InformationWeek

May 11, 1998

InformationWeek Labs:
Keep Your Team In Touch

Teamware helps ensure dissemination of information through even the most widely dispersed teams

By Jeff Angus and Sean Gallagher

n last week's InformationWeek Labs section, we introduced the business case for teamware, a category of applications aimed at improving team effectiveness. Because the contemporary business organization is struggling with the quaquaversal--that is, radiating out in every direction from the center--nature of global business (geographic dispersal, mutat ing labor arrangements, imploding distribution models), teamware offers the hope of improving communication in ways traditional applications simply can't.

While quaquaversal motion means that each of the factors by which we measure business complexity is moving farther away from what we've known as the center, it also means each of the factors is moving farther way from its traditional connections to each of the others and the ways the factors work with each other. This forces executives to improvise the ways companies work internally--and forces managers to roll out tools designed to hold this big bang of business behaviors together.

Is teamware the answer? Not by itself. While we think many organizations will benefit significantly from the software, the sociological factors of how companies provide incentives to contributors and treat remote team members outweigh any effect software can have. For more insights on this, see Sean Gallagher's column on page 93.

eRoom 2.0
Instinctive Technology's teamware product is meant to support Web-centered coordination for cross-organizational products. The idea is to create a common, virtual workspace (an "eRoom") in which team members can create and store project materials, discuss ideas, build consensus, and resolve issues. eRoom hits that spot well, and while there's room for evolutionary improvement, this newly released product makes for a strong reason to invest in an intranet. The server runs on Windows NT 4.0 and requires 64 Mbytes of RAM and 200 Mbytes of disk space. Users will need a 32-bit Windows environment and 32 Mbytes of RAM. This client-side requirement will be high for some organizations that haven't chosen to upgrade memory to that level. There's also a rentable version.

The basic organization involves setting up users, groups, passwords, and privileges (or importing authentication data from an NT domain), and inviting users to join. The eRooms themselves are parallel to a Windows space: They are folders that contain nested folders and files, but with the addition of discussion groups.

There are several ways to collaborate using eRoom. There's the shared, structured file system approach of nested files and folders and sticky notes related to specific topics and tasks. You can use links to files instead of files themselves to save space when a file is important to several discussions or tasks. There are also hierarchical discussion groups and polls.

Polls are an interesting feature that probably won't get as much attention in the field as Instinctive paid to them in the interface. You can attach a poll (a question with customized answers) to any page. The idea is that organizations waste a lot of time meeting and getting to consensus on proposals. In principle, the polling feature could help--healthy organizations might find this feature helps a lot.

eRoom has a useful file version tracking feature that stores who made modifications to a file and keeps prior versions of the file for rollb ack purposes. A team can use this to document the evolution of its thinking about issues, and build a historical record of what was decided in what order, and why--as well as by whom.

Not much of eRoom can be customized. You can add your own logo to the eRoom and set up subject hierarchies, but that's about it.

The product has some support for one-to-one communication through E-mail. You can launch E-mail by going to user and group membership rosters to send mail. But there's no real-time chat-room feature--which is surprising, because much of the technology in this product is far more advanced.

There's some significant support for one-to-many communication. The security mechanism lets you set up access control so you can communicate with specific users on specific topics. The system also has an E-mail prompt service--you can configure the system to send a message once a day to everyone interested about new or changed items in the eRoom, with hyperlinks to the changed documents.

The application supports groups with access rights. You can control who has access to specific messages and attachments by choosing from a list of individuals and groups.

Sorting and filtering are good. The intrinsic search capability in this version is effective. The Windows-like work areas have lists you can sort by available criteria (such as document creator or date). The search facility doesn't return results from files you don't have access to.

Getting attachments into eRoom is wonderfully easy, relying on a drag-and-drop model that most Windows users already know.

There's no intrinsic archiving feature, but the optional version control for each document means you can compose a trail for all decisions and products. When you double-click an attachment, depending on your permissions, you either bring it up in its program (behaving like a Windows desktop icon would) or bring it up in read-only mode.

The ability to attach a link to a file, instead of the file itself , encourages team members to reference files wherever needed. It also means that as the files advance through the version-control system, every reference stays up-to-date.

There's only online documentation for eRoom. It's very Web-like, but makes good use of graphics. The topical organization is good, the directions straightforward.

Administration is spread between someone in an administrator role (who sets up the overall environment) and coordinators who manage the eRoom to which they belong. Coordinators should be inter- mediate users, but if you train them about an hour, you can off-load almost all the support effort from IT to the teams themselves.

The security scheme is not as complex as many groupware systems, but it suffices for our test scenario environment, which presumes a decent level of trust. There's one security issue worth noting: If a user doesn't have access to a folder, he or she can still see the folder and its name. This can constitute a potential security risk-- even without access, this may be an invitation to the excluded to try to find out more.

