Feature

posted 31 Jan 2007 in Volume 3 Issue 7

Cover feature

Working together

Managing the production of co-authored documents can be an onerous task. Thankfully, there has never been a greater choice of tools to help the process run smoothly.

By Jessica Twentyman

Anyone who regularly collaborates with colleagues and clients to create co-authored business documents usually has a few horror stories to recount: endless conference calls between multiple authors; hours spent reconciling different versions; amendments that mysteriously go astray and are never incorporated into the finished document.

In fact, employees may spend up to 25 per cent of their working day on non-productive document collaboration tasks, according to a new report from the Butler Group. “That’s not time spent on creating and revising content,” says Butler Group analyst Richard Edwards. “That’s time spent on non-productive work – looking for the right versions, making sure documents are sent to the right people, working out how best to apply comments and flag errors, formatting content to suit house style and so on.”

That situation is untenable for most organisations, he adds. “Technology issues, business constraints and information formats all combine to make the job of document collaboration a much more arduous task than it should be. But documents, in whatever format they exist, are an integral part of every business and institution. Therefore the efficacy with which documents are created, revised and published should be of the utmost importance to business managers.”

The fact is that, until recently, the available technology simply wasn’t up to the task of making document collaboration available beyond an organisation’s four walls. But in recent years, says Edwards, the environment of the information worker has changed considerably. “The office is no longer a fixed location or a dedicated room within a building: the office is any place where the employee creates, shares and stores information, and collaborates with colleagues, partners, customers and others on projects and business processes,” he says.

As a result, document collaboration tools need to play catch-up, making it possible for teams of authors situated in any location and time zone to write, review and edit documents together.

For many large organisations, this problem is most commonly solved by their current enterprise-content management (ECM) supplier. In fact, document-collaboration tools may account for as much as 40 per cent of the $1.46bn market for ECM tools, according to Edwards. Products include EMC Documentum’s eRoom Collaboration, Open Text’s LiveLink ECM Collaboration and Stellent’s Collaboration Management (now owned by Oracle).

Take, for example, WSP Group, one of Europe’s largest engineering and management consultancies. It recently invested in an end-to-end ECM platform from EMC Documentum at a cost of some £2m ($3.9m). That system will be rolled out to about 2,800 users across 39 offices in the UK in four phases that will take around two years, according to enterprise-applications manager Sophie Ashdown.

As well as better management of e-mails, one of the key aims of the project is to speed up bid response times by making it far easier for WSP consultants to work together on vital bid documents, explains Ben Richmond, managing director of the Content Group, the systems integrator working with WSP to implement the software.

The EMC Documentum eRoom modules integrate a shared digital workplace for documents with web- conferencing capabilities, Richmond explains. This creates a shared environment where active meeting participants can share applications, desktops, whiteboarding and annotation tools during meetings and conduct public and private chat conversations with each other. Participants can also save new versions of content from meetings directly into eRoom and capture snapshots of web-conference meeting highlights and annotations. Control of the meeting, meanwhile, can be passed from person to person as appropriate.

“The software should be fully rolled out at WSP by the end of 2007 and it will really change the way the company’s employees, customers and partners work together on bid documents, drawings and plans as if they were all gathered around a conference table in the same room – regardless of where they are in the world,” Richmond explains.

Not just ECM

But a full, enterprise-class content- management platform is not a prerequisite for document collaboration. The release of the 2007 Microsoft Office system, for example, provides organisations with an opportunity to consider their requirements for document collaboration, “as the release of new programs, servers and services offers information workers new ways of working,” says Edwards.

For enterprise-level document collaboration, most organisations should consider the Office Groove 2007 product, suggests Darren Strange, UK manager for the Microsoft Office 2007 product line. A Groove user can create a workspace and invite other people to it, he says, and all participants are sent a copy of the workspace, which is installed on their hard drive. Data is encrypted both on disk and over the network, with each workspace having a unique set of cryptographic keys, of course, so that they can decrypt the data instantly.

