InformationWeek

October 2, 2000

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Antidote For Information Overload

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More on knowledge collaboration:

sidebar: Vendors Upgrade Groupware For The Web

Keep Your Knowledge In-House (9/4/00)

EETimes: Need: Net-speed knowledge tools (9/4/00)

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Metayer uses Clickbar from Webforia. Clickbar is client software that runs within a Microsoft Explorer browser. It lets Metayer highlight any part of a Web page, add notes, and either store the information or send it to others via E-mail. Recipients also need the Clickbar client to read the documents, but colleagues can install the application in minutes via a link in each E-mail from a Clickbar user.

For people struggling to share Web information, Metayer says, Clickbar is "a beautiful way to do it."

Some knowledge-collaboration products focus more broadly on general day-to-day communications, while others specifically address document management. For example, HotOffice provides a type of Microsoft Office online, with group calendaring, bulletin boards, E-mail, and online conferencing capabilities, in addition to document-sharing functions.

Greg Sekowski, a senior director of Halverson Consulting, a management-consulting firm in Chicago that specializes in human-resources issues, says his three-person organization uses HotOffice as a "pseudo" intranet to share documents among remote employees and customers. He looked into an intranet, but that option was too expensive for his small business.

Before using HotOffice, Halverson Consulting used Outlook, but that proved to be difficult, because some documents were too large to transfer via E-mail and collaborators had a tough time keeping track of attachment versions.

HotOffice solves this E-mail quandary by offering a password-protected central repository for company information, meeting notes, schedules, and project-related documents--a centralized hard drive of sorts, with groupware. "It's pretty much a night-and-day shift in sharing information," Sekowski says.

One way HotOffice circumvents attachment headaches is by letting users view documents online without having to download and translate them.

Al Pino Photo by Andre Ramjoue First Security Corp. in Salt Lake City also has attachment problems. Employees use GroupWise for E-mail. But Al Pino, president of the $23 billion bank's IT subsidiary, First Security Information Technology, says GroupWise doesn't allow for detailed routing, tracking, and collaborative control of attachments.

To address this shortfall, Pino's group has been using the collaborative document-management services of NetDocuments from NetVoyage. The hosted Web service provides an online repository to "service the life span of documents," says Leonard Johnson, VP of marketing for NetDocuments. Pino uses the service to help his IT group develop plans for computing implementations in banking operations.

Business executives in the bank have to share their needs for applications with the IT department. In turn the IT department provides technical input on the best computing options. The whole process eventually reaches a formal agreement that requires the sign-off of various administrators.

Web access is also required for collaboration among group members in Idaho and New Mexico, as well as Utah.

Pino says NetDocuments trumps GroupWise for collaboration by maintaining one version of a document while tracking all access and changes to that file in a simple-to-use interface. Pino says NetDocuments automates all the tracking and versioning headaches typically associated with shipping a document around an organization via E-mail. He says GroupWise and most E-mail systems don't offer much control over attachments, such as tracking changes to the document by various collaborators.