I’ve written before about first-, second- and third-order effects of the Internet. The first-order effect was to take things that were on paper and put them online. Next people realized that the Internet was an interactive, rather than just a publishing, medium. This was a second-order effect.

Over the last few years social networks and online communities have popped up all over the place to let people connect to each other. Probably the best known social network site is MySpace. But most online social networks are focused on a specific population or content type. For finding work  you might use LinkedIn.  There are sites for sharing different types of content (Flickr for photos, YouTube for video, and Last.fm and MOG for music).  Some social networks are based on age (Friendsover50.com), others on race (MiGente.com, BlackPlanet.com), and yet others on geographic location (Grono.net, LunarStorm).

So what’s the difference between "network" and "community"? 

Wikipedia defines online social networks as “…a category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools. These applications, known as ‘online social networks’ are becoming increasingly popular.” 

Often the terms "network" and "community" are used interchangably, but they are not the same. The best definition that differentiates the two comes from Amy Jo Kim  (author of Community Building on the Web):

A network is composed of loose ties, often the focus is on a topic or particular type of content or behavior. A community may have the same focus but the ties are stronger. No one misses you in a network; they might if you’re a popular and vocal member of a community.

Thus a community is based on fairly intense interactions between its members, while a network is not. According to Ross Mayfield, the founder and CEO of Socialtext, communities are:

• Top-down
• Place-centric
• Moderator controlled
• Topic driven
• Centralized
• Architected

While Networks are:

• Bottom-up
• People-centric
• User controlled
• Decentralized
• Context driven
• Self-organizing

Unfortunatley, like everything on the Internet, it is not that black and white. There are lots of examples that don’t fit the criteria for either definition. The UseNet (the pre-cursor to the Internet) had thousands of interest groups which were top-down, place-centric, moderator controlled, topic driven and centeralized (charcteristics from both networks and communities).

Building communities is hard, slogging work. I believe that communities are like sharks: if they stop moving forward, they die. This is where many of today’s social networks like Friendster went wrong. It is not always enough to see who the friends of your friends are. You need to be able to do something of value with them.

A few years ago, I gave the keynote talk at the Online Communities Conference. For that talk I created 10 rules for establishing online communities, and believe they are still useful today:

1. Identify community founders/initiators, and explain the reason for starting the community, ongoing roles, and participation.

2. Provide a good reason for people to be in the community.  What are the benefits?

3. Provide a community member directory (with profiles) and an easy way for members to contact each other and learn about each other.  The goal is to develop trust among members.

4. Establish a way to handle conflict at the initiation of the community.  Present these rules clearly.  Conflicts must be handled quickly and fairly or they will tear the community apart.

5. Provide a hosted or focused chat.  Appoint a facilitator with editorial capabilities (with editorial policies stated), and appoint discussion owners to drive the discussion to a decision, conclusion or action.

6. Create informal spaces for people to socialize and interact. This also helps to build trust.

7. Create a critical reason for members to be active in the community.

   a. It should be the only place they can get critical information;
 
   b. People should receive intrinsic rewards from the community that make it important for them to be there personally, and;

   c. People enjoy interacting with experts in the community and should be able to learn much that is helpful to them in their everyday work.

8. Bring newbies up to speed fast (guides, buddies, docents, tours, FAQs).  It is also a good idea to post or e-mail new members the "rules of engagement" for acceptable behavior in the community.

9. Keep the content fresh and new with critical information and regular events that keep people coming back to participate in the community.

10. Monitor participation frequency and quality, and reward those who deserve it.

Various pundits have seen the way social networks and online communities (which are fluid social structuries) are changing and evolving. Amy Jo Kim sees them becoming more mobile because everyone has a cell phone. I see them becoming more political.

The Internet cuts time and cost out of the communication equation. You can reach anyone, almost instantly. It also takes distance and geography out of the equation.  When you take these factors out of the communication equation, for the first time in human history you have given people the ability to organize around a topic, idea or cause.

The Internet is intruding into our political process, and there will be upheaval over the next decade as people begin to realign their allegances not to geography, but to specific ideals, and those groups, if they get large enough and organized enough, will begin to exert political power. This is a third-order effect of the Internet on social structures.

I see a world in the not too distant future where we are not represented by a politician in the house or senate, because power does not have to be concentrated as it did because of slow communication and transportation when the U.S. Consitution was written. Power can now be distributed, and affinity groups can help to represent the individual in their interests and in many areas of their life.

This does not mean things that came about from first- and second-order effects will dissappear. There will still be publishing to web sites and social networking. They will just evolve in a more political direction, and more of the group/network/community effects will be implemented online. 

Microsoft says Vista will be out early next year… yeah right! But when it does come out, Vista looks to be the most collaboration-oriented operating system ever. Over the last few years, Microsoft has put its toe into the collaboration waters, but with Vista, it looks like it is diving in.

In my firm’s RTC report last Fall, we talked about how Microsoft will push collaboration down into the operating system. Figure 1 shows not only the different functional categories that my firm has for the collaboration market, but also has arrows showing directionality of the market.

What we see from these arrows is a convergence of the market around "Project Management, Virtual Workplace, and Process", and that all of the other functions (CRM, Document Management, KM, portals and communities, and RTC functions) are being merged into this central space. Many of these functions are being pushed down into the “collaborative infrastructure” layer that currently deals with e-mail, security, directory structures, and so on.

Although it is happening slowly, we are starting to see RTC features moving into virtual team tools (the central square in Figure 1). There are a few vendors that now offer web-based project management and virtual team tools, where presence and IM have been integrated. Convoq ASAP and Sherpa Project are both good examples of this. However, when most of the vendors in this area of collaboration are questioned about the integration of RTC into project tools, the reply we generally get is “Our customers are not asking for it.” One of the sayings at Collaborative Strategies is that “Customers don’t know what they don’t know.” Consequently, they don’t ask for things they don’t know about or even think is possible. Relying only on customer feedback to determine your product roadmap is a pitfall that many collaboration vendors seem to fall into. With that strategy for a product roadmap, the vendor will always be a "follower,” not a “leader" or "innovator.” We see the integration of IM and presence into the project management, workflow and virtual team space areas as a great opportunity for product/service differentiation over the next few years.

With all of these collaborative functions collapsing in on the central square in Figure 1 (Virtual Team Spaces), we also see an arrow showing many of these functions being pushed down into what we call the “collaborative infrastructure layer.” One of the major forces pushing many of these collaborative functions down into this layer is Microsoft, since it owns the Windows operating system.

In a recent briefing about Office 12, Microsoft showed a new “results-oriented” user interface (UI) rather than the “command-oriented” interface that Office tools have had for the last 20 years. This new interface is based on what the person wants to do rather then how the commands can be grouped together.  This makes sense and shows the maturity of the Office product, and how well Microsoft is listening to its customers.

A new “Review” tab was promised to have additional workflow (routing) capabilities for any type of document created in Office 12, but what was not covered in this briefing was how collaboration will be integrated into Office 12. Our guess is that there will be a “Collaboration” tab that will let you share whatever document your working on with others on your team, group, etc. The collaboration tab will include icons that will show the presence of others (through MSN and Microsoft Communicator). This will enable to you chat or IM others about a document your working on. Microsoft should be able to link to AOL and Yahoo (as was announced earlier this year) servers so that you will be able to do two-way communication with associates in those IM areas (I asked this question of Mr. Gates at the MS Communicator 2005 announcement in San Francisco).

