Recently a company sought tools to support their distributed team. The team required a combination of synchronous and asynchronous tools, that supported features like document sharing, conferencing, project management capabilities, Outlook integration, and much more.  Could any one vendor come close to fulfilling all of these objectives? Here's what David Coleman found out after evaluating about 30 different vendors.

A recent client has a management team that is distributed, but all with broadband connections. The team is working to develop an educational application that includes both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration components. The client asked us to evaluate team tools to support their distributed team that will need to work together closely over the next six months and will be working with an outsourced development team to bring this application to market.

The criteria for this team application at first blush seemed to be very reasonable, and there were about 30 vendors that we (CS) could think of off the top of our head that would meet most of these criteria. So what were the team criteria? We broke them into Synchronous and Asynchronous criteria, as we suspected (rightly so) that there was no one vendor that would meet this clients needs.

Asynchronous Collaboration Criteria:

?  Needs to provide a secure team space for the storage of documents and other content for the project. Security needs to be role based and flexible.

?  They also wanted rudimentary document management features such as: check in-check out, version control, WebDAV and document (not folder) level locking.

?  They wanted some rudimentary project management features (more than just task management) so they could tie task progress to specific resources and a personal/group calendar, but nothing as sophisticated as MS project

?  A contact manager that synchronized with Outlook

?  Supports threaded discussions (or Wiki's and Blogs)

Synchronous Collaboration Criteria

?  Support for Audio,Video and Data conferencing: Wanted good video multicasting that supported at least 15 fps in each window.

?  Wanted VoIP and conference calling with integration with PSTN transparently

?  Wanted presence detection and management, and the ability to see if a team member is online even when they are not in the team application (they also wanted presence integration with any of the consumer IM packages)

?  Support IM//Chat (and whisper- chatting with one specific person when in a group meeting)

?  Support for web conferencing for small team meetings (2-6 people) including: application viewing, application sharing, co-browsing, white board (with multiple cursors for group editing)

Common Criteria:   

?  Does not require a large download (none preferred) and is easy to install, use and administer

?  Needs to support cross platform (some of the team are on PC's others on Macs)

?  Wanted to do this on an ASP and did not want to host the HW or SW themselves

?  Wanted it for a reasonable price

?  System was flexible enough so that they could add and subtract team members or experts as needed.

With at least 40 vendors in the asynchronous collaboration space and 80 vendors in the real-time space we (CS) were not able to find one vendor that could meet these needs. So we decided that two or three might do the trick. On the asynchronous side to deal with the:

• Threaded discussions
• Secure, persistent meeting space, supports file storage and individual and group access
• Project/task management
• Group Calendaring/scheduling (linking tasks to calendar)
• Document Management with check-in/check-out and version control
• Document review, with some workflow and process management
• Outlook and mobile synchronization
• Cross platform support

We looked at these asynchronous collaboration programs:

• e-Room (now part of Documentum/EMC) - E-room has been integrated more with Documentum that has its roots in document management. E-room also does presence detection, but only if your in the same room, and it does a reasonable job of project and task management and has excellent security. Eroom.Net, which is browser based would allow both Mac's and PC's to access content securely, but it is expensive, $600/mo. for a 10 person project team (with one community). Eroom is really enterprise oriented (now that they are owned by Documentum/EMC) and really focused on supporting a larger enterprise than a small distributed team.

• Intranets.com - is what we are currently using in house at CS (after using Groove 2.X for a year). Intranets.com did fit a lot of the asynchronous criteria and does provide an easy-to-use, inexpensive on-line team environment. Unfortunately they do folder-level locking, and although Intranets.com resells Netspoke, as its real-time solution, Netspoke is more for web presentations (1 to many) rather than e-Meetings. Intranets.com also has very limited project management features, just task tracking and notification, but no ability to link to a resource or calendar.

• Groove (the Internet version through PopG). The PopG version Groove avoids the dreaded 30 MB Groove download and just requires a recent level browser to use. In addition they have some other tools like Team Directions, which is a project management tool that integrates into PopG (and Groove). Since we looked at Groove they have come out with version 3.0 (virtual office) that has a lot of great new features and the ability to do some workflow through the new forms tool. Groove also has some real-time features built in like presence detection and does task and some project tracking. It also has threaded discussions and is a secure, persistent meeting place for file storage, with a high level of security and granularity. In addition it supports Outlook synchronization and has a feature to support offline work when not connected. The new Version 3 offers an expanded workflow capacity through the new forms tool. PopG is $30/mo./user or $285/mo. for a 10-user team package. Team Directions is $900 for a 10-user license (one time fee).

We looked at these synchronous collaboration programs:

?  Elluminate 6.0 (beta) - only supports one video window

?  WebConference.com - so far the best candidate, but requires a special server to support high bandwidth video conferencing for multiple people (some additional cost here)

?  Ivisit - Only got to evaluate iVisit lite not Pro

?  Qnext - integrated with all the consumer IM clients for presence

?  Marratech - does not support app sharing (currently)

?  ESPRE Solutions (eMeeting product not yet released) - did not support persistent meeting rooms

Although we are still in the process of evaluating the "Full-time" team tools for this client, the current front runner is a combination of: Intranets.com and Webconference.com with potentially a tool like Trillian that allows them to connect to all of the major consumer IM systems, and a simple project oriented tool like eProject.com ($395/user/year) or Sherpa Project ($274/mo for 10 users), iTeamWork (free) or BaseCamp ($19/mo. for up to 10 projects).

The idea here is not all of the team needs a tool like this, and that only 2-3 people on the team need these greater project management functions. Unfortunately, multi-protocol IM systems like Miranda (which are free) are only available on the PC. However, there is also a free multi-protocol IM system for the Mac (OS X) called Fire and supports: AIM?, ICQ?, irc, Jabber, MSN?, Yahoo! Messenger? . However, Pexit, Trillian, BuddySpace (built on top of Jabber) and Giam, all do support multiple IM protocols, work on PC, Mac and Linux and are free (open source programs).

The Bottom Line

Although we have not finished the evaluation and recommendations for our client, we were surprised to find that there really were no collaboration companies out there that could meet all the criteria (features/functions) our client wanted at a reasonable price per user for a small distributed team. In a meeting with ESPRE Solutions and a subsequent demo, it sounds like they are going in the right direction with a product they showed at the Streaming Media West show, but the product is still in development and will not be out until Q1, 2005. The other direction we could look at is to look at a portal front-end which could hook programs with the collaborative functions required by the above criteria. Plumtree is a good candidate in this respect as they have gadgets (scripts) that have allowed a number of companies to link into their portal. Eroom, OpenText and Lotus are all hooked into Plumtree, as collaboration vendors (asynchronous), and some of the synchronous tools could be easily integrated through the Plumtree Developer Kit.

