InformationWeek

Asset Management: It's About Time

Group scheduling adds a vital dimension to workgroup and enterprise collaboration

By Tom Dellecave Jr.
Issue date: May 1, 1995

If an application's importance to an organization is measured by user acceptance, then group scheduling is becoming vital. Employees at the Iowa Department of Economic Development in Des Moines recently proved the point by discarding their paper calendars in favor of a LAN-based group scheduling application that lets everyone in the organization collaborate.

T he adoption was a grassroots movement: A year ago, 25 high-level managers began using CE Software's Time Vision Network Scheduler. Shortly thereafter, the department made the application available to anyone who wanted it. Nearly all of the department's 189 employees now use Network Scheduler. "We're an information business," says Tim Wood, information systems manager at the Iowa department.

Communications is vital to running the department, and group scheduling software helps the department's workers with many routine types of communication that previously entailed telephone tag or paper schedules. The benefits of group scheduling are immediate and dramatic. "When the governor calls, people can be quickly located by punching up their calendars," Wood says.

Organizations like the Iowa Department of Economic Development are looking to group scheduling to provide another dimension to workgroup collaboration and productivity. Picking up where E-mail leaves off, group scheduling lets users share calendars, d evelop schedules for any kind of business activity, and monitor assets, all of which helps business processes flow more smoothly.

The Iowa department treats group scheduling as a form of asset management. Employees use it not only to schedule meetings, but also to track cellular phones, departmental vehicles, conference rooms, and anything else they need to monitor. "Any staffer in the building can find a conference room without walking around the building looking for it," Wood says.

As is the case with client-server applications, many types of group schedulers are available. Some, such as Campbell Services' OnTime, are packaged as standalone applications. Others are a part of larger groupware products such as Novell's GroupWise. Still others come bundled into desktop software suites from companies such as Microsoft and Lotus.

Group schedulers most closely resemble personal information managers (PIMs). They take schedule information traditionally found in a PIM and make it available to users across a workgroup or enterprise. Schedulers can function as real-time utilities on a LAN or operate as E-mail add-ons that work in a store-and-forward mode. Key features include automatic messaging to confirm a meeting, the ability to overlay a number of calendars to determine free time, and even support across different time zones.

The products vary widely in their ease-of-use and the amount of support IS staffers must devote to training. This can dramatically increase the cost of ownership. A company that spends $100 per user on a program such as Lotus Organizer 2.0 can expect to spend an additional $400 on training and implementation, says Bob Flanagan, director of workgroup strategies at the Yankee Group Inc., a consulting firm in Boston.

Costly Learning Curve
"The majority of that cost is making people familiar with the product," says Flanagan. "If companies choose a product that's already familiar, such as an integrated suite, the learning curve is significantly reduced." Moreover, h e adds, confusing interfaces may lead to skyrocketing implementation costs.

Other key distinguishing features include scalability, cross-platform support, and compatibility with other desktop and workgroup applications. E-mail-based schedulers allow users to store and forward meeting requests, room reservations, and other scheduling information, using the mail system's directory and transport mechanism.

More Options
In the future, these systems also will add workflow and agent search-and-filter technology. A user's desktop agent might be charged with checking other users' schedules to see if they can attend a meeting.

Schedule changes may be routed to multiple users planning an event using workflow automation, letting each user make required changes and additions to the schedule as it is circulated throughout a workgroup. Analysts predict that the ability to exchange information between applications will become increasingly important to users, driving customer upgrades and defec tions to other products as well as widespread adoption of group scheduling, says Darby Johnson, an analyst at International Data Corp., a consulting firm in Framingham, Mass.

IDC predicts that the number of group-scheduling users will double in just one year to more than 14 million by the end of 1995. By 1998, Johnson predicts, that number will nearly quadruple to more than 55 million users.

More Choices
With these projections, big-name software vendors are trying to muscle their way into the scheduling arena, giving users more choices than ever. In 1993, a small cadre of group-scheduling vendors, including Campbell Services, On Technology, and Russell Information Sciences, was joined by software heavyweights Microsoft and Lotus, which announced their own group-scheduling products and quickly won market share. Users were attracted to the integration these vendors offered, tying group scheduling into popular desktop and groupware application suites.

The next release of Microsoft Schedule+ will be available as part of Microsoft Office for Windows 95 within 30 days of the general release of the new PC operating system. Lotus Organizer 2.0, which incorporates a number of PIM functions with group scheduling, is included in the company's SmartSuite 3.1, which is now shipping. Other large software vendors including Novell, Oracle, and IBM, recently added group scheduling to their integrated groupware products.

Novell GroupWise 4.1 incorporates scheduling and calendar viewing into its messaging infrastructure. Oracle's Office 2.1 and IBM's WorkGroup integrate scheduling with messaging and workflow functions.

The presence of larger software manufacturers provides a kind of double-edged sword. It lends credibility to the group scheduling arena, drives down pricing, and increases the product options available to users. But it also means added work for IS managers charged with assessing the many products on the market.

The big pl ayers also have vast marketing and distribution resources that could ultimately drive the small players out of the market.

Saving Money, Too
Users may be swayed to purchase an integrated suite because of the attractive prices the big vendors can offer--even if it means sacrificing some of the features and performance of smaller vendors' products. Once a company purchases an applications suite that includes a scheduler, there's little incentive to invest in a standalone product, says the Yankee Group's Flanagan. If an in-suite scheduler provides basic functionality, he adds, why go out and spend more money on something with only a little more functionality?

Naturally, Chris Risley, CEO of On Technology in Cambridge, Mass., argues that products like Microsoft's Schedule+ don't satisfy users' needs the way the smaller vendors' products can. Suite-based schedulers "educate people about the need, but still leave them hungry," Risley claims.