“In this way, collaboration over Groove is very, very secure. But it’s also a very efficient way of collaborating because it keeps all the copies synchronised over the internet, providing a consistent document across a virtual team. When one participant makes a change to their copy of the document, only the binary difference is sent across the network of users – that makes it a low-bandwidth way to collaborate,” he says.

Integration between Groove and Microsoft’s SharePoint content-management environment, meanwhile, means that users that collaborate on files in Office Groove 2007 can subsequently publish or archive them to SharePoint when they’re done. And integration with Office Communicator means that users can make a phone call or start an instant-messaging session from a Groove workspace, too.

However, Microsoft is not the only vendor offering new ways of collaborating on documents. A host of internet-based options are fast emerging that come with truly entry-level pricing.

Take, for example, Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Although this is a consumer rather than enterprise product, it is likely to be used in some small and medium-sized companies where employees need to collaborate on documents with colleagues and trading partners, says Edwards of the Butler Group.

Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets is offered as a single, free service available to anyone with a Google account. “Users can invite others to either edit or simply view documents and spreadsheets that they have created, making it easy to work with others without having to send e-mail attachments back and forth,” says Edwards. Other online services that are making the worldwide web an increasingly important environment for document collaboration include Confluence, FilesAnywhere and ThinkFree, he adds.

Wikis are another great example of document collaboration on a budget, says Erica Driver of IT market research company, Forrester Research. “In 2006, wikis entered the enterprise scene to provide an alternative way for groups, teams and communities – both within and across organizations – to jointly author, edit, and publish content and documents. Wikis enable multiple people to work together on a single edition of a piece of web content; participants can make edits to a wiki page, and all other users can immediately view the edits and make additional changes if they like. Until the arrival of wikis, tools enabling such close collaboration, in near real time, on a single version of a piece of content simply weren’t available,” she says.

Dozens of vendors offer standalone wiki tools today, she says – but some are more suited to enterprise use and offer richer functionality than others. Wiki tool vendors selling to enterprises, such as Atlassian Software Systems and CustomerVision, tend to provide features such as security (for example, access control, encryption and a permissions model); enterprise integration (directories, e-mail, instant messaging); a WYSIWYG [what you see is what you get] user interface; advanced search, tagging and organisation; configuration and customisation capabilities; application- programming interfaces [APIs] for integration; and language localisation.

But a wiki will not always be the most appropriate tool for document collaboration, says Driver. “If you’re looking for an exchange of views, wikis are not the best tool for airing opinions or carrying on conversations. A discussion forum or blog tool may be more appropriate. And peer review is not always the best solution for content management. Document-management systems with check-in/checkout and version control, as well as workflow for approval routing, are sometimes more appropriate,” she says. The message is clear: organisations need to understand when and where wikis will be of value – and where better established collaboration tools will provide a superior fit.

That may make for some interesting chats between information workers and the IT department, says Edwards of the Butler Group. “Whenever the phrase ‘document collaboration’ is mentioned, most IT people immediately start to think of intranets, electronic document-management systems, groupware solutions, corporate portals and all manner of other sophisticated software systems,” he says. “Mention the phrase to the typical information worker, however, and he will immediately start to think about people, locations, contributions, timescales and tasks.”

So while the IT community will often tend to focus on the physical elements of collaboration, that is answering the ‘With what?’ question; the typical employee within an organisation is dealing with the more logical ‘How will I…?’ part of the equation – and, at many organisations, it may take some time to reach a consensus.

Jessica Twentyman is consulting editor of EI and can be contacted by e-mailing jtwentyman@ark-group.com

A matter of standards

In May 2006, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approved a standard file format – OpenDocument Format (ODF) – to be used worldwide for the storage of files produced by office application software (word-processor documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings and so on).