Find out in next month's Guru's Corner, how the evaluation turns out and who gets "voted off the Island."

The handwriting is on the wall: the computer and PC are starting to merge, both on the client side (your desk) and on the server side (the switches or servers). So what will this new technology look like, and how will this convergence affect the evolution of collaborative applications?

In recent briefings with Interwise, Centra and webconferencing.com as well as a number of other vendors we are seeing more evidence of the "convergence" trend, only this time the convergence is not just audio, video and data conferencing, but also the convergence of the two collaboration hardware platforms on your desk; the telephone and computer.

It has been clear for about a decade that the phone and computer were on a collision course. I have a cell phone/PDA, where the two have been integrated into one device. With the popularity of IP infrastructures, and the inroads that IP-PBXs have been making against Class 5 PSTN switches VoIP is moving into the mainstream as an infrastructure. Cisco sold its one millionth IP-Phone this year. A recent report from the Dell’Oro group shows the increased revenues from soft switches and hybrid systems.

Total Worldwide IP Telephony Carrier Equipment Market (Softswitch, Hybrid Media Gateway Softswitch, Media Gateway):

Source: Dell’Oro Group

Slick Trick

Later this month, Interwise ( www.intewise.com ) will be releasing ECP Connect 5.2 that is one of the smoothest blending of the two desktop machines we have seen from an RTC vendor. We have seen a number of hybrid systems (VoIP and PSTN) systems from Raindance (Meeting Edition, www.raindance.com ) Spectel (recently acquired by Avaya, and other RTC vendors, where they participants in an online meeting can be part of a web conference or presentation weather they are on a regular analog telephone (PSTN) or listening/talking through their computer (VoIP). We thought this was pretty neat when Raindance showed us this trick, but Interwise has taken it a step further, and provided a third option we haven’t seen before. They enable you to call into an 800 # for the web conference from you analog phone and have it be a VoIP call. All this is done seamlessly and transparently, eliminating the necessity to buy an expensive IP phone ($300) until there are enough applications to warrant its use in your enterprise. It also eliminates the big "headset switch" which I am constantly doing when switching from my telephone headset to my computer headset or vise versa.

Alcatel and eDial

Some of the switch vendors, seeing a very fragmented and rapidly changing market also see collaboration as a big opportunity. Avaya recently acquired Spectel for the same reason, and not to be outdone, in mid-September Alcatel acquired eDial (www.edial.com), a conferencing and collaboration vendor. Alcatel’s strategy is one focused on "Unified Interaction Management (UIM), and includes four different factors in this comprehensive solution. Alcatel not only offers a soft phone (IP/computer-based phone called "My phone") but also a unifed messaging mailbox "my mailbox" and the ability to do sophisticated call routing and management "my assistant."  The piece they had announced but had not delivered on is "my teamwork" which is where eDial fits in. Alcatel’s strategy over the next year or two is to integrate the eDial technology and expand communications infrastructure and middleware layers to meet the goals of thier UIM strategy.  This means that they will be adding video so that they can support a true rich-media environment, and are also extending the SIP protocol with SDP (session description protocol) extensions for additonal functionality.

Given the recent rash of acquistions of RTC vendors by Telecom-oriented acquirers, it shows that many of these vendors do understand that collaboration is critical to their future and they are trying to get into the game faster through purchasing rather than building a solution. However, this convergence of PCa nd telephone for collaboration will continue to be a hot area for the next year or so, as various infrastructue players jockey for position.

Form Factor and Mobility  

The handwriting is on the wall, and the computer and PC are starting to merge, both on the client side (your desk) and on the server side (the switches or servers). So what will this new technology look like?

Let’s look at another area where this integration is further along… cell phone/PDA. Although I have a PDA with cell phone functions, I believe, as do some of the other analysts at CS that the form factor will be the phone not the PDA. A good piece of evidence in this area is that Samsung has just announced the first mobile phone (SPH-V5400) with a built-in hard drive. This device is sure to shake up the wireless market, and give rise to new levels of data storage on a handset. On the software and operating system side, Microsoft has hedged its bets with its SmartPhone 2003 operating system for phones that are still a phone form factor but include a number of PDA functions such as contact lists, address, ability to browse e-mail or the web, etc.

Now you have to ask yourself, if the phone is the form factor, then how does that effect collaboration? For example, I am on the road and want to be included in a web conference (assuming I am not driving, but just a passenger in a car) I can call into any number of web conferencing systems with my SmartPhone, but with a 2×2 screen what would I be able to see, or for that matter what should the web conferencing vendor be showing me? Maybe they should just show a streaming video of the person presenting along with the audio portion of the call. If I was using a PDA and had a bit more real estate, say 3×4, then they could show me the presence information (i.e. who is in the conference, who is speaking, etc.) as well as either a picture of the speaker, or maybe the data stream and show the PowerPoint slides that are being discussed. I don’t know if you have ever seen Pocket PowerPoint, but you need very good eyes, as everything is very small. Because my PDA has a small virtual hunt and peck keyboard, I could do back channel chat with the presenter or anyone else in the conference, but that conversation mode would be slow and limited. Although we know a variety of cellular providers are upgrading their networks (Verizon puts in $1B to upgrade to 3G network) to 3G or better data carrying capacity, it will probably be 2005 before streaming video to the cell phone is available, and 2006 or 2007 before interactive video is available on SmartPhone, as both the infrastructure and the end points (cell phones) need to support these functions.

Collaboration on the Desktop

The desktop is a different story because there are fewer real estate restrictions. Most PCs already come with an analog phone jack built in. We believe computer manufacturers; especially those that make laptops will start to insert IP telephony equipment as standard. For example, a few years ago only a few phones had cameras in them. Now every phone sold in Japan has a built-in camera. We are already seeing laptop manufacturers build in better speakers (some even offer sound systems from Harmon Kardon) and microphones. Sony’s VAIO line of laptops as well as Toshiba have offered integrated cameras for the last few years in their smaller more portable models like the Sony VAIO TR5 and the VAIO PCG-TR3AP3. Monitor manufacturers are not far behind. Last year CTX launched the M730V 17-Inch LCD Monitor Provides Complete Multimedia Feature Set, Including Surround Sound, CCD camera, 3-Port USB 2.0 Hub, and DVI/Analog Input. On the desktop we see the form factor moving into the PC instead of the phone. PCs already have a numeric keypad, larger screens, and with the right card can support both digital and analog hand or headsets. The PC is also the easier tool for collaboration. As these two form factors combine, I can’t wait until I only have to wear one headset!

