_schedule.cfm

KM Cluster- San Francisco and Silicon Valley: Enterprise Social Network Analysis , March 3, 2005, with Valdis Krebs.

Spring 2005 VON Conference & Expo will be taking place March 7-10 at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, CA.

See: www.von.com

eLearning 2005, Dallas Tx, April 2-5

See: http://www.itcnetwork.org/eLearning2005.htm

DCI's Portals, Collaboration and Content Management Conference, April 12-14, Phoenix, AZ

The 6th Annual Knowledge Management Conference & Exhibition for Government April 20-22, 2005, Ronald Reagan Building, Washington, DC

See: http://www.e-gov.com/events/2005/km/

The 2005 World Congress ,April 26 - 28, 2005 , in Philadelphia, hosted and co-sponsored by the General Services Administration

See: http://www.futureofworkcongress.net

IEEE International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (CTS05), May 15-19, 2005 in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA.

See: http://www.engr.udayton.edu/faculty/wsmari/cts05

NetWorld + InterOp, May 3-5, Las Vegas, NV

See: http://www.interop.com

The Expanding Presence of Knowledge Management, May 5-6 Adam's Mark Hotel, St. Louis

See: www.apqc.org/kmconf2005

Interwoven GearUp '05 Conference, May 11-13, San Francisco Palace Hotel

See: www.interwoven.com

Enterprise Search Summit and Streaming Media East
May 17-18, 2005 Hilton New York
1335 Avenue of the Americas, 53rd to 54th Streets
New York, NY 10019 . 212/586-7000

See: http://www.streamingmedia.com/east/

TechLearn, May 17-19, 2005, Philadelphia

See: www.techlearn.com

InfoCom, June 8-10, Las Vegas NV

See: www.infocommshow.org

Avistar Revenues Up Quarter Over Quarter

See: www.avistar.com

Polycom announces industry firsts for voice and video over IP with first SIP conference phone and entry video system

See: www.polycom.com

Powwownow Announces European conference calling for as little as six pence per minute

See: www.powwownow.com

MegaMeeting Offers SMBs Flat Fee A/V/D Conferencing

See: http://www.megameeting.com/

Oracle buys out PeopleSoft, posts $4 billion profit

See: www.oracle.com

Polycom Records Record 4th Quarter Revenues

See: www.polycom.com

InstaDial Technologies Announces Subsidiary InstaTelecom Inc .Launches InstaTalk Global VoIP Broadband Phone Service

See: http://www.instadial.com/

SiteScape Announces Partnership with IP Unity for Media Services

See: www.sitescape.com

RADVISION ProLab(TM) Version 3.5 Provides Advanced Product Testing for the Development and QA of Advanced IP-Based Communication Solutions

See: www.radvision.com

WebEx Launches MyWebExPC For Free Remote Access From Anywhere

See: http://mywebexpc.com

IsoSpace Releases Mobile Version of Collaboration Suite

See: www.isospace.com

Polycom Expands VoIP Conferencing Gear to Include SIP Phones

See: www.polycom.com

Marratech and Wired Red Offer Rescue Packages for FVC Bankruptcy Orphans

See: www.marratech.com; www.wiredred.com; www.fvc.com

Interwoven's Q4 results show $0.07 per share profitability and 96 new customers
See: www.interwoven.com

5500 Attendees at 12th Annual LotusSphere Along With IBM Workplace Forum "Sister" event
See: http://www.lotus.com/lotusphere

More Than 100 Life Sciences Companies Now Using Open Text’s Livelink
See: www.opentext.com

Lotus introduced Workplace Collaborative Service

See: www.lotus.com

Artemis 7, Version 6 Adds Performance-based Budgeting Capabilities
See:http://www.aisc.com/Product/1

Lotus Notes/Domino 7.0 Expected to be Released in the Summer of 2005
See: www.lotus.com

TrustyFiles 2.4 Issues P2P File Sharing Challenge
See: http://RazorPop.com

Business Method Patent For its Enterprise Community(R) Model Given to ProjectVillage

See: http://www.projectvillage.com

U.S. ARMY 172nd Stryker Brigade Uses Breeze for Battlefield Collaboration
See: www.macromedia.com