Involv Intranet
Changepoint International's Involv Intranet is the most feature-rich of the products we tested. It's also the most complicated to use and has the greatest administrative overhead. We tested the intranet version of this product; a rentable version is available through Internet service providers, but it has fewer features.

Involv Intranet's interface is much more structured than those of the other products we tested. Originally marketed as a rentable application, Involv Intranet is now marketed for installation on the corporate network--though it can support users fairly well over a modem or Internet connection.

Like Lotus Development Corp.'s Instant TeamRoom, which we reviewed last week, Involv Intranet is based on Lotus Domino. But unlike Lotus' own product, it comes bundled with a collection of applications. This application library lets users create project-managemen t sites or sharable discussion areas structured to a specific project or set of tasks within a project, as well as more general team discussions.

Involv Intranet's interface looks like an opened notebook. The left frame provides a tabbed navigation interface, and the right frame displays the application or document selected. While this makes navigation through Involv's features fairly intuitive, it also makes the client graphics-intensive, which can slow performance.

When users log on to Involv Intranet, they are presented first with the interface's Intranet Home page. This is a customizable HTML page that can be configured to present "message of the day"-like data, including calendar items and messages specifically targeted to users inside or outside the local network. The navigation tab for the Intranet Home page can include links to global intranet applications, such as the corporate calendar and job postings.

Applications created by or shared with each user appear in the user's Personal Workspace tab. The opening right-frame page for the workspace lets users change personal information that appears in their listing in the User directory, including in/out status, and configuration settings for the user's view of the intranet. The user can also place files in this directory listing to be shared with other users.

The user directory tab provides an alphabetized index of all Involv Intranet users. There's also a search engine to find the directory page for a specific user.

The fourth and final notebook tab for the interface is an application library. Users can select applications from the library as templates for applications to be placed in their personal workspace, and designate those with whom they want to share those applications.

One major feature that Involv has and the other products lack is a live chat program. Each shared application has a chat room associated with it, so that team members can type topic-specific real-time messages to each other while they're working on a task. While this isn't a complete substitute for the phone, it can save having to configure conference calls for every team collaboration.

One of the greatest strengths of Involv Intranet is its project-management applications. These include project collaboration, issue management, and change control. The project-collaboration application can even export project schedules as Microsoft Project files.

Involv Intranet's security is the most configurable of the products we tested. It can restrict access to various tabs that are otherwise public to intranet users. And because Involv puts shared applications onto a personal workspace, there's little risk of someone outside of a team even knowing the team's applications are there.

There's good built-in sorting within Involv Intranet's applications, through prebuilt views of the underlying database for each application. Also, since Involv is built on top of the Domino interface, it inherits Domino's expanding and colla psing list method of filtering.

Another advantage of Involv Intranet over the others is its ability to archive applications once their use has ended. The coordinator of an application can close and archive a discussion by clicking a button in the application's properties screen.

One place Involv Intranet falls a little short is version control. Involv has a structured document-management application, but it doesn't automatically store version information or previous document versions. You can attach multiple versions of a document as attachments to a single document-tracking entry, and denote whether the document is checked in or out--but this is more manual than eRoom's approach.

Administration is straightforward. In its locally deployed version, Involv Intranet carries with it the heavy administrative burden of any complex Notes application. But if you're already a Notes/Domino site, it should dovetail into your existing workload.

Go, Team!
Can your organizati on take advantage of teamware? Probably. Every company has nodes of people who are team-oriented. These groups would be a logical first choice to test a teamware concept.

Should you try an ISP-hosted or self-hosted model? It depends. If your projects are volatile and of short duration (two to four months), the ISP hosting off-loads the administrative work from the IT group. Longer projects in which institutional knowledge needs to be captured for reuse, or in which customization is useful, will benefit from an application you own and run internally. Either way, though, the cost of entry is very low.

While Lotus' Instant TeamRoom 1.1 makes sense for many physically remote, multicompany, or multidepartment teams, we wouldn't choose it for our scenario. The search limitations make discovery difficult in a big team with a compound project. The choice of lightness against features is admirable and efficient. The addition of features in an upcoming version 1.5, including E-mail notices, will be va luable, but it falls short of providing an ideal workspace for our specific purpose.

Presuming all your participants use a Windows 95 or NT desktop environment, eRoom is a fine choice for project advancement when the project team spans organizations internal and/or external. The smooth interface and balance of features and complexity make for a productive environment.

Changepoint's Involv Intranet is more of a complete intranet and extranet solution: It is designed for widespread corporate deployment. As such, it may not be as attractive for quick-and-dirty ad hoc projects--but once it's installed, it can help make ad hoc teams part of the corporate culture.