For years we at CS have been saying, "that he who has the most connections wins!" This is said somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it has nevertheless proven to be true over and over. In the last 18 -24 months many of the ECM vendors realized this and acquired collaboration companies. But integration of ERP content into critical business applications that require collaboration is one of the big trends we have been tracking in the collaboration space over the last few years. It is the ability of collaborative applications to connect to content that is one of the biggest determinants of value for the collaboration technology (the other is how many people the collaborative application can connect to - the network effect). This article looks at a variety of approaches different vendors are taking to help the enterprise extract this value. The three approaches include: collaborative frameworks, smart content connectors and repository-based solutions. All of these approaches help collaborative tools (and those using them) to connect to content.

Content, Context and Process

You have heard this before from me. These are the three factors we see as critical to get value from any collaborative technology: content, context and process. In addition I see three ways in which collaborative systems achieve value: from the network effect (i.e. how many people they can connect to); from how much (and how many different kinds of) content they can easily (transparently) connect to; and how much a part of a critical business process the technology can become. These also seem to be the three approached many vendors are taking to their products evolution in the collaboration market. For example eRoom (now part of Documentum/EMC) believes that the best way to get into collaboration is through building off of a content repository base. At CS we agree with this, at least more than building off of a messaging-based system (see our whitepaper on the subject). But because there are not many standards in the collaboration space, it is important for an IT organization to look at the options available before deciding on the path they want to follow.

Collaborative Consolidation Trend

A trend we at CS have been following, I call "collaborative consolidation." What I mean by this is the process that occurs in an enterprise when the IT organization gets tired of supporting a dozen different collaborative applications for as many different departments. IT either unilaterally decides to support 1-2 collaborative vendor solutions or spark an initiative in this direction.

Many Paths To Follow

We talked with three different vendors this month that are offering solutions to help consolidate or aggregate collaborative solutions in the enterprise. They each take a different approach: Global Crossing offers a collaborative framework to integrate Exchange and Notes; Groove and their partner Cashal offer Java mapped connectors to ERP and other data types through Groove’s new Forms tool; and vendors like Documentum and Stellent are trying to unify the enterprise through collaboration from a repository. Global crossings solution is portal oriented, Grooves is data connector and Forms oriented and Documentum offers a repository-oriented solution.

The Way of the Portal

Global Crossing with their Compoze portal solution to provide a unified collaborative framework and through APIs, do Java mapping to Microsoft Exchange and IBM/Lotus Domino to allow the integration of mail, calendar, content and tasks. To this they are adding IM and presence and will be able to work across all of the major IM systems (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, etc.). Currently this solution is targeted towards the enterprise with a goal to unify a variety of collaborative islands. It is priced at $15k/CPU, with 4 CPU’s the usual starting level. Each CPU is capable of supporting 500 concurrent users. Generally this portlet solution is sold through their resellers. The focus of the Compoze product is aggregation rather than consolidation. Compoze portlets can be embedded in such systems as Oracle, Sun, BEA, and Vignette. If you want to know more about their solution see: http://www.compoze.com.

Forms and Smart Connectors

Groove and Cashal have taken a somewhat different approach to this same problem. Through a new Forms tool (Version 3) in Groove Cashal (a Groove partner) now provides access to 400 different data sources. Like Global Crossing this tool also allows you to connect to MS SharePoint and Lotus Notes. This solution seems similar to the connectors offered by Stellent, who has a focus of Universal Content Management. Stellent also connects to a number of different portal systems such as: BEA WebLogic, IBM’s WebSphere, Plumtree Portal and Sun’s Java Systems Enterprise Portal. What is interesting about the Cashal implementation is that they abstract the semantics and do application object mapping to support ease-of-use and also connections at a high level. Groove supports a decentralized collaboration environment. It allows a team to retrieve data from a variety of ERP sources, and act on that data as a team to cut cost and cycle times. A good example of this is Siemens Medical Solutions that sells large medical equipment like CAT scanners, MRI machines, etc. These are very expensive and large machines that might take some construction to get them into the building. One of Siemens biggest problems was getting all of the different aspects of the delivery and installation coordinated. This not only involved Siemens people, but contractors and client personnel.

Siemens needs a flexible system as they change their processes monthly to continue to optimize them. In addition Groove can be the front-end to Siebel, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and other ERP systems. Groove is using the CASHAL solution internally for their sales force and Siemens along with eight other companies are currently beta testing this product. According to Matt Pope, the product manager for Groove that we interviewed, the product is supposed to be in production release late this month.

"The Groove connector will give us a fast, low cost, easy way of mapping data directly between Groove forms and our back-end data warehouse systems," said Doug LaVigne, vice president of logistics, Siemens Medical Solutions, which currently uses Groove software for its high-speed logistics process improvement project. "We enhance our applications every quarter to support our changing business needs, so the ability to quickly build and deploy data transports is critical to our success. From my perspective, this is the marriage of an industry leader in data integration with the industry leader in collaboration software that supports today’s mobile, cross-company project teams."

For more information on the Groove/Cashal solution see: www.groove.net

Collaboration Architectures

Collaborative tools fall into two general classes: messaging-based or repository-based. When examining technologies for your enterprise it is important to determine which architecture for collaboration will best fit your current (and future) infrastructure and use.

Messaging-based Collaboration. Microsoft Exchange/SharePoint and Novell GroupWise are examples of messaging-based collaboration tools. The messaging infrastructure is used to send process assignments through the e-mail/messaging system. Unless this is a one-to-one interaction, the pervasiveness of e-mail as a current part of enterprise infrastructure, supports employees in "worst practice" behaviors that can make a critical business process slower, less secure and less repeatable. These systems are limited by the e-mail capabilities and policies:

• Content is sent with e-mail messages as attachments, URL links or is stored in mail server folders
• Attachments sometimes do not arrive or links aren’t accessible, especially when sent to external parties
• Content can’t be viewed by the recipient if they don’t have the application needed to render it
• Attachments exceeding IT policy limits are not forwarded
• There is no way of knowing with attachment is the latest version
• In addition, e-mail attachments can carry viruses and may be a security compromise. The corporate servers can often mistakenly filter out legitimate content. This model is not scalable or appropriate for enterprise or value-network oriented collaboration.