Microsoft is supporting SIP not XMPP, so it is not likely that its tools will communicate with IM clients like GoogleTalk and Skype (now eBay).  We believe that users will get tired of having 2-3 IM clients on their desktop, and that some common standard for IM (interchange) will emerge over the next year and put an end to IM wars.  The value from the network effect will drive such a standard, and as much as Microsoft might resist this, it eventually will have to join in or lose the market share it has with MSN. Microsoft has announced "federation" deals with AOL and Yahoo as two bullets in its war against Google.

Presence is such a compelling function that Microsoft is putting it into Vista. The underlying technology is known as "People Near Me" and is being used by Microsoft for its own software projects and by other developers. The company has built one such program into Vista — Windows MeetingSpace — that lets people share and view files.

MeetingSpace is designed with a couple of situations in mind. First is the scenario where people meet up at a coffee house and want to share data with one another. The second scenario might be within a company where several people are meeting and want to be able to view and edit a presentation together. The feature requires the laptops to have some form of network connection, but it does not require Internet access since the technology uses peer-to-peer connections. Users with most versions of Vista will be able to start a session; those with Home Basic can join a session but not start one of their own.

Similar ad-hoc networks were possible in Windows XP and other versions of the operating system, but with Vista, there is a more robust means to connect nearby users, as well as the built-in MeetingSpace program.

The feature, which had been known as Windows Collaboration, was present in prior test versions of Windows, but Microsoft has both renamed it and worked to make it more stable in the Beta 2 version of Vista that was released recently.

Allowing PCs to connect to one another does raise security challenges — the main one being that people may be duped into connecting to someone they are not looking to share with. The issue also exists in XP, where peer-to-peer options offer little beyond the name of the network and are listed alongside wireless Internet options.

But with Vista, Microsoft says it has put in place measures to ensure all parties know what they are getting into and are willing participants. People can choose whether to be seen or not in the "People Near Me" feature, and they can also decline or accept any particular invitation. Meanwhile, those hosting a session can choose not to broadcast their meeting and can also require people to use a password to keep out virtual party crashers.

The intent of MeetingSpace is to allow nearby participants to communicate. That means that the technology is good for a gathering where all parties are in the same physical location. But for the case where one or more people are "dialing in" to the meeting, a Web conferencing product like WebEx or Microsoft’s LiveMeeting is still needed.

With Vista, any application will have access to this type of presence information. Microsoft’s quandary is that it is the target of government regulators (especially in Europe) and anything it puts into the operating system becomes regulated. Hence, it’s our belief that the company will keep specific applications like Live Meeting as applications (servers) which they can continue to sell, and which will not be regulated. But Microsoft will move some of the more general features of Live Meeting, like screen or application sharing, into the operating system for 1-to-1 or small group collaboration, group writing or document review.

Microsoft Communicator integrates IM, VoIP, telephony, video and web conferencing into one server. It also acts as the preferred front-end to LCS 2007 (also due out in Q1 2007). Ultimately it will let an employee access a company’s IM system from any device connected to the Internet (and these days using wi-fi, that could be a cell phone or PDA, too).

Convergence is happening all over the collaboration space:  Audio, video and data conferencing are converging; VoIP, PSTN and computer networks are converging; synchronous and asynchronous collaboration technologies are converging and evolving into on-demand collaboration tools. But none of these are the convergence I’m about to cover. Collaborative convergence is the need by enterprises to converge the myriad collaborative applications and services into one that works for the whole organization and does so securely and effectively.

Oracle may be a bellwether for convergence and standardization throughout the enterprise.  Oracle had 12 different RTC (real-time collaboration) systems in use before the company decided to build and standardize on its own RTC tool. Over the last decade, most large organizations have experimented with collaboration technologies, initially with asynchronous and then synchronous technologies (in the new millennium).  All of the organizations I’ve interviewed have used collaborative technologies (IM, web conferencing, or web meetings) at some point over the last year, and many of these organizations were regular users of these and asynchronous collaboration technologies (like SharePoint, eRoom or Groove). 

One of the things we often note when doing multiple interviews with the same organization is that different groups in the organization use different RTC technologies.  For example, the training group might be using Centra or Adobe’s Breeze, while the sales group uses Linktivity’s WebDemo, and the marketing group is using WebEx or InterWise.  This collaborative tool proliferation has not gone unnoticed by IT departments — more and more they have had to support users on these applications.

In Oracle’s case, they developed their own RTC tool and because of some insightful work by the development group, they were able to get it adopted across the enterprise in reasonably short order, and with a high level of success.

Strategies for Corporate Collaborative Consolidation

I see IT’s move to consolidate collaboration tools a sign of a maturing collaboration market.  There seem to be two strategies for doing collaborative consolidation in an organization. 
The first way is that IT does an evaluation of a number of collaboration technologies (hopefully including the ones currently being used by the enterprise), and based on this evaluation (which is based on a variety of factors including cost, politics, and which vendors are already well known to IT, like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, etc.), mandates which collaboration tools the corporation will use based on (such an evaluation at Target Corporation is a two-year process).  I don’t see this as the optimal strategy for consolidation, not because of technical factors, but because of behavioral and social factors.

The second and, fortunately, more common strategy seen for consolidation is when someone in IT realizes that the enterprise is spending a lot of money on collaboration services and tools and reports it to the CIO. The CIO asks an IT person to go out to the enterprise, identify all of the stakeholders for all of the different applications, interview them on why they chose that application (business needs), how it is being used, how many are using it, how effective a solution it is, and what is critical about that software for the processes they are using it for (critical features and functions). 

Armed with this information, the IT person or, in many cases, an outside consultant (like my firm) completes the interviews and writes a report on the current state of collaboration in the organization.  This gives an initial assessment, or as we call it, a “collaborative snap shot”, of the organization.

If the CIO is wise, he/she will ask the IT person or consultant to develop a plan for consolidation.  If the IT person or consultant is wise, they will convene a roundtable of all of the stakeholders identified in the report and let them know the corporate consolidation goal.  This usually provokes a period of discussion by the roundtable, the result of which is that a number of the stakeholders see that other collaborative tools can provide the functionality they need without too much (or any) training or change in their business processes. 

If the roundtable leader is lucky, it becomes clear to all members that one solution will predominate and will fulfill most of the needs of each of the stakeholders.  Through a political process, the leader can often get consensus and buy-in from all of the stakeholders.  In some cases, we have seen two systems be approved.  In one case, we saw the whole company move (over the course of a year) to one system except for one department, which insisted on using an in-house system because they claimed that they needed 100% uptime (by contract) and that the system the rest of the company was moving to only had a 99.7% uptime metric.  In-house systems, while very specific to the needs of the company, are often expensive to develop and maintain.  Within two years of the initial move, and working with the collaboration vendor, they were able to get the uptime to an acceptable level and the last group in the company abandoned the in-house built system to move over to this vendor’s system early in 2005.  Having this collaboration consolidation process take two years is not an unusual amount of time for a large enterprise. 

I have seen this second strategy to be more successful, not because of technology reasons or even cost, but for political and behavioral reasons.  The roundtable process gives people a chance to express their opinions, and to understand other technology options and what the tradeoffs will be.  In addition, people feel like they have some say in the outcome and ownership of the process, and you get a higher level of “buy in.”  The outcome of this ownership usually is a much higher and less painful adoption rate of the collaboration technologies.  The overall cost of implementing the technology across the organization is often lower, and there are champions for the technology all over the organization (all of the roundtable members).