Lotus announced IBM Workplace Designer

See: www.lotus.com

Akonix Systems, Inc. Announces Akonix L7 CM5000 Appliance for IM management, compliance and security

See: www.akonix.com

Userplane announced the deployment of its multi-user Web chat room system

See: www.userplane.com

Good Technology, Inc. Announced GoodAccess, Which Securely Extends Oracle, Siebel, Salesforce.com and Custom Mission-critical Enterprise Applications to Mobile Professionals on a broad range of Palm, and PocketPC Platforms

See; www.good.com

CTI Squared (CTI²), Announced Version 4.5 of their InTouch platform

See: www.cti2.com

Arena Solutions Inc. Offers its Arena PLM Workgroup Edition, An Entry-level Version of its PLM Solution, Free For the First Year. 

See: www.arenasolutions.com

Interwoven Reported Total Revenues of $43.2 Million for the Fourth Quarter of 2004, an Increase of 7 Percent Quarter over Quarter

See: www.interwoven.com

Google May Offer VoIP

See: http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/01/24/HNgooglevoip_1.html?source=NLC-TB2005-01-24

The Siemens Communications Group and Microsoft Corp. announced a new global sales and marketing alliance

See: www.microsoft.com

Microsoft Reveals New Exchange RoadMap

See: www.microsoft.com

Interwoven Offers Web Content Management With Introduction of LiveSite

See: www.interwoven.com

Omnipod Creates New Channel Program

See: www.omnipod.com

Samsung Telecommunications America introduced Speech-to-text dictation on cell phones.

See: www.voicesignal.com

InStat Notes That 55% Growth in IP-enabled PBX solutions in 2004, Year-to-year Growth Decelerates to 14% Growth by 2008.  IP-based PBX Solutions are Expected to Experience Steady 22.3% Average Growth Over the Next Five Years,

See: http://www.instat.com/

SMART Board interactive whiteboards support wireless and mobile devices

See: www.smarttech.com

Niku Announces General Availability of Open Workbench 1.1 Project Scheduling Tool
See: www.niku.com

Quask, a provider of browser-based data collection and analysis software, has announced the launch of the FormFlow workflow application

See: www.quask.com

Macromedia Breeze Live Achieves Full JITC Certification; Rapid Online Training and Communications Available for Use over DoD Networks

See: www.macromedia.com

Trinity Convergence Announces VeriCall Edge 2.0 for Video- and Voice-over-IP Solutions

See: http://www.trinityconvergence.com/

Cisco and Tandberg Team Up For IP Videoconferencing For Education

See:www.cisco.com

Applied Global Technologies Introduces the Ultimate Presentation Platform

See; www.appliedglobal.com

No article this month

XpertUniverse Launches XpertSHARE Portlet for Websphere

XpertUniverse, an Advanced Industry Optimized IBM Business Partner, has announced the launch of the XpertSHARE portlet for WebSphere. This is designed to allow the XpertSHARE expert location, live collaboration, and business intelligence solution to be accessed through WebSphere portal software. XpertSHARE is designed to enable companies to systematically deliver human expertise to employees, customers, and partners across organizational and geographic boundaries. The XpertSHARE portlet is a pluggable user interface component that serves as a presentation layer for the XpertSHARE information network. This feature enables WebSphere customers to integrate the advanced functionality of XpertSHARE into their networks, permitting users on-demand access to industry or issue-specific experts by means of a rich online collaborative environment. Used alone, or in conjunction with other IBM software solutions, XpertSHARE addresses the problem of information sharing that troubles many large, geographically dispersed organizations. XpertSHARE creates value by making the search for and exchange of tacit information fast and precise.

For more information see: http://www.xpertuniverse.com

We have not seen too many expert location tools in the market lately. With the demise of the Lotus Discovery Server, expertise location has been more in the area of social network analysis and tools than specific expertise location. The XpertShare tool uses the WebSphere back end, so your enterprise needs to be an IBM shop to start, but building expert location into a rich collaboration environment is a "no-brainer." Although we have not tested this product or been briefed, we soon will be!

Something strange is happening in the Sims 2 multiverse.

Players of Electronic Arts' enormously popular simulated life game are complaining that their artfully-crafted homes and mansions are beginning to resemble the Twilight Zone, thanks to an artifact of the game's design that causes hacks to spread like viruses from user to unwitting user.