Repository-based Collaboration. Lotus Notes, FileNet, Documentum eRoom and OpenText are examples of repository-based collaboration tools. This collaboration architecture is more efficient given the trend towards rich, complex documents and larger document sizes, and operates as follows:

• Content is stored in a central repository and exposed to a team through a digital workspace where it is placed in context within a project or process so teams with access can interact with it.

• Team members can be notified of changes in the content and are usually given a URL to the content in the team space.

• The team space offers a variety of real-time capabilities such as IM and application sharing and asynchronous tools such as content versioning and project/resource management.

• Access control is implemented at various levels, with the more sophisticated tools implementing group, process and role-based security.

This is a much more flexible and scalable architecture for an enterprise, and does not have many of the same challenges that an e-mail based collaboration environment has. CS believes that the most successful collaboration solutions are those based on repository architecture. End-user organizations tend to dramatically underestimate the level of complexity involved with collaborative solutions. A messaging-based architecture can’t cope with the increased complexity - whereas a repository-based architecture can. Increased complexity in today’s enterprise can come from a variety of sources:

• Increased content (CAD or rich media)
• Increased process (inter-company processes)
• Security and team access rules and increased roles

• Disbursed expertise and colleagues leads to increased complexity in both interactions and relationships

For more information about the Documentum Repository-based collaboration solution see the CS white paper on the topic (www.collaborate.com ) or contact Documentum.

Whichever path you choose, portal, repository, or connector, the trend seems to be for collaboration to be linked to enterprise content. After all, you need to collaborate around something! That thing is usually some sort ofcontent, and these connections are one of themajor ways to increase collaborative value.

The trend towards consolidation of enterprise collaboration vendors both inside and outside the enterprise will act as an additional driver for the types of solutions mentioned above. We at CS expect this area to become a hot spot for collaboration over the next year or two, and expect to see similar solutions from all of the major vendors. For what is at stake here is access to the enterprise.

David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies. This column is his ideas and comments and do not necessarily represent the views of all of the analysts at Collaborative Strategies.

VCs have invested millions in Social Networking companies like Friendster, LinkedIn and ZeroDegrees. Even more recently a new class of company that supports Social Network Analysis (SNA) like Spoke or Visible Path have been the beneficiaries of VC largess. So what is all the hoopla about Social Networks and why should you care? What does Social Networks or SNA have to do with collaboration?

Social Networks, or "trusted networks" are the new hot technology for 2003-2004. VC’s are investing in them, and they are a natural way for a social animal, like humans to do some things. Like refer friends to a movie, a restaurant or each other. It is also a good way to find others with common interests. This can have a business twist to it in the procurement part of supply chain management. In collaboration trust is critical, and who are you going to trust more than your friends, or the friends of your friends, or the friends of your friends’ friends.. you get the idea! Social networks seems like a reasonable outgrowth of collaboration. Lets hope it is not too much of a fad and is taken to far, or that the vendors promise too much.

It’s the Network, Stupid!

What are social networks? Well, chances are if you frequent the Internet you are part of one. Essentially Social Networking is the ability of Internet-based technologies to greatly enhance the efficiency of acquiring knowledge about your friends, colleagues or acquaintances.

Online social networks are webs of relationships that grow from computer-mediated discussions. The webs grow from conversations among people who share a common affinity (e.g., they work for the same company, department, or in the same discipline) and who differ in other ways (e.g., they are in different locations, keep different hours, specialize in different disciplines, work for different companies). When the people are distributed across time and space, then these conversations need to take place online, over an intranet or private internet forum.

For example, with Friendster if you find a friend in the system (which is highly likely because that is usually how you get asked to join one of these networks) you can look at their friends and imply that since you both like your first friend that you might have things in common or like each other. So rather than waiting for a cocktail party where you might get introduced to this person by your friend, you can ask for an online introduction and speed the process along. Friendster happens to be great for people in their 20s and 30s who may not like the bar scene and want some kind of filtering, to hook up.

It is interesting that social scientists that have studied these networks have found that:

• Most people do not know much about their own social network (the average person knows about 500 people)

• That the path chosen to a target (date, mate or job) is not necessarily the most efficient path, and traversing social networks is an en efficient process

• Granovetter, and others have shown that the more degrees of separation there are, the less value the path has for an action to happen.

Stories and Scenarios

Let’s look at a scenario: Person A is a salesman at company XYZ, and he is looking for some help on a difficult technical proposal for a prospect. Being an outgoing guy, he normally would let his fingers start dialing and work through is network to find the expertise he needs to finish his proposal. But using social network technologies he is able to identify through these tools that his colleague B knows colleague C, who knows Expert D. Using the SN tool A persuades B for an introduction to C and C for an introduction to D. So far so good, but A has had to rely on the good graces of B&C and may in fact "owe them one" for this introduction. In addition, in some SN’s there may be a burden placed on the "introducer" and doing an introduction (of any kind) might obligate B or C to some additional action (like getting feedback on the A-D interaction, or to put A’s problem into a context that D would understand). But even without worrying about those issues, once A gets to D and makes his request, D might legitimately ask "what’s in it for me?"

A real life example of this occurred a few months ago through LinkedIn, a business-oriented SN, I am a member of. I got a request from someone I knew that someone I did not know wanted to talk with me. In this case it was a junior member of a venture capital firm. Intrigued, I said OK, and was contacted by e-mail by this person, who quickly turned me over to a more senior person at the VC firm that was considering an investment in a company in an area that CS has expertise in (collaboration). Once the introduction was made, the VC started asking questions about the market, their firm, potential competitors, etc.

Having been introduced by a friend, we tried to answer the VC’s questions, but since our knowledge and experience are what we charge for, we did not want to give too much away, and my colleagues and I agreed to bound the interaction to about an hour’s worth of our time, since the VC was not paying. We thought that this would give the VC a good idea of our expertise and they might want to use us for something later (but we were not holding our breath). The VC followed up with additional e-mails and phone calls, and one of my colleagues and I ended up spending several hours of unpaid time looking at this start-up for the VC and giving them our recommendation. If this request had come by e-mail, or phone (more normal channels) we probably would have talked to them about fees within the first few minutes, bounding the interaction that way. My point here is that there is benefit in the SN for the "requestee", but not always for the "answerer." For SN’s to create value, they have to create value for both sides of the equation.