“For the first time in the history of computing, software users will be guaranteed that they will be able to use their data in any compliant software package, both now and in the future,” says Richard Edwards, an analyst with the Butler Group.

However, while politics may well determine that support for ODF becomes de rigeur at some point in the future, Microsoft Office file formats will continue to be de facto standards for the time being.

For its part, Microsoft is sponsoring an open-source project to bridge the worlds of ODF and its rival Open XML file formats: ODF being the document file format used by the cross-platform, open-source suite of office applications maintained by Sun Microsystems, and Open XML being Microsoft’s alternative document format.

“The Open XML formats were developed to support existing and future Microsoft Office functionality and are considered by many to be in competition with ODF. But in reality, the Open XML and ODF file formats have been created with different uses in mind,” says Edwards. “The Open XML formats were designed to accommodate new features and functions in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, launched towards the end of 2007, while ODF was designed to accommodate traditional file exchange, records management and collaboration scenarios in a non-proprietary manner.”

Therefore, says Edwards, although to some the commitment from Microsoft to interoperability with ODF may sound like a story with a happy ending, he is not convinced. “To us, ODF is all about ‘content exchange’ and ‘readability’, whereas Open XML is more about ‘information exchange’ and ‘flexibility’. The differences may be subtle, but they are significant,” he says.

The goal of the open-source project is to build a set of document translation and conversion ‘add-ins’ for the various versions of Microsoft Word, which will then enable users to open and save ODF files. “Many European governments and public bodies are being encouraged to ‘do the right thing’ with regard to ODF, and so Butler Group would advise them to visit the project’s website for more up-to-date information,” says Edwards.

http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net

Table 1: Use the right authoring and content management tool

Content authoring/management environment: Blog tool

Characteristics: Tool for content authors to type up thoughts and post directly to a web page. Readers may have the option to respond, but they cannot change the author’s posts. Features include workﬂow, comment and trackback, spam management, a search engine, RSS feed aggregation and management, and community tools.

Use cases:

Reaching out to customers;
Fostering employee collaboration.

Content authoring/management environment: Document-management system

Characteristics: System that manages the complete lifecycle of business documents from collaborative authoring to archiving; key features include indexing, check-in/checkout, versioning, annotations, workﬂow, and lifecycle management.

Use cases:

Creating a document-audit trail;
Implementing editorial control over documents before publishing to the masses;
Maintaining a single version of the truth;
Providing a secure repository for document access and consumption.

Content authoring/management environment: Web-content management (WCM) system

Characteristics: Enables the collection, assembly, staging, maintenance and delivery of textual and graphic content for the primary purpose of disseminating information via the web and other online channels (for example, wireless, e-mail).

Use cases:

Managing and delivering content in customer-facing websites;
Managing content published in intranets and extranets through a speciﬁed group of authors.

Content authoring/management environment: Team collaboration tools

Characteristics: System that provides a team workspace, document repository, lightweight library services, (for example, version control, check-in/check-out), basic ad hoc workﬂow, discussion threads, and alerts and notiﬁcations. It may also provide real-time collaboration features like desktop sharing, presence awareness, chat and whiteboarding. Provides basic document- management features.

Use cases:

Central virtual meeting place and ﬁle cabinet for team members for duration of a project or through active usage of a particular document.

Content authoring/management environment: Wiki tool

Characteristics: Web-based content creation, editing, and publishing tool that enables any user with permissions to modify web pages created by themselves or others. Provides basic WCM features.

Use cases:

Frequently asked questions;
Meeting minutes and agenda building;
Collecting anonymous feedback;
Jointly authoring and editing group documents.

Content authoring/management environment: Office productivity tool

Characteristics: Software with WYSIWYG tools that enable an author to create a document that can be saved, attached to a message, forwarded to others and posted in repositories. Editing takes place asynchronously via annotations and markup tools, and consolidation of edits is manual.

Use cases:

Authoring documents that require speciﬁc structure or formatting.

Source: Forrester Research