Entire neighborhoods of Sims are being mysteriously graced with eternal youth, while some characters are finding all their needs fulfilled by a single shot of magic espresso. Others no longer need to empty the toilet after potty training their toddler. Some Sims are being abducted by aliens when they glance through their telescope -- every time, instead of just occasionally, which is normal.

All this mayhem is the work of a community of experimenters wielding hex editors, custom programs and reverse-engineering skills who began mastering their own Sims 2 worlds immediately after the game's release last September.
The hackers share their weird science with one another through public websites and forums.

The hacks are easy to install, but they aren't for everybody. Many are cheats that eliminate challenges and obstacles in the game, while others modify fundamental behavior of the virtual people that inhabit the Sims 2 world. The "No Social Worker" hack, for example, allows Sims to neglect their children without the state getting involved. The "No Jealousy" patch lets them keep multiple lovers without getting slapped all the time. Another hack allows teenagers in the Sims 2 to get pregnant. As the game is sold, they can't even have sex.
'Our community continually surprises us by their creativity and dedication to pushing the game's limits further then we ever dreamed possible!'

Electronic Arts

The first sign that some of the hacks were spreading to unwilling users came in October, in the form of a dishwasher that did nothing special, but was inexplicably named Candace on the screen. Candace began replacing the ordinary dishwasher in the houses of users who had never visited a Sims 2 hacking site, or knowingly installed a hack. A torrent of other hacks soon followed, and users who wanted to play the Sims 2 as it was designed found them as unwelcome as the latest Windows worm. By mid-November, players were openly complaining on EA's Sims 2 forum and other sites. "Please help, I'm afraid my game is going to get ruined forever," one player despaired. "This stuff is not funny."

Anti-virus Simware

It was the modders themselves who figured out what was going on. The Sims 2 lets users build their own virtual houses from the ground up, then populate them with carpeting, furniture, wallpaper and appliances picked from the game's built-in catalog. If they build something they're proud of, the user can export a house to a file that can be shared with other players, primarily though EA's own Sims 2 web site.

What nobody had realized was that hacked objects or behaviors would be transferred with the house, and would supersede the game's original functionality for anyone who installed it. So if you download a house with a magic espresso machine in the kitchen, all of your espresso machines in all of your Sims houses and neighborhoods will become magic. If the house came from a game that has the "No Jealousy" patch installed, your game will henceforth be free of the green-eyed monster as well.

If you then export one of your houses and share it, anyone who installs it will also be gifted with special java and open relationships. And so on. As a user downloads and uploads more houses, the hacks accumulate in the game like spyware.

The Petri dish for these unintended Sims 2 viruses is EA's own "Lot Exchange," where over 27,000 user-created properties -- many lavishly detailed and elaborate -- are available for downloading, with more added every day.

At one point as many as three-quarters of the lots on the exchange contained hacks, estimates Suzanne Walshire, a 57-year-old Sims 2 player from Pflugerville, Texas, and an early victim of the phenomenon." It's extremely widespread," Walshire says. "Someone at Electronic Arts was really shortsighted not to have thought of hacked objects spreading this way. If they knew that their own objects would download with a house, they would know that other objects would download with a house also."

But the company says it was indeed surprised. EA declined interview requests for this story, but last month, thirty days after the initial complaints rolled in, the company finally issued a warning about the spreading hacks on its Sims 2 forum. At the same time it announced that it had reprogrammed the exchange to identify any lots containing modified objects or behaviors, and to allow users to see all the elements in a property before installing it.

"Our community continually surprises us by their creativity and dedication to pushing the game's limits further then we ever dreamed possible!," the company wrote, by way of explanation.

"I think the response wasn't exactly timely," says a Sims 2 hacker who asked to be identified by his online moniker, Jfade. By then the community, fearful of being blamed for the issue, had already developed its own solution. Modders took a page from the anti-virus industry and created a central list of identified hacks, their names and checksums, then wrote programs that can scan a user's Sims 2 directory and isolate suspect files.

"It allows them to see more details about the hack ... and then they can either move it out of the downloads directory or delete it," says Jfade, who authored one of the programs, called the Sims 2 Hack Scanner and Lister. "I knew I wouldn't want to have these hacks, and in the process found out that I had quite a few."