The champions for the technology not only help educate their groups (and other groups) about the new technology, but, and even more importantly, they can help explain to people the benefits of the technology in the context of their specific business process.  They can explain that the sales people can now conduct a web demo with two clicks and that the demos can be recorded and played back later (if needed).  They can explain to the training people that the RTC software can link to their current LMS, and that it offers additional virtual classroom features in an upcoming release from the vendor. In many cases, the outcome (technically) of both strategies is the same.  Often it is Microsoft, Oracle, IBM/Lotus, Webex or Adobe/Macromedia selected as the corporate collaboration vendor because their other tools are already in use in the enterprise and those vendors have long-standing relationships with IT.

Once we get a call to help an organization (usually a group in IT) with this, we talk about the four stages that are needed to help an organization with this process:

Stage 1: Assessment. This includes not only the work defined above in the “collaborative snap shot”, but also some of the tools we have developed to help give us a (numerical) idea of how important various collaborative features and functions are to each group in the organization. In addition to the technology, we also look at how the culture supports collaborative behavior, what the economic impact of the collaborative technologies is, and how these tools are seen politically.

Stage 2: Requirements and Vendor Selection. Once the assessment is concluded, the data is analyzed and a report is developed for IT management. As part of this report a “requirements” matrix is developed with each of the features/functions prioritized based on scores they got from each of the business and IT groups assessed. Since the features are rated on a 1-10 scale, often features that are 7 or above are put into a shorter “requirements list” and given to 4-5 of the vendors that have their tools currently being used in the enterprise as well as a few other vendors that might have unique or solutions or are using a newer technology or architecture (e.g., vendors that use VoIP, or are Web 2.0 oriented, etc.). Since we are familiar with many of the major vendors in the collaboration space and their product road maps, we can shorten this requirements and vendor selection process, and also keep the vendors from pestering our IT clients.

Stage 3: Strategic Pilot Project. In Stage 1 when we are doing the assessment, we are on the lookout for various groups that might be good candidates for a pilot project. In one instance we talked with the manager of a support team that had 200+ people in the same location and another 20 scattered around the world.

There were a number of criteria we established for pilot projects that used collaborative technologies: the manager had to be technically savvy; a good leader (with good communications skills); very interested in IM (which was the technology we were testing); have a bounded group of between 100 -300 users; the group had to be heavy users of the technology (IM); the technology being tested had to be part of a critical process for the group and ideally used every day.

The support group in question met most of these criteria and proved to be a good group for the IM pilot, which lasted 30 days (with this whole stage taking about 60 days).

As part of the pilot, we gathered as many metrics on IM usage from the target group as possible before allowing access to the new IM technology. In addition, we gave training to half the group and the other half we just let figure the technology out (after all, IM is pretty simple and should be easy enough for anyone to use).  By doing this we were able to tell from the pilot how critical training might be to the rest of the organization.

The goal of the pilot project from a strategic basis was threefold: one, to have a big success with the technology and to publicize that success to the organization (it is easier to build on success then failure); two, understand the best way to offer the technology so that high adoption rates occur; and three, to understand the priorities of this technology to each group in the organization and roll it out to those groups in order of priority.

Stage 4: Implementation and Adoption.  The timeline for this stage can vary widely from as little as a few months to years. Often it depends on the size of the organization, how important the collaboration technology is, the degree of support the project has from management, and a variety of other factors.  The goal in implementation is to do a strategic rollout of the technology along with the necessary training and education so that those groups that get the technology know how to use it and where to use it. This often means showing a use case or example using a critical process for each group on how the collaborative technology can be used and what the benefits are.

For the support group I have been using as an example, only half got training, but because support people are very technically savvy, the difference between the group that got training and the group that did not was not very significant. Showing a support person how they could integrate all of the IM clouds on their desktop (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc.) into one buddy list and still do presence detection is just showing a feature. It was important to show them how a specific IM tool can be used for internal IM (new policy), and how the IM clouds could be used with customers and suppliers (outside the firewall) more securely (both through policy and technology). It was just as important in this case (and most cases) to educate the group on new IM security and use policies as it was to educate them on the technology.

As the technology gets rolled out to different groups, and the number of users scales up, it is important to monitor the response times of the technologies to make sure that they do scale and that there is not a degradation in service quality or service reliability (e.g., IM fails in the middle of a conversation). Often both these factors are tied to the enterprise’s network bandwidth, QoS, firewalls, and other infrastructure factors. It is important to talk with those in IT responsible for the corporate infrastructure prior to the rollout to make sure that the enterprise infrastructure can support the use of these tools and to also project expected usage over the next year or two to make sure infrastructure growth is keeping pace.

Although other analyst firms in this space recommend 10-step programs, they are essentially the same as the program outlined above, but with each step being a bit more granular. It is important when doing collaborative convergence to look at the process holistically and give equal importance to people, process and technology. Often the technology is the focus of this type of project because it is the most visible and tangible, but people and process really comprise about 80% of the success for any collaborative technology (which enables them) and it is critical not to underestimate the importance of these other — and less tangible — factors.

Podcasts are inherently a broadcast medium, a bit like "Amateur Hour" on radio or over the web. Podcasts are seen essentially as time-shifted audio (for your iPod) – kind of like TiVO for your radio (or web). But the Web was created to be interactive, so how come clever programmers haven’t created a mashup that allows interactive podcasting?

There are some people who believe as I do, and have tried various workarounds to make their podcasts more interactive. One of them is Joseph Jaffe, a marketing expert who has a podcast called "Across the Sound" (the Long Island Sound, that is).

Unlike my less-professional podcasts, Joseph, while looking at the latest in web marketing and PR, asks for feedback. He gets it through a number of channels: though his companion blog, where people leave comments and Joseph reads them (and answers them) on the podcast. The other asynchronous route is the ever-present e-mail. Joseph also reads and comments on those. Really creative (and geeky) listeners have even submitted audio files to him to be played on the air (during his pod cast).

The point is that anyone with an opinion is probably going to get a reaction, which really means interaction, and the most obvious way is through the Web. I am looking for more real-time interaction on my (asynchronous) blog and put 3Bubbles (see the "Live Chat" button) on each blog so people can react in real-time to what I have published. Blogging is also a broadcast medium, and 3Bubbles has taken some steps to make it more interactive. The problem with 3Bubbles (which they are fixing currently) is that there is no indication of presence. If you’re on my site and bring up 3Bubbles to chat with me, I don’t know you’re there, and most likely I’m busy writing this article or with something else. Not that I don’t want to chat with you…I do, but I need to know you’re there and want to talk. What’s nice about 3Bubbles is that the chat is in context (of the blog post), so we have a ready-built framework for our interaction.

With the big push in VoIP both into SMBs, consumers and the enterprise, it should not be very long before some smart developer adds VoIP chat to blogs and podcasts. This would be like Google integrating GoogleTalk into their Blogger service (which they may be doing?). Others call this type of podcast a "real-time, VoIP podcast feed.”

With almost a billion IM accounts at the end of 2005, and over 1100 VoIP vendors and a VoIP adopton rate greater than that of fixed-line phones, one would expect some type of interactive podcast where there is not only interaction between the podcast host and guests, but with the listeners also. Kind of like a conference call, where initially there is a presentation and everyone besides the presenter is muted. Then other presenters are allowed to speak, and finally during the Q&A session the phones are opened up to everyone (but only one listener at a time can speak). This can probably be done with Skype now, and definately with a real-time tool like WebEx, but only for a specific meeting. What’s more, with tools like WebEx you can record the meeting and add in data or content and make sure that it’s synchronized with the voice.

"We can build it. We have the technology…”. This famous quote from the introduction to the ’70s TV show "The Six Million Dollar Man" is particularly apt for interactive podcasting.  Maybe Yahoo! or Microsoft will step up to the plate and offer this more interactive version of a podcast, or maybe Apple with its iTunes will look at taking the lead in this race.