Social Network Analysis (SNA)

SNA tools by contrast allow you to analyze social networks. They provide "sociaograms" or maps of the interactions of various individuals in a company, community, value network, or other type of organization. Up until a few years ago SNA, was a small, but interesting academic discipline, which has grown 10X because of sudden interest over the last few years. One of the values of this type of analysis is you can see who is talking, interacting, collaborating with who, and sometimes the pattern of interactions is indicative of a problem, lack of information flow (bottleneck), or other situation that needs to be addressed for the health of the organization.

The contention of many of the SNA vendors is that their tools, in analyzing a social network can provide you with information that allows you to take some new action. Since all relationships, interactions or collaborations are based on trust, and trust requires some type of interaction or information in context, then a logical inference would be that SNA tools allow you to identify and improve relationships. This is one way to create value. SNA tools and technologies are a bit more straight forward in that they can provide value to several areas of the business: HR, Sales, Support, etc. Some vendors like Entopia, Visible Path and Spoke, have tied these tools to SFA, CRM, BI/Competitive Intelligence or Help Desk and Support tools to add value. Stanley Wasserman, the chief scientist at Visible Path claims that through an API they are able to plug into salesforce.com and improve close rates by 22%, cut deal cycle times by 27% and increase the size of the deals sales people were working on.

Another way to add value is for consultants, with expertise in SNA to come in, and using a variety of tools (iFlow, Pajek, etc.) analyze various types of organizations and then based on the patterns of interactions, draw some conclusions. Figure 1 shows the interactions within a corporate R&D group.

The Ties That Bind

The interactions between individuals in social networks are often characterized as "ties" and there are: strong ties, weak ties, and bridging ties, to indicate the type of relationship there is between the two individuals in the network. In a famous paper by Mark Granovetter of Stanford University called "The Strength of Weak Ties" he showed that you can reach more people through distant friends and acquaintances than you can with close friends. With close friends you have "strong ties" you interact with each other a lot, may think alike, or have similar attitudes and opinions. Your friends of friends or acquaintances are much weaker ties in your social network, and allow you to come into contact with a greater diversity of people than your strong tie, friends would. In a variety of research studies, it has been shown that it is best to look for a date, mate, or work, through these networks with weak ties.

Ron Burt, another social network analyst, looks at the areas between networks, which he calls "structural Holes." In his classic paper called Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition Burt states that networks with "holes" — that is, unbrokered connections — present the most opportunity. A successful actor is one with ties to many points in the network who can uniquely fill one or more of those holes. To that end, Krebs — who is writing a book on his experiences with social networks and business organizations — plans to mine Amazon, map out the communities of interest relevant to his themes, and tune his presentation to optimally broker among them.

The Small World Problem

Many of you have played the Kevin Bacon game online or seen the play "Six Degrees of Separation." The play title alludes to some pioneering research by Stanley Milgram at Harvard in the 1960’s that determined that there were about 6 people between you and anyone else in the world. Today, Columbia University is continuing this research but looking at how the Internet expedites social networks. You can participate in this research at: www.smallworld.columbia.edu.

Valdis Krebs, a well known social network analyst believes that Metcalfe’s Law (network value is N2, for N users) and Reed’s Law (network value is 2N, for N groups) are great in theory, but of limited practical benefit:

"The six-degrees small world is a fallacy. The small world is two or three steps. I, for example, am supposedly six steps from Madonna. But if I want a backstage pass, it’s not going to happen. On the other hand, if I know you, and you know Madonna’s manager, there’s a chance it will. The practical limit is about three hops. After that, information, for the most part, doesn’t travel. We can form 2 N groups, but I can belong to only so many".

Show Me The Money!

So what is the value of these Social Networks and SNA tools? Why have all of these venture capitalists pumped all this money into these start-up companies? Howard Reingold, a pioneer in the field on online communities (see his latest book called "Smart Mobs" http://www.smartmobs.com/index.html) believes that thoughtfully planned and knowledgeably implemented online social networks can enable an organization to:

1. Create an early warning system.
2. Make sure knowledge gets to people who can act on it in time.
3. Connect people and build relationships across boundaries of geography or discipline.
4. Provide an ongoing context for knowledge exchange that can be far more effective than memoranda.
5. Attune everyone in the organization to each other’s needs – more people will know who knows who knows what, and will know it faster.
6. Multiply intellectual capital by the power of social capital, reducing social friction and encouraging social cohesion.
7. Create an ongoing, shared social space for people who are geographically dispersed.
8. Amplify innovation – when groups get turned on by what they can do online, they go beyond problem-solving and start inventing together.
9. Create a community memory for group deliberation and brainstorming that stimulates the capture of ideas and facilitates finding information when it is needed.
10. Improve the way individuals think collectively – moving from knowledge-sharing to collective knowing.
11. Turn training into a continuous process, not divorced from normal business processes.
12. Attract and retain the best employees by providing access to social capital that is only available within the organization. SNA can provide quantitative support for the kinds of management decisions now made solely on intuitive judgment. Here’s the scenario:

"OK, Jon, you’re working in marketing, and we’ve mapped out your personal network. You’re fine within marketing, but you’re not linked well enough to sales and engineering. We think that’s important. Your professional development goal next year is to forge new connections with engineering and sales."

Conclusions

Social Networks and the tools that analyze them are very interesting. They give us a view of something that was previously unseen, and in many ways give us unique information about both formal and informal networks we participate in. Today, some of the SNA tools can be used to identify HR issue, or look at how well groups in a conglomerate are working together after a number of mergers. And just like collaboration, these tools support the fact that these networks are built on trust, and without that there would be nothing to analyze. Some early vendors in this space are (wisely) trying to apply SNA tools to more traditional networks in sales and support to derive additional value for the enterprise. But value for SN and SNAs is still somewhat murky…it is easy to see the great potential these tools and networks have, but not always easy to monetize them. We at CS will keep a close eye on this technology and developing market and will report to you again in the near future.

SN & SNA Tools, Networks and Resources

• Friendster
• NetFriendships.com
• FriendFinder.com
• LinkedIn
• Ryze Networks
• ZeroDegrees
• Spoke Software
• Visible Path
• Entopia
• iFlow
• Ecademy
• Orkut
• Tribe
• Meetup
• Contact Network Corporation
• Pajek

David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies. This column is his ideas and comments and do not necessarily represent the views of all of the analysts at Collaborative Strategies.