It's possible such scanners will someday become as indispensable to networked Simmers as anti-virus software is to Windows users. So far the hacks that are spreading are designed to be harmless, but there's nothing keeping a new and uncommonly twisted breed of malware writer from taking the stage, producing viruses that spread through the exchange to corrupt thousands of tiny simulated worlds.

An empty trailer home could carry an invisible hack that makes the game unplayable.. at least until the user tracks it down and deletes it.

Walshire, still a loyal Sims 2 fan, dreads the day when black hats take on the Sims. "I can't see why someone who was malicious," she says, "couldn't accomplish some really nasty things."

Although this is not that serious an article it does point out several interesting situations. First, the online gaming industry has been way ahead of general business in looking at collaboration and team work. As far back as D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) you had to work as a team, each member with different knowledge, goals, feelings, skills and weapons. As a team you had to overcome obstacles (monsters) to get to the treasure. This is not too different from today's corporate environment (minus the weapons and monsters... come to think of it maybe it really is not different). The second idea is the role of avatars, or digital entities that represent you in a digital world. This is not only true for simulations and role playing games, but will more and more be a way we interact with the digital world of rich media.  The third idea is SPAM. Its all over e-mail, starting on cell phones, worms coming through SMS messages, so it was bound to happen in virtual environments. The upside is that vendors like Electronic Arts, creators of the Sim World will now most likely monitor for such "hacks" and malware.

Interwoven OffSite Extends Unique Collaborative Document Management Capabilities to Business Professionals Working Offline

Interwoven now enables Mobile Business Professionals to Access and Manage Business-Critical Content From Anywhere at Anytime. As a provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions for business, Interwoven announced the introduction of Interwoven OffSite, an offering that provides business professionals with the capability to access and modify their working documents, e-mails, and projects while working offline.

A new module for Interwoven WorkSite 8 software, OffSite enables business professionals to experience the same robust functionality and rich user experience of WorkSite -- when disconnected from the network. With the addition of OffSite, Interwoven WorkSite offers a complete mobile-enabled collaborative document management environment. In today's fast-paced environment, business users need the ability to access information at any time, from any location. This is especially true for lawyers and accounting professionals who spend a substantial amount of time in court, on the road, working at home or at client sites.

Previously, working offline was tedious for collaborative document management users, as they had to download specific files to a laptop for remote use. This approach lacked the necessary organizational structure, context, and core document tracking and search capabilities for efficiently managing information offline. Interwoven OffSite overcomes these limitations and brings unprecedented collaborative document management functionality to mobile business professionals.

OffSite enables users to easily access the virtual equivalent of their briefcase or client file -- including the organizational structure, documents, e-mails, scanned images and other content -- even when disconnected from the network. With OffSite, users can create new documents, modify documents or file e-mail into appropriate folders. On reconnection to the network, this content is automatically synchronized with the entire matter or client file.

"OffSite has the potential of dramatically improving the efficiency of users who need to work with lots of documents while they are out of the office," said Eugene Stein, CIO of White & Case LLP. "Furthermore, OffSite enables users to fully exploit the investment in document management while they work from a client site, while traveling, or from home. Lawyers need solutions and tools that match their working practices in order to maximize the adoption of the tools and realize a true return on investment. Many lawyers spend a considerable amount of time working outside of their offices, and Interwoven's OffSite is the perfect solution to enable them to effectively manage documents and e-mail anywhere at anytime without changing the way they work.

" As a fully-portable version of WorkSite, OffSite uses the same familiar user paradigms and interfaces available in online mode for ready adoption and seamless productivity. Complete collaborative document management functionality provides users with the ability to browse the file hierarchy, view and modify existing documents, create new documents, and search repository content just as if they were connected to the network. "Finally our attorneys can organize their e-mail and documents seamlessly whether they are in the office or on the road," said Stova Wong, Chief Information Officer of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, and a key advisor to Interwoven's product team.