Whoever does, it is inevitable, because it is a second-order effect. The first-order effect is to publish something that was done another way (e.g., paper, TV, or radio) on the Web. Since publishing and broadcasting are not very interactive, they are the easiest way to shift from the old form (paper) to the new form (web site). The second-order effect is to use the technology in a new way, not imagined by the users of the old format — for example, an interactive podcast. What is interesting to speculate about is what the third-order effects will be.

My favorite example of first-, second- and third-order effects is the car. Before the car there were horses. The first-order effect was that the car enabled people to go further faster than on a horse. The second-order effect (at least in the U.S.) was our national freeway system, which allows people in cars to travel all over the country. A third-order effect of cars is shopping malls — without cars and freeways, shopping malls (aggregations of retailers) would never have happened.

In the same way, we can see that people moved paper brochures onto the web and published them as a web site –  the first-order effect.  A first-order effect is always to take an old form and present it in a new (and usually less expensive) way. The second-order effect is that people are starting to recognize the interactivity of the Web and are building applications to support it, often with new features and functions. Presence detection is a good example of this. You can’t do it on the phone, but you can do it on the Web, and now with some of the new IP phones which merge the phone and the Web, you can start to do presence detection.

One could speculate that since third-order effects build upon first- and second-order effects, we will start to see some shifts that change both our economy and our society from the introduction of these technologies. For example, political power blocks that have nothing to do with geography but are based upon affinity groups and social networks. We are starting to see the rise of the “citizen reporter” and the disintermediation of traditional advertising mediums by the Web. Soon we may see virtual scenarios, where you are the main player and the vendor’s products play a major role in the scenario. This would not only help build buyer loyalty, it would also offer an educational twist to advertising.

One could imagine BMW (with its strong connection to the James Bond films) offering an online scenario that is done with realistic graphics, where you get to play Bond and drive the new BMW to escape the bad guys. On the way, you would learn about the car’s controls and special features that let you get away from the bad guys (meaning that you probably would not have escaped in an ordinary car), save the heroine and drive off into the sunset!

David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies (CS). He is the author of two books on groupware. He can be reached at davidc@collaborate.com or 415-282-9197.

You would think small/medium-sized businesses (SMBs) would not need collaborative technologies. After all, in companies that size, can’t you just pop your head into the next office or walk down the hall to talk to your colleague? This may be true for some small businesses (especially SOHO — Small Office / Home Office), but with the gloabalization of business today, it is just as likely that a small business will be as spread out as a large enterprise and therefore require collaboration technologies.

Take our firm, Collaborative Strategies, for example. I work mostly from my home office in San Francisco, while Dave Antila and the Advisory Services team work in the San Mateo office (about a half an hour’s drive south of me). Ann Marcus and another researcher are in Portland, Maurene Grey is in New York and Cliff our webmaster is in Atlanta. Fortunately, as analysts in the area of electronic collaboration, we have more tools and technologies then we will ever be able to use (although we try to test as many of the 1000 vendors we track as we can). 

In talking to vendors selling collaborative solutions, we have found that most are focused on the big sale — the enterprise. However, there are only so many large companies (in the Fortune 2000 range), whereas there are over five million small businesses in the U.S. alone today. Some of the collaboration vendors we have talked with over the last year are waking up to the fact that the SMB market is a big one, and these companies are not as saturated with collaborative tools as large enterprises might be.

In recent months, announcements from major vendors like Microsoft, Webex and IBM indicate that not only have the smaller collaboration vendors noticed the SMB market for collaboration tools — the major players have, too.

Recently we interviewed a number of vendors that have been successful in marketing and selling collaboration tools to SMBs.  We asked them some hard questions about their success: How do they generate leads? How do they keep the cost of sales down? How do they get their message right? How do they choose their target markets or niches?

Citrix Online (www.gotomeeting.com), which has spent the last five years in this market, focuses on their “Simpler is Better” philosophy in building and delivering their services. This strategy, in addition to their licensing model, provide critical advantages when selling to SMBs.

Andy Swarbrick, the CEO of PopG (www.popg.com), a 10-person UK-based company, feels that working through partners and channels was critical for them to get higher quality customers in the SMB market. 

Green Array (www.greenarray.com), another small start up in San Francisco that focuses on project management, has 1000 customers after only three months.  We interviewed their CEO, Miles Walsh, and he explained that his philosophy is to use a “catalog or mechanizing mentality” to successfully sell to SMBs. Based on this philosophy, Miles changes the company’s message (and web site) every month. His goal is to “drive people to lifetime value, while keeping the cost of sales down” — much like a catalog-based retailer does. Their goal is to get to “zero touch” sales, and keep the cost of acquiring a user under $20.

Christian Smith, the VP of Sales and Marketing at eProject (www.eproject.com), worked with his executive team in 2003 to change their view and help them see that they are selling a service. They focused on mid-market companies and researched how they bought software. They used guerrilla marketing tactics from 2003 -2005 to prove their ability to sell to this market, and in the summer of 2005 the company received an $8 million investment which they used to retire debt and boost sales and marketing. As those newly funded marketing campaigns have come online (in Q4 of 2005), their leads, sales and revenues have risen 100%.

All of these vendors seem to make good use of Google AdWords to drive traffic to their sites.  Some of them use Download.com and other sites like that to drive traffic and trials of their software.

Citrix found that focusing on specific vertical markets like financial services or health care was its best strategy. In this case it combined Google AdWords with direct mail and PR campaigns to generate the highest result.

When the vendors were asked about trade shows, there was a mixed response. PopG and Citrix are going to CeBit in Germany this year. Citrix believes that focusing on trade shows in specific verticals is the way to go. Media/PR is central to the Citrix marketing platform, in order to build brand awareness and generate leads. In December, Green Array found that a coordinated campaign, which included a press release, increased the numbers to their web site.

All of the vendors we interviewed believe that channels or resellers are a good way to get to SMBs. Often these channel partners will embed the collaboration product into their own industry-focused solution and provide specific consulting services to round out the package and increase the value to the SMB.

eProject, like Citrix, focuses on Google AdWords and optimizes its site for keywords. It also has a strong PR presence to help drive thought leadership and brand recognition. The company also recently leveraged bloggers and their user community by launching “eLounge” — a public place on the web for customers and prospects to talk to each other about project management, collaboration, and so on. In addition, the company integrated RSS feeds into the product dashboard so users can see feed results. This is now a part of eProject’s regular Internet strategy.

All of the vendors of collaboration services we talked to for this article offer their software as a service (SaaS), so it is easy for an SMB to buy a small number of seats without the need for an IT staff or any new hardware. All they need is an Internet connection.  This is also true for large enterprises, but in our experience, the larger companies usually want to install the software on a server behind their firewall after they have completed a “proof of concept”. With SMBs this almost never happens, and they tend to stick with SaaS longer. Many of the vendors we interviewed offered SaaS.

eProject, unlike some of the other vendors interviewed, feels that it has a horizontal solution, and the company uses various web techniques to go horizontal. When it comes to hiring its sales force (all inside sales), the company values vertical contextual experience and is hiring salespeople for the specific verticals they have targeted (financial services, professional services, software development, manufacturing, government and education). These verticals are no surprise; they are often the verticals most rapidly  adopting collaborative solutions.