Many managers are concerned that presence is a productivity drain, not a productivity boost. This goes for line-of- business managers as well as IT managers? and it's the line-of-business managers who need to buy in for this to really work. Standardization and cultural changes are needed before presence really takes off. It's just a questions of when this shift will occur.Presence seems to be everywhere these days. Once considered merely an underlying technology to instant messaging (IM), presence?the ability to see, in real time, where someone is, how he or she prefers to be reached, and even what he or she is doing?is becoming its own killer app, one that Nemertes Research predicts will go well beyond instant messaging and deep into the enterprise. IM is just one of many applications that will leverage presence in the future.

Presence, of course, has always been a part of how we work; most of us regularly engage people in real time, whether in person or by telephone. The telephone's "busy signal" is, after all, an unsophisticated presence indicator.

These days, 87 percent of American employees work away from headquarters, whether in remote offices, on the road or from home, according to "Maximizing your WAN: Bandwidth Trends and Benchmarks," a new research report from Nemertes Research LLC. That means that for most of us, the old ways of doing business are no longer relevant: We can't wander down the hall and pop into a co-worker's office for a chat, or congregate around the water cooler for an impromptu meeting. We can't ask the person in the next cubicle where a given colleague is, or quickly update documents with the boss right before a hastily-called review.

Enter presence technology, which mimics what it's like for employees to work in the same place and at the same time. IM is the first application to take advantage of the technology; by allowing people to see when their IM "buddies" are online, presence helps them text message with each other in near-real time. Standard "away messages" such as "on the phone" or "idle" let users know when their buddies are unavailable.

But IM is still a rudimentary user of presence information. More advanced examples are realtime communications portals, the term Nemertes uses to describe PC-based softphone applications that leverage both presence and voice over IP (VOIP) technology to do more than voice communications. They're coming in droves from networking and telephony vendors such as 3Com, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens and Sphere. These products let users see who's available when, and how they prefer to be reached?whether by telephone (and at which number) or by instant message or e-mail.

Meanwhile, software vendors?including Microsoft and dozens of its independent software vendor (ISV) partners, as well as its competitors such as Oracle and IBM Lotus?envision a world in which presence is embedded in every user's applications, including Office (Microsoft's strong suit) and back-end systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain software (where Oracle claims to have the advantage).

Under the software vendors' model, the goal is to embed presence throughout an organization, and within a company's enterprise applications. That way, if an employee is working in, say, SAP, and he needs to ask someone a question, he can see not only who's online but also who else is working in SAP at that moment?letting him ask his question immediately, and in the context of what they're both doing. In another example, an employee reading a white paper written by a coworker could simply right-click on the author's name, see whether he or she is available and how (by phone, email or IM) and instantly get in touch to ask a question or discuss a point.

Still, while many companies are intrigued by the idea of embedding presence in enterprise applications, most are 1-3 years away from actually doing that, as shown in Figure 1. What's more, 43 percent of companies that participated in Nemertes' recent benchmark, "Getting a Grip on Collaboration," said they have no plans for embedding presence throughout the enterprise.

Asked what's keeping them from implementing presence more quickly, most companies said they just can't measure the return on investment (ROI)?and they'll need to do so in order to convince the budget keepers to agree to changing the way the company and its employees work. Standards, privacy and security are also concerns.

Standards And Interoperability

Part of the holdup is the technology. Only recently has Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and its IM counterpart, SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) garnered the support of IBM, Microsoft and the leading telephony vendors. Even with this vote of confidence, many vendors say they need to modify the standards with their own proprietary extensions, especially when it comes to security. That means almost everyone today is really offering a proprietary "flavor" of SIP and SIMPLE.

This puts interoperability and integration on the back burner, and encourages the proponents of the competing IM standard, XMPP, an XMLbased, extensible open-source option that drives the Jabber IM client. While none of the IT executives who participated in our Collaboration benchmark explicitly mentioned SIP or SIMPLE when talking about presence, it should come as no surprise that those who embrace open-source software are passionate about XMPP and Jabber.

"We chose Jabber because XMPP is better," said the IT manager in charge of collaboration at a multi-billion-dollar financial services firm. "Whatever we use needs to fit into the portal. Jabber makes it very easy to do integration, plus it's inexpensive." This executive told us his biggest concern is flexibility. The company works with scores of partners, each using its own IM client, and he doesn't want to support multiple clients on his end in order to communicate with them. Instead, he says, it's easier to use Jabber to hook into the other IM applications as needed. "[Jabber] is the only [IM client] that lets me connect to all the others," he said.

Still, his bosses aren't convinced that opensource is the way to go. "We've run tests to show Jabber integration is possible, and then we shut it down," he said, with annoyance. His experience of resistance from upper management is common? most of the decision-makers we speak to are using products that support SIP and SIMPLE, and they're not inclined to switch.

Although Oracle supports XMPP, Nemertes believes SIP and SIMPLE have enough support from other major vendors and enterprise decision makers to eventually make them the winning standards throughout the IM world. Moreover, we think they will continue to drive development in other areas, including presence within softphones and other IP telephony technology, applicationembedded presence, and the like.

Whichever standards eventually win, the need for open standards is clear. Email vendors and cell phone carriers struggled with this issue, too, but they eventually came around. The question for presence and real-time communications standards is how quickly they can be stabilized and truly standardized. We think that's 3-5 years away, based on our conversations with enterprise customers and vendors.

Even Microsoft, which has bet its own development and the development efforts of its partners and ISVs on SIP and SIMPLE, is cautious. "We are firm believers in interoperability, and we do believe it will happen around SIP and SIMPLE," said Dennis Karlinksy, lead product manager in Microsoft's Real-Time Collaboration business unit. "But they still need work."

It's The Culture, Stupid…

In the meantime, companies that want to make more use of presence need to tackle an even bigger obstacle: cultural resistance. Many IT executives worry that presence, especially when used enterprise-wide, will create more problems than it will solve.

Many of the managers we speak with about presence are concerned that it's a productivity drain, not a productivity boost. This goes for line-of- business managers as well as IT managers? and it's the line-of-business managers who need to buy in for this to really work. Their concerns tend to revolve around IM, because it can be intrusive and at times downright invasive. Although certain professionals clearly benefit from IM?traders who use it to ensure they get the best price, sales people who back-channel during prospect calls? the rest of the knowledge-worker population has a harder time substantiating their benefits.