"OffSite replaces the need for Outlook PST files and adds more power for managing your documents while traveling or at a client site." "For highly-mobile business professionals such as lawyers and accountants -- who are constantly at client sites, on the road, or in court -- the need to access matter-related files and document management functionality can be most urgent," said Neil Araujo, vice president of product management at Interwoven. "Interwoven OffSite provides the anytime, anywhere availability that today's mobile, fast-paced business professionals demand -- it's like having a personal WorkSite repository on your laptop wherever you are." Key Features of Interwoven OffSite include:

-- Robust Document Management Capabilities

-- Business professionals can browse the WorkSite file hierarchy; view and modify existing documents; create new documents; and check-in/check-out documents. -- Offline E-mail Management

-- E-mail messages can be dragged from Outlook into WorkSite via OffSite, where they can be searched and viewed along with all other matter or project-related files. Duplicate detection functionality is launched when the user reconnects to the network.

-- Sophisticated Synchronization -- Users can quickly upload offline work or download entire project folders and electronic matter folders from an online repository to their laptops with a single click. OffSite supports both Express Synch and Full Synch to optimize user interaction times.

-- Conflict resolution -- When more than one user modifies or deletes a document, intelligent synchronization capabilities ensure that users are notified and given the best option to resolve content conflicts.

Availability

Interwoven OffSite will be available in Q2 2005 as an add-on module to Interwoven WorkSite 8. For more information see: www.interwoven.com

Its about time! It not like lawyers and accounts and other mobile professionals have not been mobile for many years. When WorkSite was originally conceived and built by iManage about 4 years ago we brought up the issue of the "disconnected user" and urged the inclusion of similar capabilities that OffSite has. It is good to see that Interwoven is listening to their customers and now will support "occasionally connected users."

IBM Workplace's New Look

One of the announcements from IBM's annual LotusSphere conference last week is a new version of IBM Workplace that bundles together multiple collaborative services into a single product .Workplace Collaborative Services 2.5 is built on a service oriented architecture, which allows users to mix and match prebuilt, reusable collaboration services such as IM, email, web conferencing, team collaboration, document management and learning.

"We created a new offering that pulls together all these capabilities into a single, per-CPU-licensed product, which has dramatically improved installation and capacity and [delivered] enhancements to rich client interface for workplace services," says Ken Bisconti, vice president of Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Products at IBM/Lotus.

The new offering is part of Workplace's evolution, and represents a shift of enterprise work modes toward "a roles-based collaboration work environment," Bisconti says .Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5 "delivers functionality that with Microsoft requires four products to deliver," Bisconti adds .According to Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, the new version of Workplace represents a greater integration of the Lotus collaboration pieces.

IBM is "trying to counter what Microsoft is doing by integrating everything into a single framework. Bringing everything together under Web services is a good way to do that," Osterman says.It is critical for IBM to continue this integration and SOA push with collaboration, he adds."More and more of the market is going toward Exchange" as Microsoft tightens the links between Exchange, Live Communication Server, Live Meeting and its other Office products, Osterman says.ther features of Workplace Collaborative Services 2.5 include an Activity Explorer feature, which helps users organize and manage information from multiple activities; and deeper integration with Microsoft Office and Windows.

For more information see: http://www.lotus.com

We were briefed by Lotus prior to LotusSphere about this and also in a separate briefing on WorkPlace its self. We also think WorkPlace is a good idea, and a good mix of features and functions for workgroups and teams. Simplifying the licensing and lowering the cost is also a good way for Lotus to maintain some of its market share as Microsoft keeps nibbling away at Notes users with Exchange. We hope to get a more detailed briefing and a chance to use WorkPlace in the near future and we will be sure to give you our opinion either in this newsletter or in our Collaboration Blog.

Microsoft is sticking to its most recent realtime collaboration road map.

Microsoft plans to launch and ship Live Meeting 2005, Istanbul, the next client, and the connectivity pack for Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005 in the next six months, said Dustin Grosse, general manager of sales and marketing for the realtime collaboration group.

The next Live Meeting iteration of hosted conferencing software will be the first to be completely built on Microsoft technology, Grosse said. Microsoft purchased PlaceWare and its Live Meeting franchise in spring 2003. (The last Live Meeting version added a native Windows client. Live Meeting itself had its roots in Unix and Java infrastructure.)

The current LCS 2005, which targets on-premises use, along with the current client have been criticized by some partners for their inability to host multiparty whiteboarding, screen sharing, video or voice sessions. "You can't host an internal Powerpoint presentation to 20 people on LCS the way you can with [Lotus] Sametime," said one solution provider who specializes in collaboration.

