July 10, 2000

http://www.informationweek.com/794/collab.htm

Collaboration On The Desktop

Web conferencing and instant messaging bring people together

By Marion Agnew

ou, three of your North American colleagues, and four counterparts from Switzerland are meeting to discuss the strategy for a product rollout. The proposed process needs revision, so everyone works on the white board using different-colored markers until you're in agreement. Then you assign action items, and the meeting's over.

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."

Ditto sees a good, if not completely quantifiable, return on the investment in eRoom, priced at about $10,000 for the server and $200 for each user license. Ditto uses eRoom and its application programming interface daily. "We build new features for administrative and end-user systems," he says, including a function that matches class enrollment with the membership in a particular WebCafe workspace. This feature prevents separate registration and authentication processes, which makes it easy for the students, "which is key to success," Ditto says.

This feature of eRoom--its ability to serve as a platform for custom applications--is also important for the traditional messaging and groupware packages. "As the market continues to fragment," says Collaborative Strategies' Coleman, "the more traditional groupware tools are finding more value as platforms for applications built on top of Exchange or Notes."

According to Coleman's figures, Lotus' groupware and messaging product--the Notes client running on the Domino server--leads the market with more than 50 million installed seats, compared with Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange offering, which has about 30 million installed seats. At about $4,400 for a basic package containing a Domino server with 25 Notes client licenses, that's a significant market and market share.

And a small application, used on the Notes/Domino base, can make a big contribution to collaboration within a company, says Carol Anne Ogdin, founder and president of Deep Woods Technology Inc. Ogdin, who specializes in the cultural issues of business collaboration, contends that not all collaboration in an organization is obvious.

For example, building managers in a large company could use an application running on Domino to track office moves; that application could also update the company's centralized database of contact information--keeping office numbers for the company's personnel up-to-date. "It doesn't sound like an application with a big payoff," Ogdin points out, "but in terms of finding people, it's outstanding."

Joel Manfredo, director of information services for the Rouse Co., a large real-estate development and management company in Columbia, Md., is another Lotus user who has taken advantage of Notes/Domino. Rouse responded to a consolidation in the market by implementing what Manfredo calls a "mission-critical application" built on the Notes/Domino messaging-groupware base.

The company's Leasing Management System, which went live in May 1998, integrates data from 13 or 14 large databases relating to 14,000 leases across the United States. About 900 agents find information--from sales history to physical attributes--about a retail location and then check to see whether other deals are pending in that space and how far along those deals are.

Back in late 1995, Rouse started small. "Phase 1 was how to send E-mail, use the calendar, and use shared folders," Manfredo says. "While people were in class, a team converted their desktop messaging systems to Notes." Now about 97% of their users use the calendar features, a compliance level that has translated to the Leasing Management System. "You can't go outside the system to conduct a transaction," Manfredo says. "It's successful because of that and senior management support." Rouse has more than 60 applications in project management, workflow, and information dissemination, all of which use the Notes/Domino base.

This summer, Lotus is scheduled to release a beefed-up knowledge-management product called Raven. Ogdin says Raven could make it easier for people in a company to connect--users can find experts on a particular topic in an online expert base or search data that records that expertise.

Sometimes archived data or E-mail messages just aren't enough to make collaboration work. Synchronous collaboration tools--such as the instant-messaging function in eRoom--can help. According to Coleman, instant messaging is the fastest-growing collaboration tool, with more than 3 million chats occurring per day.

Companies that want more functionality than instant messaging can take advantage of other synchron-ous technologies, including Web conferencing. With PlaceWare's Conference Center 2000 facility, as many as 1,000 users can conduct or participate in meetings with just a Web browser and a telephone line.

Van Waters & Rogers' move to Web conferencing was driven by two needs: to decrease meeting expenses and to increase communication within the company. As Miazga says, "You can have 13 people in a meeting, and all they have to do is dial up the audio connection, like a traditional conference call, and put the meeting site's URL into their browser." From there, the meeting can include slide shows, participant polls, white boards, or snapshots of a PC screen. Meeting participants can see live software demonstrations without having that software on their PC. According to Miazga, "people melt past the technology" to collaborate quickly.

Van Waters & Rogers uses PlaceWare for strategy sessions, information-sharing meetings, and training. The transition from a face-to-face meeting to a Web conference is easier than the transition for training applications, Miazga says. "For training, people are used to leaving the business site. [With PlaceWare,] since they're sitting at their own desks, they have the added impact of disruptions. People think you're still available since you're still there."

Even for traditional meetings, Miazga says presenters need to change their style. "You have to make the presentations very media intensive," he says. "You should ask a polling question every three to five minutes," to give the participants something to respond to. "You have to change the screen every minute or so to hold their attention," he adds. "It requires different facilitation skills."

Although it's Web-based, Web conferencing isn't free. The phone call costs and the seat charge for PlaceWare is $400 per year for the hosted offering. A 100-seat server is also available for $40,000. Because seats aren't named-user licenses, if you buy 10 seats, any 10 people in the company can be in a PlaceWare meeting at any given time. MyPlaceWare, a scaled-down version for small groups, is offered online for free.

Real-time collaboration is a burgeoning sector of the collaboration-tools market. Collaborative Strategies estimates that PlaceWare and other real-time collaboration tools (audio, video, and data) have penetrated only 5% of the potential market; the market experienced a 111% growth rate in 1999 to an overall market of $6.2 billion, with a 64% annual growth rate predicted through 2002.

Collaboration tools can also differ in how they're delivered to the customer. In the collaboration-tool market, the application service providermodel has caught on very quickly. Some tools, such as Integrated Application Technologies Inc.'s Internet Office distributed project-management software, are available only over the Internet.

Many companies offering tools that users can install (or download from the Web) on their desktops also offer hosting services. For example, eRoom is available through eRoom.net, hosted online, and is priced according to usage. Wharton's Ditto says that upgrading to eRoom 4.0, which lets students access rooms with only a browser, from 3.0, which required downloading Windows-based software onto a client, increased student adoption of the technology. "Lowering the barriers to using a product is critical," he says.

In spite of the success of Web conferencing and other Web-based collaboration tools, not everyone is enamored of the technology. "The latency in the Internet"--the time it can take for the browser to refresh, even in so-called real time--"gets in the way of my being engaged in the process," Ogdin says. Real-time tools don't capture the natural rhythms of a spoken dialog.

Van Waters & Rogers' Miazga is realistic about the limitations of his technologies. Although PlaceWare has helped him reduce travel costs while increasing communication, Miazga says that Web conferencing and videoconferencing won't supplant all face-to-face meetings and training. "The online synchronous connection is simply another tool to be used appropriately," he says. "It's not a wholesale replacement" for human contact.

In Coleman's view, the proliferation of collaboration tools during the past two years is just the beginning. "In the first 10 years of the 2000s, we'll see the same kind of explosion in interpersonal productivity tools," he says, citing personal-productivity tools such as Microsoft Office as a market that experienced similar growth during the 1990s.

Consider these figures: Some 3,500 students have already worked on group projects in Wharton's WebCafe implementation of eRoom. When these students enter the workplace, they'll be bringing their experience--and their expectations--with them, perhaps inspiring the rest of us.

Illustration by Brad Yeo
Photo of Miazga by Ellen Banner
Photo of Ditto by Bill Cramer
Photo of Manfredo by Scott Robinson

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