Still, there's no doubt that instant messaging is here to stay. Nemertes' research shows that 90 percent of companies report some form of IM is used within their organizations, mostly the public services from AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo. But embedded presence is years off?and it comes with even more fundamental changes in the way people work, and therefore, more cultural challenges to overcome.

The idea that drives presence?that all your coworkers, and eventually even partners, suppliers and customers, can see not only where you are but, theoretically, what you're doing?is tough for many Americans to swallow. It's hard enough for most of us to accept that our cell phones should be attached to our hips almost 24/7. (Indeed, people still complain about this phenomenon so often, one could argue we haven't really accepted it at all.) Take that a step further: People can not only reach you whenever they need you, wherever you are, but they can also "see" exactly what you're doing?and people start to get nervous.

And yet, the fact that your manager and coworkers know what you're doing while you're on the job is hardly new. We believe that the biggest resistance to presence and IM is actually the result of another recent change, one also enabled by technology, and one that's also helping drive the need for presence capabilities: The remote and independent worker. As employees have moved away from headquarters, they've often moved away from prying eyes, and many of them like it that way. They may not be so willing to go back to the main office, or to adopt the virtual equivalent.

Finally, there is the issue of controlling who knows what about whom. While it may be perfectly reasonable for a manager to expect to know the whereabouts of his or her direct reports at all times during the official work day (and, in wellrun organizations, for the reverse to be true as well), it isn't necessarily OK for that knowledge to extend to off-duty hours. More troubling to many IT executives and line-of-business managers is the notion that the rank-and-file might know the whereabouts and activities of the CEO.

Still, this isn't really much of a change from the status quo. Presumably, employees who know enough not to bother their CEOs with email, phone calls and personal visits today will realize they shouldn't do so on IM.

In all cases, we believe the answer is education and good management: Education for the end users, who will need to learn not just to accept a new way of doing business (or in some sense, reverting to the old way), but the new rules that surround it. For instance, managing presence? that is, making sure your availability status is accurate and current?is not difficult, but even when all they're using is IM, people seem to have a tough time staying on top of it. And managers need to respect their employees' time and privacy.

Ultimately, however, the change may come down to the generations. As more of today's twenty- somethings enter the workplace and climb to management and corporate ranks, presence will be increasingly accepted. These are the kids who grew up managing multiple chat windows and racking up the minutes on their pagers and cell phones?they're used to knowing where everyone is and what they're doing, all the time.

Presence And IP Telephony

Some of the most avid presence proponents are the VOIP networking vendors, including Avaya, 3Com, Nortel and Siemens. These and other VOIP suppliers have developed applications software to leverage IP networks and offer presence, conferencing and integrated voice and data for total communications convergence.

Oracle, too, is using this model in its Collaboration Suite. Oracle works with Intel and Cisco to integrate audio and voice mail into the Suite, which also includes email, calendaring, Web conferencing and a document management system called Oracle Files.

Typically, these applications are PC-based and designed to work with both IP and analog or digital phones. Picture a window that shows all your corporate contacts, and then indicates whether they're available by phone, IM and even e-mail via an icon that may, say, change from green to red depending on availability. Most offer click-to-talk, so users can make a phone call right from their PC (and have it ring to the PC, a separate IP phone or an analog/digital or cell phone). The applications also provide detailed management to both the enduser and administrator levels.

People can get very specific about who can reach them, as well as how and when. For instance, a user may opt to have the system send his manager directly to his cell phone after hours, but send all other callers to voice mail. Some systems have built-in audio conferencing, multi-party chat and even Web conferencing capabilities.

For example, Siemens' OpenScape product is built on Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 and enhances Microsoft email and Windows Messenger, as well as voice and wireless communications. Nortel's Multimedia Communications Server 5100 delivers collaborative applications? including presence, messaging and video services? on an open platform that lets partners and other vendors hook into the product using industry- standard protocols, including SIP and H.323.

Presence seems more likely to enter the enterprise via these communications-based products, rather than alongside application software, particularly given the growing IP telephony trend. The VOIP vendors are pressing their advantage by providing more robust find me/follow me capabilities, and better voice/data communications integration (so that, for example, a caller who's available by IM might get a text message, rather than a voice mail, from the person he's trying to reach).

Applications-Based Presence

Meanwhile, software vendors are developing and promoting applications-based presence?that is, leveraging presence throughout an enterprise at the application level, so users can see not just who's available and by what mode of communication, but which application(s) they're using.

That's Microsoft's eventual goal for its Live Communications Server. Today LCS allows IT managers to embed rudimentary presence functions in Outlook and most Office applications: Users must right-click on a name within an Office document to see where and how to reach that person, although they can't immediately click to call or determine if other users are working in the same Office applications as they are. To enable the features, companies must have the latest versions of Windows Server, Active Directory, Office and Exchange. In the next release of LCS (codenamed Vienna and due at the end of 2004), Microsoft plans to add Web access, so companies can let employees, partners or customers into their presence-driven systems from outside the firewall, even if they don't have access through a VPN.

We believe Microsoft is well positioned to help drive the applications-presence market. It already has more than 50 ISVs including leading IM integrators Akonix, FaceTime and IM Logic. One partner, Parlano Inc., is merging presence and collaboration into project "channels" that allow participants to chat in discussion threads, share Office documents and work on them in real time, all built on Parlano's own presence server or on LCS. Another partner, Descartes, is working to embed presence in its supply chain applications, so that, for example, a shipping company can see which drivers are available when and plan accordingly.

Conclusion

When it comes to the widespread adoption of enterprise presence, it's not so much a question of "if," but "when." The barriers are partly related to technology: Knowing everyone's whereabouts and availability within your company is valuable; knowing the whereabouts and availability of everyone you do business with, more so. But corporate culture?indeed, the very way American knowledge workers do what they do, day in and day out?will have to change if the full benefits of presence and real-time collaboration are to be realized.

It’s all about pain! There is a cost to transfer content from one collaborative tool to another, and sometimes the cost is so high, and the pain so great, you say, “OK, I guess I will stick with this old collaborative tool, because it is too painful to move!” Back when I worked in product management at Oracle, we knew this about databases. Give it to them for free; once they put some content in it, it is too hard or painful to get it out and into some other database tool. You got them! But how do you drive adoption? Will only the initial group to come in contact with the collaborative technology be the only group to use it? How do you ensure that it will spread throughout the organization?