Grosse said Microsoft shops that want such multi-party functions can tap into the NetMeeting capabilities embedded in Windows XP. The new Istanbul client, aka the next Microsoft Instant Messenger, will seamlessly interoperate with NetMeeting or LCS back ends, Grosse said.

As reported, Istanbul will incorporate integrated instant messaging, VoIP, and data conferencing and video support. The upcoming LCS connectivity pack promises to tie Microsoft instant messaging users with LCS back ends into the huge installed base of America Online and Yahoo instant messaging users. There will be an additional charge for the pack, but Microsoft is not disclosing it.

Interestingly, IBM Software's Lotus group, which pioneered easy interoperability between its Sametime instant messaging and AOL Instant Messenger, let that agreement lapse, according to sources at both companies. Microsoft, with its bridge to the public instant messaging networks, may have engineered a coup, observers said.

Grosse reiterated Microsoft's plan to converge the back-end functionality of the hosted Live Meeting and LCS over time. Some of that convergence should show up in the post-LCS 2005 release, code-named Kiev, he confirmed.

Microsoft and IBM/Lotus are in a race to embrace presence awareness within applications. At LotusSphere 2005 last week, IBM showed off a nascent Activity Explorer that melds presence with a user's current applications. It will be part of a soon-to-ship Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5 release (see the article above). Grosse said the current combination of LCS 2005 and Office 2003 already "lights up" desktop applications with presence.

For more information see: www.microsoft.com

Yea we were briefed on Istanbul a while ago, and no Microsoft does not have their act together completely around collaboration,but they are getting there. This kind of reminds me of Excel and Lotus 1-2-3, and lets hope that it does not turn out the same way for Lotus! Lotus has been in the collaboration business for much longer than Microsoft, and we are not always so sure that the mucky mucks at Microsoft understand collaboration in their bones the way the Lotus guys do. Also, what Microsoft did not tell you is the the connection to AOL and Yahoo will be through MSN, and it is one-way not two way. No we don't know what this additional feature will cost, but we think Microsoft will be shooting themselves in the foot if they charge very much for it, especially with a limited connection.

SKYPE for the Enterprise?

Skype is starting to gain a foothold in the business market, and its business-specific product isn't even out yet! The Internet telephony software (VoIP) Skype has found its way into the business world, as corporate road warriors and remote workers use it to reduce long-distance and cell phone costs.

Over the past year and a half, Skype's popularity has exploded. Currently, there are about 23 million users signed up for the service, which allows no-cost phone calls over the Internet, according to the company. By 2008 that number is expected to jump to between 140 million and 245 million, says market research firm Evalueserve.

Most of today's Skype adherents use it for personal calls, but a growing number of them are also using it to make calls for work. As more business customers start using the software, Skype's subscriber numbers could grow even higher.

"I realized while I was traveling overseas how difficult it is for my remote staff and traveling sales people to communicate with each other," said Don LeBeau, CEO of Aruba Wireless Networks, a maker of Wi-Fi networking gear. "Skype has been a great tool for helping us increase communication. Not to mention it saves us money."

In October, LeBeau sent a memo to his top executives at Aruba urging them and the people who report to them to start using Skype. Today, many of Aruba's 170 employees use it to communicate with colleagues on the road or in any of the dozen or so offices in the United States, Europe and Japan. Aruba has even placed a button on its home page to allow prospective customers to contact the company via Skype.

Aruba isn't the only company that has discovered Skype. Employees at Ruhrpumpen, an industrial pump manufacturer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, started using Skype last summer to communicate with co-workers and business partners in Asia, Central America and Europe. The company has even put a directory with Skype contacts on its Intranet site. About 70 people out of the 1,000 that work for the company are registered Skype users.

"One of our business partners introduced it to us," said Tom Wallbank, an IT manager at Ruhrpumpen. "Now, I use it a few times a week to talk to our guys in Mexico and Germany. And I'm not even one of the heavy users."

Skype executives have already recognized there is opportunity in the business market. As a result, they plan to introduce a new set of business offerings later this year. The idea is to create a package similar to the free Skype, but with extra features, such as videoconferencing, user groupings and company directories, that business customers would be willing to pay for.