When asked what advice these vendors had for others interested in selling collaboration to SMBs, Mike Mansbach, VP Marketing at Citrix Online noted “Keep it simple and intuitive, make sure you are delivering the greatest value from a collaboration product with the least amount of functional noise and feature bloat that will be a distraction to most users.”  Andy Swarbrick, the CEO of PopG says “Don’t expect success overnight, keep after it.” PogG has been in business since 2000. Christian Smith of eProject gives this advice to those marketing to SMBs: “Know your market, and look at how that market buys software, and then find the most cost efficient and scalable way to be in front of those people when and how they buy software.”

Miles Walsh of Green Array explains that “Every SMB, school, government agency, and non-profit is desperate for new and better ways to collaborate with their internal and external team members. Traditional software typically replaces existing working systems, which can be expensive and high risk.  The key to success in the SOA world is providing complete solutions that leverage existing people, processes and help put out burning fires in minutes, not months.”

After interviewing all of these vendors about their success in marketing collaboration to SMBs, a few things seem clear:

• Simpler is better, and wider adoption and faster growth (with SMBs) is more likely with this product strategy.
• Browser-based SaaS is a good way for SMBs to get started with collaboration software, and often customers will bring their value network onto the service as needed.
• Getting the message right seems to be critical, and many of these vendors change their message often (monthly) and experiment with different lead acquisition strategies (ads, PR, print ads, trade shows, and so on).
• Focus, focus, focus. Pick a target vertical or population and, either through a channel partner (VAR) or via direct sales, sell into that niche rather than go after the horizontal market and run into the major collaboration players.

Last year was an interesting year in the collaboration space. There were some major mergers and acquisitions (Adobe and Macromedia; Webex and Intranets.com, etc.), which were product of a maturing collaboration market and the result of a number of driving forces – not the least of which is a realization by many organizations that collaborative functions themselves are only part of the solution. 

We see a number of vendors beginning to realize this. They are leaving the general collaboration market to the Microsofts and IBMs of the world, and narrowing their focus on either vertical markets or specific processes. One such vendor, which I have written about recently, is Open Text.  Open Text has done an excellent job of partnering with other companies to provide successful offerings in a number of vertical markets like oil and gas, government, and financial services.  Recently, Open Text took a turn away from collaboration, letting Microsoft deal with those functions, and on top of this Microsoft/SAP platform they are building applications to deal with Sarbanes Oxley and other regulatory compliance issues. Open Text has always been a bit ahead of the pack in this sense, so we expect even more collaboration vendors to throw in the towel and move out of the horizonal collaboration market to focus on specific verticals.

A second trend we see is the loosening of investment monies for software start-ups, including many in the social software and collaboration space. Venture capitalists, always wanting to reduce risk in their investments, now demand that the application be developed and deployed before they invest, reducing the one of the largest risks (that of the software never finishing development). Fortunately, this converges with a number of other trends such as “Software as as Service” (SAS), and the emergence of agile development and extreme programming environments. In addition, there are now many freeware or Open Source tools to help with this type of development as well as both Java and dot net frameworks. 

All of these, along with the trend in outsourcing, have combined to make it possible to create applications in a very short time and for very little money. In the past, it may have cost $500K for seed investment, but today applications can be built for $25-$50K. What this means is that these applications can not only be built more quickly and easily, but that start-ups can now start with a much greater valuation if they do work with VCs. Recently we have seen applications like: Writley, Basecamp, Sugar CRM, GroveSite and others that are great examples of these trends.

Another trend we are seeing, and one that will increase in 2006, is a proliforation of collaborative offerings, so much so that it will become even more confusing to end users. On the upside, with many of these solutions offered as an SAS, end users can often try these solutions for free for a short time, and this can help to eliminate some of the confusion.

So what should we expect in this year? More of the same.  We will continue to see consolidation in the collaboration space, especially in the horizontal tools area, and by the end of the year we should be down to about a dozen vendors occupying this space (including IBM and Microsoft, etc.) with more and more vendors moving into vertical and process solution areas.  We also expect to see the last collaboration vendors offer A/V/D conferencing. Along with consolidation, we will also see expansion, mostly occuring at the edge of the net, in the area of podcasts, blogs, wikis and having those technologies move more and more into the mainstream. Blogs and wikis are already taking on a corporate flavor in 2005 and we will see more of that this year.  There will also be some major mergers and acquisitions in 2006, and we will also see more of the zombie collaboration vendors finally die off, or run out of money. Needless to say, 2006 will be as active a year in the collaboration space as 2005 was!

OpenText under the strategic leadership of Tom Jenkins has evolved from a document and archive management firm to a serious player in the collaboration space. With their new strategy we at Collaborative Strategies believe that they are a good vertical counterpoint to Microsoft’s horizontal play in this space.

I recently attended an “analyst day” at the OpenText LiveLinkup conference in Orlando in mid-November. Most of the management team from the Chairman (Tom Jenkins) to the head of sales spoke to a good sized group of analysts.  Based on what I heard and saw, I believe that OpenText is moving in the right direction given the current trends in the collaboration market.

Ease of Use

One of the big messages from John Shakelton the OpenText CEO was that he wanted to make it easy to buy, deploy, and use OpenText.  This fits with feedback we have had from a number of user organizations that we have interviewed over the last year. Most organizations prefer “easy” over “feature rich” (and not so easy). We have seen other vendors like SiteScape (who I talked about last month) also moving rapidly in this direction.

Dancing with Elephants

There are a number of “elephants” in the collaboration space, and Microsoft is one of them.  Rather then being on the dance floor with these behemoths, OpenText has wisley decided to work with Microsoft and add on to what they are currently offering. Microsoft is seen as a “horizontal” collaboration play. As it turns out, OpenText found that about 60% of their 20 million users also use Microsoft desktop applications and SAP. So OpenText did deals with both of these “elephants.”  To the features found in Microsoft desktop applications and SharePoint, OpenText offers a search engine, archiving engine, portlets and case management. Partnering with Microsoft gives OpenText access to the 800 million users of Microsoft desktop applications.

Go Vertical

OpenText’s real strength, and where we believe that they will not only survive, but thrive, is going after vertical markets and specific processes.  At OpenText they call that the focus on business applications, and industry solutions. They have created a 10 x10 matrix of the top verticals and top applications, and will select a number of these to partner on or implement.

OpenText has done an excellent job of “going vertical” over the last few years and have partnered for such applications as: Community of practice for Government, or partnering with FrontRange Systems for Oil and Gas Exploration applications.

In our recently released RTC 2006 report (www.reports.collaborate.com) we believe that by 2008 there will only be a few major colloboration players (elephants) left and all the other vendors in this space will either: be acquired, go out of business, or move into specific vertical and process niches that they can defend.

For OpenText what this means is that they are building applications on top of both Microsoft and SAP (Levels 2 and 3) for specific verticals and processes.

This change has been so pervasive at OpenText that they have re-organized the compay to reflect this new strategy.  They have put sales support and professional services (all revenue generating areas) under one person (yet to be named).  The other two groups are: Product development, and product marketing.

One of the areas they have focused the most attention on with partners like Deloite is SOX compliance.  Working with Deloite they found that 80% of customers use the same compliance process, with 20 % customization for that particular organization. OpenText which is about $400 M in revenues this year will be looking for some small acquistions this year to add specific SOX expertise to the team.

John Kirkham (based in the UK) is currently running the sales team. For the last year about 55% of sales are in Europe. OpenText is also trying to consolidate its executive team into its Chicago and Waterloo (Canada) offices. This seems very contrary for a company that sells collaborative tools, currently they have executives spread over almost 50 different offices.

SOX it too me!