Smaller vendors that specialize in group sch eduling are better able to bring out the many scheduling features users demand, Risley says. One such advantage is in multiplatform support. On Technology's Meeting Maker XP, for instance, runs on Windows, DOS, and Macintosh clients, and on Windows, Macintosh, and NetWare servers. Microsoft's Schedule+ runs only on Windows.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., was willing to forego multiplatform support while looking for a group scheduler. The flight center instead preferred to do business with a big-name player like Microsoft. Three years ago, the center purchased Microsoft's Schedule+ 1.0 for more than 360 managers, researchers, and engineers. The organization wanted a scheduler that was integrated with its Microsoft Mail to provide users a common interface.

The flight center uses Macintosh, Unix, and Windows clients. It found that Macintosh and Unix workstation users need to maintain Windows PCs just to check mail and scheduling, says J. Briscoe Stephens, advanced sciences IS coor dinator at the center. "That's not good economy," he says.

On The Horizon
But help is on the way. The flight center is testing Schedule+ for Windows 95, which includes support for Macintosh clients. Unix support is expected later in the year.

Despite the lack of cross-platform support, Schedule+ users such as Stephens like the package's ease-of-use. "There's virtually no learning curve," Stephens says. "I won't say there isn't a product as good as Schedule+ out there, but there's no program as neatly integrated for us into our office environment."

Some users will no doubt become interested in more than ease-of-use and cross-platform functionality. In some cases, businesses will seek interoperability with other vendors' scheduling and groupware applications. The advantages enjoyed by users of desktop suites may wane as other features become more important. Microsoft, for instance, tends to provide basic interoperability within its own product family but lags behind other vendors when it comes to fostering interoperability with other manufacturers' applications. (For related story on group scheduling and interoperability click here)

Case In Point
The Iowa Department of Economic Development is a case in point. It chose CE Software's Network Scheduler not only for its ease-of-use, but also because the package is compatible with multiple networks and E-mail systems. Whereas Microsoft's Schedule+ only supports MS Mail, CE's Network Scheduler runs with Novell's global Message Handling System and DaVinci Mail, also based on MHS. The Iowa department runs 486 clients and maintains its scheduling and calendaring on a single server. Because the department chose CE Software, compatibility was not an issue.

Network Scheduler can make use of both types of E-mail directories and transport systems. It works over any Novell NetWare, Banyan Vines, IBM LAN Server, Microsoft LAN Manager, or TCP/IP network, and supports Windows and DOS c lients. Such interoperability makes the scheduler more flexible and available to meet users varying needs. It also eases the support burdens on IS staffers, notes IS manager Wood.

Adds Jerry Zeephat, product marketing manager for CE Software, "Every network administrator will tell you they're overworked. They don't want to implement a product that's going to require a further tax on their time." Don Campbell, CEO of Campbell Services in Southfield, Mich., says ease of use is the most important factor in user acceptance of group scheduling.

Many IS managers don't want to force users to learn a new set of commands with a new interface. Only 10% to 20% of the cost of implementation is the cost of software, says Campbell. "What looks like the cheapest software often ends up being the most expensive solution," he adds. While Campbell's OnTime scheduler isn't an add-on application to E-mail like Schedule+, Campbell says it was designed with the end user in mind. Standalone applications like OnTime hold one st rong advantage over E-mail-based systems. Whereas most E-mail systems handle scheduling by storing and forwarding requests and thus have a built-in time delay, standalone applications allow for real-time searches. Because there is no time lag while the message is being sent, real-time searches provide the most accurate information, Campbell says.

A familiar interface eases the user learning curve and cuts training costs, adds the Yankee Group's Flanagan. That's why many companies stick with their current schedulers or adopt one as part of a desktop suite.

When the Fossil Energy Division of the Department of Energy in Washington began looking into group scheduling, those targeted to receive it demanded an easy-to- use application that didn't bog down the division's E-mail system.

They chose Campbell's OnTime. "Users dictated that we get it," says LAN administrator Herman Tessman. "This wasn't an IS decision."

The rollout of OnTime to the department's nearly 260 use rs began the first week of April. OnTime doesn't rely on an underlying E-mail system, so scheduling changes occur in real time, says Tessman. That also eases the demands placed on the E-mail system.

The Fossil Energy group uses OnTime primarily to schedule meetings. And since nine of 10 meetings are within the division, officials wanted to choose their own scheduler, rather than adopt a package that would be used by the entire organization. "There's been a lot of motivation to use group scheduling," Tessman says. "We've seen very little resistance to it."

Higher Level
Yet officials at Compaq believe that group scheduling can be effective on the enterprise level. Compaq's more than 5,000 users run OnTime on more than 80 Banyan Vines servers and Windows clients. Its users are based in Singapore, Germany, and Switzerland as well as at Compaq headquarters in Houston. "We needed to provide a corporate-wide calendaring solution that used Banyan," says senior network administrator David Be nita.

Compaq didn't face compatibility issues between clients, servers, and networks since it had standardized on Vines and Windows. But the PC and server manufacturer did face network management issues resulting from such a large number of users.

According to Benita, selecting a scheduler that didn't require a lot of training has made the management of the system more bearable. "We didn't have to spend a lot of time training," he says. "Users picked it up on their own. Now I don't think I could pull people away from it."

Such excitement points toward the time-saving benefits of group scheduling. It's apparent that over time, the technology will become an integral part of the corporate computing infrastructure. Indeed, scheduling may become part of every desktop operating environment and enterprise system.

As scheduling applications become better integrated with agent technology, workflow, and messaging, businesses may well be able to automate more and more routine business processes, workgroup i nteractions, and even computer tasks. It's one piece of technology that's arriving just in the nick of time.

Photo Collage: Kathleen McCutcheon; Images: FPG and the Stock Market

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