"The Skype for Business offering will address ways to better serve the business community and targeted toward individuals and workgroups, not CIOs for enterprise wide deployments," said Niklas Zennström, CEO and co-founder of Skype during a keynote address at the Internet Telephony Expo in October 2004.

Skype's newfound business users say they're very interested to see what the company has to offer. But selling a service to these companies for a fee won't be a slam dunk.

"We will definitely check out their new offering when it comes out," Wallbank said. "Of course, we'll have to compare it to what others offer. Nothing really beats free."

I have to confess, we use Skype internally, both for calls with analysts in their home offices and with our clients. We find it pretty useful. It does also support IM and presence detection to a degree, and the VoIP quality most of the time is pretty good. We have one client who has one computer that Skype seems to take up an inordinate amount of processing power,but we believe that it may have something to do with the way his machine is configured, because it has not used up anywhere near the resources on CS systems. One of our analysts has not been able to configure Skype with her headset, but that too should be only a matter of time before those bugs are fixed. Making calls for free is very useful, and the VoIP quality will only get better. This also puts pricing pressure on the regular telephone companies (all of which have investments in VoIP technology companies). CS sees the cost of communications moving towards zero. It is not there yet, still at a few cents a call, but it is free on Skype and other services (see: www.freeconferncecall.com) which is great for collaboration.

New Directions in Context-based Collaboration

By David Coleman

You would not think of a PDF document or an Excel worksheet as collaborative tools. But thanks to Adobe and Advanced Reality, both of these applications are.

In a recent meeting at Adobe (www.adobe.com), we were briefed by Jonathan Knowles, Technology Strategist for the Intelligent Documents Division at Adobe. Intelligent documents is the division that acquired Accelio (formerly Jetform) a few years ago and now have re-written and integrated that workflow technology into the new version of Acrobat 7.0.

Collaboration at Adobe falls into three categories:

• Universal Client
• Intelligent Documents
• Document Services

PDF is really a presentation component and a document container, but Adobe has expanded it's capabilities to now store business logic, forms, calculations, variables, security checks, and XML transport schemas.  As part of the new release of Acrobat, Adobe Form Designer (a drag and drop) forms tool was included, and enables end-user creation of XML forms, for a variety of workflow types.

Adobe claims to have 1/2 billion copies of the Adobe reader in use. They also have expanded PDF to work offline, and to deal with both connected and transactional relationships. This also means that they can work outside the firewall, or even if the computer the PDF document is on is not connected.

Most of collaboration for Adobe is around review, markup and approval, and has a lot to do with workflows for these processes. Adobe has also created a "Policy Server" to organize and control a document through it's whole life cycle, and includes functions around encryption, access, audit,etc. PDF can even include intelligent 2-D barcodes (you mostly see this when you print out your boarding pass for an airplane).

Adobe considers PDF a de-facto standard, but nevertheless they are on ISO committees to create new standards in this area. PDF/E (for exchange) is a standard that is emerging and should be ratified by next year, which looks at document exchange, review, markup, and approval for CAD documents. Since Jonathan came from AutoCAD is was not a surprise to see that Adobe has an interest in the AEC market and is making PDF more able to deal with AEC content types.

What is nice about these PDF documents is that you can make almost any kind of document into a PDF. Adobe showed us a CAD diagram drawn in AutoCAD, where a user that did not have AutoCAD could review and make changes to the document without having the AutoCAD application. The ability of a PDF document to support this has some far reaching implications, besides everyone having to have a version of the application to deal with application content. In addition the PDF container, as an intelligent container allows support for policies, security, page numbering (you can have a variety of different document formats in one PDF document), headers and footers, etc. for that document, no matter what is in it.

Adobe even claims that they can enforce security on a PDF document even when the document is on a computer that is not connected.  This seems a bit magical to me, but I don't believe Adobe would claim this if they could not do it.

Collaborative Documents

Since PDF is an intelligent container that is focused on the display and printing of documents, and Adobe seems to be moving in the direction of collaboration through some of these acquisitions (Accelio, and more recently OKYZ's 3-D collaboration technology), it was not a great leap for us to ask when Adobe was going to have a blogging tool?  The question kind of surprise them, but we could see that it is a logical direction for them to move in, and although we did not get a definitive answer, I believe that Adobe will announce a blogging tool, or PDF blogging functionality sometime in calendar 2005 or early 2006. With that question out of the way, I took things to the next step and asked when they were going to support web conferencing. Which to me is a logical extension of the current way they use PDF to display a document. Why not enable it to display the document at the same time to several people in different locations? Again, a look of surprise, and no real confirmation of that direction, but if I was Adobe, I would seriously be looking in that direction! Our expectation is early to mid 2006 there will be an Adobe product that supports real-time group document editing, annotation, markup, etc. and that it will probably be linked to their current workflow and forms technology.

