InformationWeek

Sounds like an ordinary meeting, right? Only you're still sitting at your desk. None of the participants was in the same place. Instead, you all met in a private online room using a Web-based conferencing tool. In the process, your company saved $5,000 to $10,000--the cost of four U.S.-to-Switzerland plane tickets, hotel expenses, and time out of the office--all for a few hundred dollars in software licenses.

Chemical distributor Van Waters & Rogers Inc. in Kirkland, Wash., uses PlaceWare Inc.'s Conference Center 2000 meeting facility for situations such as this one. As Ron Miazga, the company's human-resources training director, says, "Sometimes we need to get 16 people from across the United States together for a week in a room, and sometimes we just don't."

Web conferencing is just one type of collaboration tool in a rapidly growing market that includes more conventional offerings such as project-management tools. Graduate and undergraduate students at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania routinely complete class projects using Wharton's WebCafe, a virtual collaboration space based on the eRoom tool from eRoom Technology Inc., formerly Instinctive Technology.

Even if your experience with collaboration software is limited to E-mail and sharing calendars online, you're ahead. David Coleman, founder and managing director of Collaborative Strategies Inc., a consulting company specializing in the collaboration-tools market, estimates that fewer than a third of people with software such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook on their desktops use the calendar or scheduling functions collaboratively. "More people use their personal information managers," he says, and many use calendars on paper.

Recently, options for collaboration software beyond E-mail have grown exponentially. "There's been an explosion of offerings in the past two years," Coleman says. He estimates that more than 1,000 software packages offer collaboration functions. Although the collaboration-software market can be divided in several different ways, one primary differentiator is whether a tool provides functions primarily for asynchronous collaboration, such as discussion databases or bulletin boards, or synchronous (real-time) collaboration, such as Web conferencing tools.

At first glance, software in the asynchronous space is familiar; it includes messaging and groupware tools and project-management software. But new features in both markets are blurring the line between these traditional applications. Messaging and groupware tools offer bulletin boards and shared databases as well as E-mail and calendars; project-management packages add messaging capabilities to their shared databases and documents.

Wharton's WebCafe implementation of eRoom falls into the distributed project-management market. Collaborative Strategies predicts that revenue from this market, which includes teamware products such as Microsoft Project, is expected to grow more than 36% during the next year. During the next three years, this growth will continue, with revenue jumping from $700 million in 2000 to nearly $1.5 billion by 2003.

More than 90 classes at Wharton, including the required Management 100, have used WebCafe. Besides giving faculty a place to post course content online, WebCafe lets students collaborate more easily. "Courses at Wharton are becoming group-project intensive; it's seen as good practice for the business world," says Rob Ditto, senior project leader in Wharton's Computing and Information Technology group.

Students employ WebCafe project workspaces, which use a browser interface, to revise documents and track messages relating to a group project. "With WebCafe, students have a place to keep 'our stuff' about a project--our comments, our working tools," Ditto says. "It lets them get their revisions off paper and out of E-mail into another area." Threaded discussions about class content are archived so teachers and teaching assistants can answer complex questions online only once; students can search the archives for answers. The Intercom feature also provides for real-time instant messaging sessions that Ditto says are particularly useful for specific needs, such as tutoring sessions before exams.

Faculty members have also embraced WebCafe. "It goes along with their message to students about the burgeoning importance of technology in the business world," Ditto says. Faculty members who had established a Web presence before Wharton implemented eRoom in August 1998 aren't required to use WebCafe. Citing the other extreme--teachers "devoted to chalkboards and overhead projectors"--Ditto says that "using eRoom has leveled the playing field among the faculty who do stuff online. We can reach a wide variety of faculty with different levels of technical expertise."

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