Nothing, not even sex, seems to sell as well as fear! Although it has taken much longer for the market for SOX solutions to appear, it seems to be on track and growing rapidly according to both Deloite and OpenText. These partners have generated more revenue this quarter for this application then they did all of last year, and expect revenues to be 3X what they were over last year.

The partners also found the sales cycle to be longer then expected, about 6 months, and it is a strategic solutions sale rather then a software sale, which means that typically there is a 2-1 services to software cost in the sale.

Eric Slaghuis from SASOL petrochemicals did implement a SOX application with OpenText that supported collaborate in controlled environment, focused on standard operating processes and looked at faciliting effective risk assessment and document controls.  They were able to put the application on one page, which spaned 18 levels of hierchy in the SASOL organization. The application took 36,000 man hours to build, most of it using internal SASOL people, and this project had a 10-1 services to software ratio.

SASOL is not unusal for the SOX market, as they are in a highly regulated vertical and they found out that their initial use of paper-based or Excel spreadsheet was too difficult to replicate for the next year. 90% of customers did it manually, and did not automate. This year, the second time around, about 40% are doing the automation. 

The Customer is Right

One thing I heard a lot at the OpenText conference was about the people at OpenText and how responsive they were to their customers.  Having attended other “elephant” events for Oracle and Microsoft, that is not typically the comment you hear at those conferences. We at CS believe that this is a significant differentiator that OpenText is taking advantage of. If looking at their Communities of Practice offering, it is bundled with instructions on how to be successful with an online community, as well as several templates and examples to get you started.  Rebecca Phillips of General Dynamics, who runs a secure Community of practice, talked a lot about the level of support and response they go from OpenText. Where we see OpenText differentiating it’s self from some of the elephant vendors is that they are invested in their customer’s success rather then just selling software. This might seem like a subtle philisophical difference, but it really is a much bigger change, and one we see as a smart strategy. 

Another trend we have seen, and that has been written about in the RTC 2006 report, is the shift in those who are buying collaborative solutions.  More and more these are business people with a specific problem, who are adverse to risk, and are not sure how to apply the technology except in a very specific way. 

OpenText’s philosophy of of both verticalization and investing in their customer’s success is sure to make them one of the survivors in this dance with elephants, but if you read between the lines at OpenText, you can see they are moving away from collaboration and focusing more on the vertical applications like SOX and compliance, and letting Microsoft deal with the collaboration aspects at a lower layer. The question then becomes is OpenText a collaboration player? CS expects to see more vertical solutions from OpenText this year, and less collaborative ones. We saw demo’s of their community of practice products, and of TouchPoint (their RTC technology) but there were no real plans to make TouchPoint commercial that we heard from OpenText management at the conference. Does this mean collaboration is in limbo at OpenText?

David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies (CS). He is the author of two books on groupware. He can be reached at davidc@collaborate.com or 415-282-9197.

Blogs, online social networks, instant messages, chat, and other collaborative technologies all compete for our time and attention. At times, this tug-of-war for our attention can be overwhelming, and cause productivity to suffer. Technology helped create this problem, so is it reasonable to believe that technology can help us solve the problem as well?  David Coleman examines the issue.

We all see the panhandlers on the street corner offering “will work for food” or my favorite, “will help with existential crisis for food.” The blogging revolution has something in common with that guy on the street corner, in that both are trying to get your attention. Blogs, wikis, IM and other collaborative innovations all require the same thing from you: your attention.

Attention Attention!

What is attention? One definition is that “it is what you focus and put your energy towards.” Dave Sifry of Technorati calls attention “time directed to a purpose by a person.”

I believe that attention is just about the most important commodity we have. It is a combination or our time (which we have limited amounts of) and our interest (which are often variable and dynamic).  Additionally, there is not just one type of attention, and attention does not stay the same, it, like consciousness is dynamic.

There is the face-to-face stare you in the eye, totally focused attention, and there is as Linda Stone calls it “continuous partial attention. Stone believes that since the mid-1990s, continuous partial attention has become a way of life, in which our attention bandwidth has been stretched to its upper limits, and we just keep the top-level item in focus and are always scanning the periphery for opportunity.

Why do we do this? After some introspection, I believe it is because we want to stay connected and don’t want to miss anything, especially an opportunity!  Stone, further goes on to say that the new aphrodisiac is “committed attention.”  For some people, having everyone watch your every move is very hot!

ADD/ADHD

With adult attention-deficit disorder (ADD) getting more mainstream press, there are also a number of theories arising about attention that might be useful to examine. One theory states that those today that have ADD were “hunters” in our distant past and evolved in such a way that they were able to split their attention and scan the horizon for game, or more importantly, an animal that might see them as prey.  The “farmers”, who were more stable and planted crops, had no need to develop this split attention scanning ability (that we now call "ADD") and therefore have a more “normal” attention focusing ability, where they focus on one person, task or topic, rather then many. Hunters are able to take in continuous stimuli and react quickly to changing circumstances. Farmers are patient, methodical, and focused over long periods of time. If you want to know more about this theory, Tom Hartman introduced the theory of hunters and farmers in his book, Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception.

What Tom Hartman describes as a “hunter” sounds like what Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention”.  According to Stone, most of us today are continually scanning the horizon not for game or food, but for opportunity.

Attention and Collaboration

What does attention have to do with collaboration?  I believe any type of electronic collaboration requires the attention of at least two people. Your attention might be needed synchronously (that is, in real-time) or asynchronously, but you need to focus and respond to be part of a collaborative interaction.  But collaborative interactions are not the only thing competing for your attention.

It is my belief (and Ms. Stone’s also) that we are at the limits of our bandwidth or ability to process incoming information. One estimate says that the sum of all human information will double every 11 seconds by the end of this century. So I believe that things are only going to get worse — much worse.  As nano technologies move into the mainstream, we will start to have smart sensors in almost everything, since they can be embedded at a molecular level.  These sensors will also be able to send messages.  Our appliances (washing machine, refrigerator, etc.) are not only getting connected to the wireless network in our house, but to the Internet. They too are getting smarter and will start to send us messages. In a short time we will have all sorts of devices competing for our attention.

Technology and Behavior

Blogs, online social networks (Tribe, Friendster, etc.), instant messages, chat, etc. are all competing for our time. As one blogging pundit recently quipped, “I quit every online social network I was in so I could start having dinner with people (friends) again!” One of the issues in this always connected world we are building is when do we have time for ourselves, leisure time. According to Stone, “it is leisure time that makes us human.”

The question is, since technology is helping to create this problem of over stimulation, can technology help us solve the problem?  Can tools and technologies help us take our power back and enhance the quality of our life?

Even I have been in meetings where someone at the table is typing at their computer, reading e-mail on their Blackberry, and not fully paying attention to whoever is speaking in the meeting.  WebEx, the current leader in web conferencing, has taken an interesting approach to this in their Sales Center product.  It it estimated that over 40% of those in a webinar, online presentation or demonstration are not really paying attention, but are dealing with e-mail, IM or something else. The WebEx product knows that this can be frustrating to the presenter, and now has the ability to detect which window is on top on the attendee’s screens.  If an attendee does not have the WebEx screen on top, their name (on a list of attendees the presenter can see) turns red and lets the presenter know that the attendee’s attention is elsewhere, and they can ask him/her a question to bring their attention back to the webinar or presentation.

Some companies have taken a behavioral approach to help deal with this flood of information and its resultant effect on attention and productivity. “Casual Friday” has been taken a step further by some organizations and evolved into “email-free Fridays.” 

