Collaboration without borders

By Chris Harris-Jones

The rise of suites of collaboration software tools over the past few years implies that collaboration has become a fully integrated set of activities. However, I personally view the suites as collections of useful, but largely independent, tools rather than truly integrated suites.

For example, there are many options for communication – instant messaging, text messaging, email, discussion groups, blogs, wikis, bulleting boards, project workspaces and more. One user will select one to use, but others will prefer to use different modes of communication.

This results in discussions in which multiple modes of communication are used, stored in various locations and often buried in different projects. There will be overlaps and unresolved disagreements, which need to be rationalised.

Collaboration suites focus on technologies. The problem is that users don’t. They just want to get their work done. The focus needs to be upon the factors central to collaboration, enabling the user to identify content by who is involved, the subject and the context at the very least. This would also enable topics of interest to be easily retrieved.

IBM and Microsoft have made interesting moves towards addressing the problem of making tools within their suites more interoperable with one another.

IBM has introduced the concept of activity-centric collaboration with Activity Explorer, part of IBM’s Workplace Managed Client. This enables users to collect together activities so that a task, such as develop presentation’, can be created. This can then be used to create the first draft of the presentation, hold discussions on its development recorded as part of the activity and thereby save the completed thread of discussion as a single unit.

Another significant change is the addition of ‘activity presence’, identifying if a piece of content is currently being edited within an activity thread. This enables users to start instant messaging (IM) sessions at the point when a colleague is engaged in a task in the activity thread, which gives an interesting new use of the presence concept.

Microsoft Office Communicator now delivers improved integration between many of its synchronous communication methods. Voice over IP (VOIP) can connect directly to a public switched telephone network (PSTN) gateway, enabling a seamless use of VoIP and the public telephone network.

It is also possible to swap between communications modes very easily. If you initiate an IM session with one person, it is possible to add a new participant and convert the interchange directory into a conference call. The server directly calls each person automatically on their preferred method of communication.

These developments are a very welcome improvement to the integration of collaboration technologies and we can expect to see more of them over the next couple of years – and not before time.

But there is an essential second level of integration to be addressed between the collaboration suites of different vendors. It is not unusual to find multiple collaboration tools in larger organisations, so at some point these different suites will need to work together. This is even more likely if you work across corporate boundaries with suppliers, clients and so on.

However, if I set up a discussion group, a project workspace, or any one of a whole set of collaboration tools, in one collaboration suite then the only way others can contribute effectively is by using the same tool. There is no way for multiple workspaces to inter operate together. With the absence of any real integration between suites the most commonly used solution is for the collaborating parties to use just one of the tools. That often means extra licences are required and will certainly mean that some people will have to learn a new piece of software. But if I want to e-mail (or phone) I don’t need to worry about the technology the recipient is using. Why shouldn’t this be the case for collaboration suites, too?

The main problem is the absence of any widely agreed standards. E-mail uses recognised standards and interoperability between systems works very well. IM is moving in this direction, too. But there is still no such thing as ‘universal IM’ because vendors have their own versions of the session initiation protocol (SIP) and SIP for instant messaging and presence leveraging extensions (SIMPLE) standards.

There are standards for calendaring that are gaining acceptance very slowly, most notably iCalendar (iCal) and WebDAV (CalDAV) – both from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). ICal defines a standard for exchanging information between calendaring systems, and CalDAV (currently in draft) defines an access method for calendars based on HTTP and WebDAV. However as anyone who has tried to synchronise calendars using iCal will know, current implementations are often far from perfect.

Another standard some organisations are using is network news transfer protocol (NNTP). This can be used to transfer text items between systems, but it is not a collaboration-specific standard – a ‘work around’, rather than a true collaboration exchange. It is also intended as an off-line synchronisation method rather than a real-time transfer.

There are many other initiatives, but these are too partisan for industry-wide agreement and therefore full inter-operability. Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine that collaboration spaces will be fully interoperable in fewer than five years, given industry interests and the speed at which standards naturally evolve. So at present you will just have to select your collaboration tool and hope others are happy to work with your choice – which is scarcely satisfactory.

Chris Harris-Jones is research director at IT industry research company Ovum Research.

www.ovum.com