Application-Based Collaboration

We also were briefed recently by Brian Hoogendam, the CEO at Advanced Reality (www.advancedreality.com) a venture-backed collaboration start-up in Texas.  Advanced Reality is a company we had talked to before, when they had release their Excel product, which allowed people to collaborate through Excel, and if you were working on a budget with someone this was a great solution. Advance Reality also has tools that allow you to share and collaborate through other Microsoft products: Share Point and PowerPoint.

Advanced Reality has come up with another tool to use in collaboration, the Browser. Now this might not seem like much but their JYBE plug-in for IE or even FireFox browsers allows co-browsing,chat, and the ability to do "remote control" (if given permission) on another PC. The beauty of the Advance Reality tools is that there is no training, because you are already using an application you know. Their philosophy is that collaboration should occur in the context of what you are working on and in the applications you work with. We at CS agree with that statement and take it a step further to say that collaboration should occur within the process your working in and should include any applications that you work on within the process.

In any case, with pop-up blockers disabled we were able to install a simple toolbar and I and two other CS analysts were able to use JYBE to view a variety of different web pages, including the (www.collaborate.com) site. Although we often use Glance (www.glance.net) internally to share documents in real-time, JYBE is a bit different from Glance in that Glance is a screen sharing tool, and sometimes it is a bit slow in painting my screen on the other person's PC.  This is not true with JYBE, and everyone's screen was instantly available. Although JYBE is not a web conferencing tool like WebEx (www.webex.com)or Raindance  (www.raindance.com) it can be used for free web conferencing, or as we like to call it an "e-meeting." 

E-Meetings On the Web

An e-meeting as we define it has a small number of people involved (2-6), is secure and highly interactive. JYBE supports all of these e-meeting characteristics. While I would use JYBE for an e-meeting, I probably would not for an e-Presentation (more of a one to many paradigm, with much less interaction and security). JYBE is free and the beta version is available for download at: www.jybe.com. It is available as a service or can be bought by an enterprise, and in this configuration works with LDAP and Active Directory.

In addition JYBE allows more than application viewing (like Glance) but allows application sharing if the applications are web (browser) based. Because it supports a hybrid architecture (both P2P and Client/server) it could be used for live help responses for a help desk, or live blogging, and has the ability to extend presence awareness, so that you can ask someone to join you in an e-meeting or collaboration.

Summary

Both of these vendors are reacting to the need of users to have collaborative tools that support interactions within a specific context or process. Adobe is taking one approach, Advanced Reality another, but both approaches support collaboration through an application, usually eliminating training time, and ensuring a common context for the interaction. We expect to see this type of application-based collaboration from Microsoft also as the move more and more to embed collaboration functionality into their rich "Office" applications. We expect to see this later this year in Office 12. Although it will be implemented somewhat differently from Advanced Reality, it will certainly give them a run for their money.

David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies (CS), and the editor of the “Inside Collaboration” newsletter. He is the author of two books on groupware, and is the editor and writes the “Guru's Corner” column for this newsletter. He can be reached at davidc@collaborate.com or 415-282-9197.

Three reasons why ‘Less is More’ for SMB Collaboration .

By Roger Greene .

Talking with David over sushi at lunch recently, we discussed his definition of collaboration: “E-Collaboration occurs anytime you have two or more people sharing complex information via the computer on an ongoing basis for a specific purpose or goal.”  It’s pretty open-ended definition, but as readers of this newsletter know, collaboration has many faces. [read more]

Collaborative Strategies makes every effort to bring you timely, accurate information on collaboration and knowledge management. However, we are part of a rapidly evolving market ourselves and events occur during the publication of this newsletter every month that we do not become aware of or that happen post-production. If you know of such events, please contact David Coleman at Davidc@collaborate.com so we can note these key events in the next edition of this newsletter.