Who Owns Your Status Data

The data that says if your typing on your keyboard, on your phone, your cell phone, or in a meeting (webinar) is your status data. This data is very valuable, not only to vendors (because they can see what you pay attention to), but to those who currently interact with you and even those who may want to interact with you in the future. Imagine if this status data were in an interoperable file format. 

Steve Gillmore and Dave Sifry are proposing this standard format for attention/identity. Attention.xml is a specification for tracking, prioritizing and sharing what people are reading, looking at or listening to in RSS and elsewhere. If such a standard were adopted, it not only would let others know who is looking at what, but when. The question then becomes who should own this “status” data.  If someone has access to this type of data they would know an awful lot about you, your habits, interests, even what you did on a specific day. I would think that this type of information is very sensitive and should be owned by you, the person generating it, and all or part of this data should be made available to those that request it on a case-by-case basis. Otherwise, it would just exacerbate the proble of collaboration, and make attention that much more difficult.

Most large organizations today use Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools that help organize and manage a group of projects simultaneously, using a highly structured approach. They track the elements of the work breakdown structure, including costs, timelines, milestones, risks, resources and other critical elements. Executives can then regularly review entire portfolios by monitoring the at-a-glance dashboard indicators ubiquitous in PPMs. In this article, David Coleman teams up with Ann Marcus and explains how the integration of tools, techniques and data types can produce both top- and bottom-line benefits.

Ann Marcus and I have looked at the role of collaboration within Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and have coined a new acronym, "CPPM", for an emerging set of tools that are starting to come to market. In this two-part article, based on the recent research and interviews we have done, we explore the role of collaboration as part of this emerging tool set for corporate project productivity.

More Productive Project Management

Our goal is to help senior management in mid-to-large-sized organizations understand what is needed to make their projects, portfolios and programs run more smoothly and achieve better results. We believe that a new way of looking at existing tools and project information can do just that.

We begin with an explanation of the origins of and evolution to CPPM. We then show how senior managers and organization leaders in a variety of industries have begun to recognize the need for an integrated tool set. We also detail the advantages of employing CPPM and provide some questions to help you determine whether your organization would benefit from adopting a CPPM.

Finally, we illustrate how this integration of tools, techniques and data types can produce both top and bottom line benefits for the project organization and the enterprise as a whole.

Introduction

In any organization senior management must be able to allocate resources to initiatives, goals and programs in order to accomplish the strategies and aims of that organization. Project management across the organization, sometimes called "Program Management" or Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is becoming a more important issue for most organizations. As the level of complexity and volume of projects, portfolios and programs rises, management has the increasing challenge of oversight on these projects. 

Often the day-to-day management of projects, portfolios and programs is delegated to project portfolio managers. The new tools and technologies we are beginning to see emerge require a keen understanding of the immense volume and complexity of data these managers must manage to be effective. They must evaluate the progress of a portfolio at a glance, be able to drill down to project-level details should operations go astray, and use the data to make key decisions that keep the projects aligned with organizational goals and objectives.

Staying on top of their game requires these managers to have effective tools that flex and respond to inputs and reporting requirements—the structured foundation of project management. The prevailing tools of the trade for project portfolio managers have been Project Portfolio Management (PPM) packages.

These tools are powerhouses when it comes to allocating and tracking resources across projects, developing and maintaining schedules, flagging warning signs and presenting critical summaries in easy-to-read formats. However, when it comes to handling all the unstructured data that surround projects—brainstorming, proposals, document revisions, specifications and so on—PPM tools haven’t really measured up.

In all fairness, PPM tools were not designed originally to store this type of information, but in the complex, global business climate today, the unstructured data has assumed new importance. Responsible managers must assess whether failing to capture and link this information to specific projects/processes will result in negative effects: missed business opportunities, reduced team involvement, regulatory compliance shortcomings, and overlooked business processes innovation.

That’s where a new class of tools we call Collaborative Project Portfolio Management, or CPPM, comes in.

Recognizing The Need

Acknowledging the practical interplay between a project’s objective elements and the impact of a team’s subjective interpretation and style is the first step in understanding why we propose this new approach. Blending objective, structured formats with subjective, unstructured information can help clarify the logistical assumptions and realities that go into executing a successful project. We propose that linking the data, creates a clear, relationship between the elements and results in a more complete picture whose combined value is "greater than the sum of the its parts." For example, regular collaborative involvement has been proven to strengthen team commitment and the resulting quality of the work that team produces all while reducing costs and minimizing wasted effort.

Acknowledging the practical interplay between a project’s objective elements and the impact of a team’s subjective interpretation and style is the first step in understanding why we propose this new approach. Blending objective, structured formats with subjective, unstructured information can help clarify the logistical assumptions and realities that go into executing a successful project. We propose that linking the data, creates a clear, relationship between the elements and results in a more complete picture whose combined value is "greater than the sum of the its parts." For example, regular collaborative involvement has been proven to strengthen team commitment and the resulting quality of the work that team produces all while reducing costs and minimizing wasted effort.

Based on the growing complexity of business today, the need is greater than ever to integrate project information in a way that works for all levels of the organization. Access to shared materials and subject-matter experts, both in real time (synchronously) and via posted messages (asynchronously) is critical to moving a project along, especially when a team is distributed geographically.

Our research reveals that project, line and organization leaders would welcome a seamlessly integrated set of tools to archive, retain and review both structured and unstructured data. They want to be able to peruse it in a "just-in-time" fashion to answer team, executive, regulatory and process management requirements. Additionally, they would benefit from doing so in a secure, online location. The executives we interviewed indicated that access to such an integrated set of tools would allow them to reinforce critical project and portfolio decisions, drive team buy-in and performance, and assemble process management collections that have the potential to become organizational knowledge assets on their own.

Project Portfolio Management (PPM)

Coordinating and keeping portfolios on track and on budget is a profound challenge for any organization. The bar continues to be raised with the demands of a global marketplace for efficient operations, lower overhead and the best use of resources, such as around-the-clock schedules for teams whose members extend beyond national boundaries and datelines. Regulatory compliance requires careful handling and full accountability with respect to dialog, documents and decision-making. The tools necessary to manage the structure and the texture of such a grand undertaking must therefore be robust and up to the task.

Figure 1. PlanView Enterprise, a PPM Tool, provides at-a-glance portfolio analysis.

Most large organizations today use tools known Project Portfolio Management (PPM) that support the ability to organize and manage a group of projects simultaneously using a highly structured approach. They track the elements of the work breakdown structure, including costs, timelines, milestones, risks, resources and other critical elements. Executives can then regularly review entire portfolios by monitoring the at-a-glance dashboard indicators ubiquitous in PPMs.

In banking, for instance, project portfolios are often global in scope, highly regulated and as detailed as snowflakes. PPM tools are used regularly to initiate, optimize, fine-tune and manage the process and performance.

Project Team Collaboration

Project portfolio managers rely heavily on the use of the PPM application’s highly structured format and easy-to-read dashboard indicators that display key metrics graphically. For project portfolio managers, the benefits of tools like PPM are obvious.

Dashboard project metrics are an effective tool to help management make decisions, such as on the selection of projects for portfolios, on resource management or on the alignment and compliance of projects with corporate goals and regulations. However numbers alone don’t play the whole tune. Another class of tools, called Project Team Collaboration (PTC) tools, provides centralized, secure storage of all manner of unstructured project content and objects (See Figure 2).

Figure 2. Project team collaboration tools (PCT) like EMC Documentum eRoom provide a centralized environment for sharing discussion and materials.

