1.0.7- Enterprise Tools

Enterprise Tools

VTS tools have been evolving over the past decade, but their exact point of arrival is a bit difficult to track, as the category of technologies has been known by a variety of names. Portals, for example, is the term used to describe doorways into internal, employee-facing intranets that aggregated key internal information and made it easy to access, though not all team members knew how or were permitted to post information to these internal resource sites.

As it became evident that working with external entities across the supply chain or the customer base was of value to the organization, secure sites, called extranets, were developed that aggregated information for the group of internal and external participants on a project team. Getting to these sites, however, could be tricky if participants tried to login from a computer other than their own from a fixed location (often required a VPN (Virtual Private Network)). The latest iteration of VTS tools are wiki-based team spaces. These were designed to make it relatively easy for participants to access and modify shared material and since many of them are offered as a service the users often did not need IT involvement to get them up and running.

This is in contrast to many of the enterprise collaboration tools like IBM/Lotus Notes or Microsoft Sharepoint and Exchange. These enterprise-sized applications require IT department involvement to install, configure, and maintain these applications. They are designed to manage almost every imaginable need of collaborative teams—whether separated by cubicle walls or national borders, within and between organizations.

Intel’s SharePoint installation, for example, serves Intel’s 80,000 employees worldwide as well and extends to many thousands of external consultants, customers, and others entities in its supply chain, with gigabytes of multi-level security-protected information shared across the world.

These enterprise-based virtual team tools contrast sharply with Web 2.0-based applications, many coming from startups, that have low overhead, a low initial investment of money, take almost no time to learn, can serve small to large teams, and may even focus on a specific vertical or horizontal niche. Often these tools can be used for smaller applications and can be under the control of the user rather than IT.

A few such web-based applications include CoCreate’s OneSpace, for collaborative product engineering and development; Autodesk’s Constructware, for the construction industry; and Synchris’ Privia for collaboration in developing government contracts. For small vendors, specialization is a key differentiator in a market dominated by the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Cisco with products designed to serve the masses. But serving the masses is Web 1.0, Web 2.0 is focused on serving the individual or small group and dealing with the “long tail” as it is called.

All of these terms (VTS, DPM, etc.) refer, in a broad or specific way, to a virtual place for those working on common issues to “come together” electronically to share information. They often take the place of a physical teamwork space, offer secure persistent storage for actively shared materials, and provide a log of who said what and when, or who touched what object, and when or what they did to it. Since everyone must come to the common space it would be easy to provide a communication tutorial that goes way beyond how to use the technology.  The people aspect is about “how to use the technology tools more effectively.”

Typically, VTS tools have a core set of features, which include asynchronous communication (threaded discussions) and storage for various types and versions of shared documents such as schedules, drawings, photos, specifications, bills of materials, proposals and so forth. They usually include simple document management (including check-in/check-out and version control) and often integrate with some sort of real-time tool like IM/Chat or web conferencing. Beyond that, they may include options from a growing list of possible features.

Here is a listing of the product categories that fall under into the VTS tool category; they include both Web 1.0 and 2.0 tools.

·  Discussion/Bulletin boards (WebBoard, PhpBB)

·  Content/Document Management (Vignette Collaboration, ShareMethods)

·  Distributed Project Management (DPM) tools  (PlanView, Projity, Clarizen, eProject, CopperProject)

·  E-rooms, team rooms and e-collaboration tools (e-Room, Near-Time)

·  Groupware (IBM/Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, WebSphere Portal and IBM Workplace)

·  Intranets/extranets (Intranets.com now WebEx WebOffice (now Cisco), Intranet Connections.com)

·  Knowledge Management (Knexa, KnowAb, Tacit)

·  Online Community tools/spaces (Yahoo or Google Groups, q See Levine, Stewart, The Book of Agreement (San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler, 2002