Here at CS, we are always playing with new collaborative tools and technologies. We are analysts (and mostly geeks) and often get off on these technologies. But sometimes there is just so much pain involved you throw up your hands and decide it is not worth it.

Disappearing TCP/IP

I remember one case where were seeing a demo of some new collaborative software which worked over some sort of VPN. When I downloaded this (beta) real time collaboration tool as part of the vendor demo, it wiped out my TCP/IP protocol stack. I could not see my network, connect to the Internet, nothing. The vendor apologized, and of course the demo never proceeded. After trying to recover the protocol stack for an hour or two, and calling Microsoft Support, I eventually decided to roll back the system. I nice feature in XP Pro, that allows you to create a rollback point (which I do now before installing any new software), where it takes a snapshot of the systems for you, and when you roll back, it goes back to the system settings at the roll back point. All well and good, and I was able to roll back my system (the TCP/IP stack worked fine before installing the new software) and off I went with out losing too much time or work. In this case the collaborative vendor was at a loss, but fortunately, Microsoft had a great feature that allowed me to recover with minimal amounts of pain and loss.

The Pain of Content Migration

I had a recent experience and an ASP vendor of collaborative tools set up a new account for us so we could try their tools and new services first hand. After a few of the analysts here played with the tool, they said it was superior to the tool we were using, and we should move our content over to the new tool. So we divided up the work. One analyst moved the database/contact list and group calendar over. I got to move the documents and files over.

The first day I was assigned this task, I went through the files we had in the old tool, and look at what was current and created a file/folder structure in the new tool documents section that paralleled the structure in the old tool. So far so good! Then I started moving files, which consisted of downloading the file from the old collaborative tool, to my desktop and then uploading the file from my desktop into the new tool. Fortunately, it was drag-and-drop to move the files down to my desktop and up to the new tool (no I could not drag files, folders or documents directly from the old tool to the new one). Ok, so I spent an evening doing this and managed to get about 100 documents into the new tool.

I then talked to some members of the management team of the company with the new tool and they told me about web folders, and the ability to create them. Because this new tool supports WebDAV so well, it did make it a lot easier to move both the files and folders over to this new collaborative environment.

Soon after I talked with these folks, a support person called me and walked me through the creation of the web folders. I first tried dragging files to my desktop and then could drag them over to the appropriate folder. Since this was going so well, I got bold and dragged some folders (filled with files and documents) onto my desktop and then tried dragging the folders into the new tool. This did two things for me: 1, it was much faster, and 2, it preserved the folder hierarchy. That all went well until I started getting error messages saying that not all of the files in the folder had been copied.

OK, so now I was in limbo (a state that requires the most energy to stay in) some documents in the old tool and others in the new tool. I tried going back a step and just dragging and dropping one file from a folder on my desktop into the new tool. Same error message, so now I am really worried. In addition, I also tried to create new folders in the new tool, and drag some files into those. Everything went smoothly except the new folders did not show up when I went back to look at the hierarchy. When I tried to reload the files into those folders, the new tool told me that the files were already there… but I just could not see them. At this point I had exhausted my ingenuity and decided to yell for help!

I made another telephone call to support for the new tool vendor, to see if they had seen this kind of behavior before. However, before we could get a call back we began to see notices that we were out of space. The lesson we are learning from this is that nothing ever goes as smoothly or as easily as the vendor promises (or you expect). What might have been more graceful is that the tool would have let us know when we were within 10% of our storage limit and presented us with some options, rather than having us figure out what was going wrong by ourselves.

Now that we had found out what the (suspected) problem was, I called the marketing VP at the new collaborative tool vendor and got our space increased and I continued to move content over the next week.

Moving content is kind of like spring-cleaning. You look at everything very critically and say, “Do I really need that?” We decided to move whatever we did not need immediately onto our corporate server for storage.

Database Migration

The other analyst that moved the database over only had to exported it as a tab-delimited file and then imported it into the new tool in an existing DB structure for Sales activity tracking that was already available from the new vendor. He was given an interface to map the field names. Out of 850 records he had 10 records with errors. He went back into the original tab-delimited file and fixed e-mail address and other corrections in the records, and then re-imported the file successfully.

Strategies for Success

As the process of moving content wore on, the initial excitement and novelty of the new collaborative tool began to wear off. The other issue was to get everyone to move over to the new tool. One strategy was to make that the only place they could find the content to use. Checking the content on the new site and then deleting it from the old site did this. We hoped this would eventually force everyone on to the new tool if they wanted access to the content.

A second strategy was the “more functionality” appeal. To see if we could get some of the people here interested in using the new tool based on functions the old tool did not have. Like, it has a group calendar, or it will synch up with your PDA, etc.

Critical Factors for Adoption

Whatever the strategy it is unclear what the critical factors for adoption of collaborative technologies are. I believe about 10-20% of it is the technology, but the other 80-90% is people and process. Collaborative Strategies has recently launched into some new research looking at just this issue. Several of our analysts are currently interviewing both collaborative vendors and end-user organizations (both kinds: where the collaborative tool is being used in a group or department but did not spread throughout the organization, and companies where the collaborative tool is used throughout the organization). If you are either a vendor or end user and would like to be part of this study please contact me immediately ( davidc@collaborate.com )! All information will be kept private, and we will derive trends and best practices from the aggregate of interviews we do. Those participating will get an executive summary of the results of the survey.

"Collaboration" is a term that is on everyone’s lips, and there is hardly a software vendor out there that has not included collaborative functionality into their product.  That is the good news.  The bad news is that in doing a number of interviews and case studies over the last few months where we are looking at the "persception of value for collaboration technologies."  What we found is that the adoption and depolyment of these technologies is not occuring in any type of organized manner, and consequently is not at at the level we expected in most organizations.

There is good new and bad news. Although there are more vendors offering collaborative functionality than ever before, the adoption or uptake of these technologies is not as strong or as organized as we were hoping tot see!

"Collaboration" is a term that is on everyone’s lips, and there is hardly a software vendor out there that has not included collaborative functionality into their product.  That is the good news.  The bad news is that in doing a number of interviews and case studies over the last few months where we are looking at the "persception of value for collaboration technologies."  What we found is that the adoption and depolyment of these technologies is not occuring in any type of organized manner, and consequently is not at at the level we expected in most organizations.