August 23, 2005

For many years now, email has been an effective tool that requires no training and can provide virtually instant communications in the the B2B marketplace. However, the problem is that email does have its limitations.

While powerful and versatile, email isn't secure across organizational boundaries, and provides very little structure for teams to work together. As the volume of email increases, important items are increasingly lost in a sea of information.

Keeping track of approvals or the latest version of documents is difficult if not impossible. The bottom line is that email is an ineffective tool for team collaboration. The solution to the business need for managing communication exists, and it is surprisingly effective.

Workgroups and teams are increasingly finding the answer to the email dilemma in the form of collaborative workspaces.

These tools have been around for a few years and have proven to be extremely valuable, particularly in facilitating project-based communication. Workspaces compile powerful collaboration tools in a single integrated environment.

This usually includes functionality for file management, calendar and contact management, and real-time collaboration tools like presence detection, instant messaging and web conferencing. There may also be tools to allow for the development of custom forms for defining and managing business processes. The result is a powerful environment that enables teams to work together across geographic and organizational boundaries.

While workspaces are proving to be remarkably useful business tools, we have only begun to tap their power. The ability for teams to be more productive is magnified when workspaces become part of an end-to-end business process.

New features are emerging that change workspaces from standalone tools to powerful functionality embedded directly within business applications and designed to manage resulting content as a true corporate asset. For example, consider how a team might collaborate on a sales proposal with this new generation of workspace technology.

The first difference is that the proposal process is started directly within the sales force automation (SFA) application, so the sales executive does not need to switch context and start a new application.

The workspace is instantiated and it is based on a pre-defined template that the company uses to ensure consistency in its proposal generation process.

Since the SFA application already knows the customer, the opportunity and the account team, the workspace is pre-seeded with relevant background materials and the team has already been provisioned.

Presence detection allows the on-line status of the team to be displayed, and embedded IM and voice over IP allow team members to communicate in real-time. Additionally, team members can discuss key items using threaded discussion technology that allows teams to collaborate even when they are not all online at the same time.

As the team works through revisions of the proposal, feedback can be gathered immediately through the use of embedded web conferencing. All revisions are kept in a content management section of the workspace.

When a final version of the document is ready for approval, a pre-defined approval process can be started. This ensures that the approval process is followed even when team members might not be thoroughly familiar with the process.

Upon final approval, a number of things can happen automatically. First, the workspace may be retired and the assets in the workspace can be placed under policy management.

Of course, we already know that this is a proposal and the company has policies in place to handle completed proposals. The proposal is placed under records management because the company maintains all proposals for a pre-determined period of time in case any future issues should arise. This substantially lowers risk to the company that can arise from uncontrolled content in the enterprise.

Also, the proposal is made available to all corporate users that might need to access it later. Since the document is generated from within the SFA application, it is permanently tagged with rich metadata that allows for more accurate searches. This allows the enterprise to make full use of this valuable corporate asset as needed in the future. All of this happens automatically and does not require any user intervention.

Workspaces continue to mature as a key piece of productivity software. As they evolve into true solutions with the ability to work with business applications, drive and enforce business processes and manage resulting information for policy and as records, workspaces will become mission critical applications that are as important to business as email is today.

Article by Rob Koplowitz,
Senior director, Oracle Corp.
Source: Line 56