PTC tools focus on the interactive aspects of teamwork and offer tremendous support for logging and tracking the context-sensitive materials and iterative discussions that lead to project ideation and creation. Maintaining the collection of materials intact and available for review is more critical now than ever with shorter project cycles, smaller budgets and increasing regulatory governance and control.

EMC Documentum’s eRoom, for example, provides a virtual team work space to manage discussions about the project plan, issues, risks, and best practices. Its ability to support the various elements of project collaboration is essential to give breadth and depth to the project or portfolio and provide a fuller, richer sense of understanding. PTC products support the contextual element of projects in a superior fashion to PPMs but often lack the ability to support detailed operational reports.

Next month we will look at industry challenges for CPPM, based on some of the interviews Ann and I did as well as the evolution and application of CPPM today.

Ann M. Marcus is a Collaborative Strategies Analyst and Consultant focused on vendor collaboration strategies, collaboration in education, and knowledge management for virtual teams. She also provides product marketing, business development and editorial expertise and is a contributor to the Collaborative Strategies Advisory Services Group.

You wouldn’t think of a PDF document or an Excel worksheet as a collaborative tool. But thanks to Adobe and Advanced Reality, both of these applications are. In a recent meeting at Adobe, Jonathan Knowles of the company’s Intelligent Documents Division explained the company’s strategy. In this article we first examine how Adobe is tackling the collaborative needs of customers via Acrobat, intelligent documents, and document services. Then we turn our focus on Advanced Reality, talking to CEO Brian Hoogendam about his company’s JYBE web browser plug-in that supports co-browsing, chat, and remote PC operation.

You would not think of a PDF document or an Excel worksheet as collaborative tools. But thanks to Adobe and Advanced Reality, both of these applications are.

In a recent meeting at Adobe, we were briefed by Jonathan Knowles, Technology Strategist for the Intelligent Documents Division at Adobe. Intelligent documents is the division that acquired Accelio (formerly Jetform) a few years ago and now have re-written and integrated that workflow technology into the new version of Acrobat 7.0.

Collaboration at Adobe falls into three categories:

PDF is really a presentation component and a document container, but Adobe has expanded its capabilities to now store business logic, forms, calculations, variables, security checks, and XML transport schemas. As part of the new release of Acrobat, Adobe Form Designer (a drag and drop) forms tool was included, and enables end-user creation of XML forms, for a variety of workflow types.

Adobe claims to have 1/2 billion copies of the Adobe reader in use. The company also has expanded PDF to work offline, and to deal with both connected and transactional relationships. This also means that they can work outside the firewall, or even if the computer the PDF document is on is not connected.

Most of collaboration for Adobe is around review, markup and approval, and has a lot to do with workflows for these processes. Adobe has also created a "Policy Server" to organize and control a document through it’s whole life cycle, and includes functions around encryption, access, audit,etc. PDF can even include intelligent 2D barcodes (you mostly see this when you print out your boarding pass for an airplane).

Adobe considers PDF a de-facto standard, but nevertheless they are on ISO committees to create new standards in this area. PDF/E (for exchange) is a standard that is emerging and should be ratified by next year, which looks at document exchange, review, markup, and approval for CAD documents. Since Jonathan came from Autodesk, it was not a surprise to see that Adobe has an interest in the AEC market and is making PDF more able to deal with AEC content types.

What is nice about these PDF documents is that you can make almost any kind of document into a PDF. Adobe showed us a CAD diagram drawn in AutoCAD, where a user that did not have AutoCAD could review and make changes to the document without having the AutoCAD application. The ability of a PDF document to support this has some far reaching implications, besides everyone having to have a version of the application to deal with application content. In addition the PDF container, as an intelligent container it provides support for policies, security, page numbering (you can have a variety of different document formats in one PDF document), headers and footers, etc. for that document, no matter what is in it.

Adobe even claims that it can enforce security on a PDF document, even when the document is on a computer that is not connected. This seems a bit magical to me, but I don’t believe Adobe would claim this if it could not do it.

Collaborative Documents

Since PDF is an intelligent container that is focused on the display and printing of documents, and Adobe seems to be moving in the direction of collaboration through some of these acquisitions (Accelio, and more recently OKYZ’s 3D collaboration technology), it was not a great leap for us to ask when Adobe was going to have a blogging tool. The question kind of surprise them, but we could see that it is a logical direction for them to move in, and although we did not get a definitive answer, I believe that Adobe will announce a blogging tool, or PDF blogging functionality, sometime in calendar 2005 or early 2006.

With that question out of the way, I took things to the next step and asked when they would support web conferencing. (Which to me is a logical extension of the current way they use PDF to display a document — why not enable it to display the document at the same time to several people in different locations?) Again, a look of surprise, and no real confirmation of that direction, but if I were Adobe, I would seriously be looking in that direction! Our expectation is that in early-to-mid 2006 there will be an Adobe product that supports real-time group document editing, annotation, markup, etc., and that it will probably be linked to their current workflow and forms technology.

Application-Based Collaboration

We also were briefed recently by Brian Hoogendam, the CEO at Advanced Reality, a venture-backed collaboration start-up in Texas. Advanced Reality is a company we had talked to before, when they had release their Excel product, which allowed people to collaborate through Excel, and if you were working on a budget with someone, this was a great solution. Advance Reality also has tools that allow you to share and collaborate through other Microsoft products: Share Point and PowerPoint.

Advanced Reality has come up with another tool to use in collaboration: the browser. Now this might not seem like much, but their JYBE plug-in for IE or even FireFox browsers allows co-browsing, chat, and the ability to do "remote control" (if given permission) on another PC. The beauty of the Advance Reality tools is that there is no training, because you are already using an application you know. Their philosophy is that collaboration should occur in the context of what you are working on and in the applications you work with. We at CS agree with that statement and take it a step further to say that collaboration should occur within the process your working in and should include any applications that you work on within the process.

In any case, with pop-up blockers disabled we were able to install a simple toolbar and I and two other CS analysts were able to use JYBE to view a variety of different web pages, including the Collaborate.com site. Although we often use Glance internally to share documents in real-time, JYBE is a bit different from Glance, in that Glance is a screen sharing tool, and sometimes it is a bit slow in painting my screen on the other person’s PC. This is not true with JYBE, and everyone’s screen was instantly available. Although JYBE is not a web conferencing tool like WebEx or Raindance, it can be used for free web conferencing, or as we like to call it an "e-meeting."

E-Meetings On the Web

An e-meeting, as we define it, involves a small number of people (2-6) and is secure and highly interactive. JYBE supports all of these e-meeting characteristics. While I would use JYBE for an e-meeting, I probably would not for an e-Presentation (more of a one to many paradigm, with much less interaction and security). JYBE is free, and the beta version is available for download at www.jybe.com. It is available as a service or can be bought by an enterprise, and in this configuration works with LDAP and Active Directory.

In addition, JYBE allows more than application viewing (like Glance) but allows application sharing if the applications are web (browser) based. Because it supports a hybrid architecture (both P2P and client/server), it could be used for live help responses for a help desk, or live blogging, and has the ability to extend presence awareness, so that you can ask someone to join you in an e-meeting or collaboration.

Summary

Both Adobe and Advanced Reality are reacting to the need of users to have collaborative tools that support interactions within a specific context or process. Adobe is taking one approach, Advanced Reality another, but both approaches support collaboration through an application, usually eliminating training time, and ensuring a common context for the interaction. We expect to see this type of application-based collaboration from Microsoft also, as the company moves more and more to embed collaboration functionality into its rich "Office" applications. We expect to see this later this year in Office 12. Although it will be implemented somewhat differently from Advanced Reality, it will certainly give them a run for their money.