Two Approaches to Collaboration

If you have decided that your collaboration strategy will focus on a suite approach as opposed to best-of-breed technologies, then you will most likely take a hard look at IBM and Microsoft to meet your needs. Both IBM and Microsoft have produced a suite of integrated technologies that deliver a collaboration functionality that addresses all four of the collaboration pillars. Microsoft delivers collaboration functionality in a combination of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007/ Exchange and IBM delivers the functionality in a combination of Quickr, Connections, and Lotus Notes/Domino.

Four Pillars of Collaboration
• The Messaging Pillar enables teams and individuals to communicate and manage their interactions in a formal, auditable manner. This includes email, calendaring, scheduling, and contact management.

• The Real-Time Collaboration Pillar is more focused on ad-hoc communications providing the team with the capability to easily initiate a real-time conversation between one or more individuals. This includes Instant Messaging, Web Conferencing, and Unified Communications capabilities

• The Team Collaboration Pillar provides the content management services that collect, store, and manage the documents that are pertinent to the team’s activity. This can include document management, ad-hoc workflow, and basic project management.

• The final Pillar, Social Networking, represents the newest pillar in the collaboration house. This pillar provides a way for teams and individuals to share knowledge not only within the team, but to be able to reach out to an extended group for their input and feedback. Technologies in the pillar can include Blogs, Wikis, RSS, and Tagging.

IBM Collaboration Capabilities
The Lotus brand showcases IBM collaboration solutions. For those of us who remember Lotus 123 and early versions of Notes, much has changed. They have revamped nearly their entire line of products and have added new collaboration products.
• Messaging– Lotus Notes and Domino Server provide all functionality in the messaging pillar. Their latest release sports a brand new interface and deeper integration to their collaboration products

• Real Time Collaboration – IBM offers instant messaging and Web conferencing with Sametime and Sametime Unyte. The platform offers secure instant messaging and Web conferences. The instant messaging client lets you interact with a variety of other IM systems through a gateway.

• Team Collaboration – Lotus Quickr fills the team collaboration niche with a variety of features that include file sharing, team calendars, team tasks, blog, wiki, RSS feeds, contacts, lists, and discussion forums. One of the most exciting new features in Quickr is their connector approach to integration. These connectors include:

o Windows/Office Connectors
o Lotus Notes/Microsoft Outlook Connectors
o Sametime Connector
o Connections Integration

• Social Networking – Lotus Connections and its hosted cousin LotusLive represent a relatively new product release. This tool models the non-business social software tools like Facebook, Delicious, and MySpace by putting them into a business context. The tool boasts 7 modules:
o Profiles – Update your profile, network with others, follow what others are doing, etc.
o Community – Share information with those of like minds through a community.
o Bookmarks – Like Delicious, you can tag information and make that tag public. This can provide huge improvements in search because the tags make it easier to content and people
o Blogs – Simple and straightforward tool to publish your content
o Activities – Very flexible tool to share ad hoc tasks among a large group. With the connectors, you can put emails, instant messages, and files right next to the tasks in context
o Files – Share files among your communities
o Wikis – Share web-based information among your communities

Microsoft’s MOSS 2007 Collaboration Capabilities
Microsoft addresses collaboration with three products, Outlook/ Exchange, SharePoint, and Unified Communications Server. These products deliver the four pillars of collaboration in a highly integrated model, often creating a seamless user experience.
• Messaging– this capability is addressed with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. The combination of Exchange and Outlook provides a integrated suite of messaging functionality

• Real Time Collaboration – Microsoft delivers this capability with their Unified Communications Server. This suite of functionality provides instant messaging, Web conferencing, presence and integration with Outlook, SharePoint, and Telephony systems.

• Team Collaboration – SharePoint is the primary delivery vehicle for the Team Collaboration functionality from Microsoft. SharePoint provides

o Team Calendars
o Team Contacts
o Announcements
o Meeting Management
o Outlook Integration
o Document Management
o Content and Document Workflow
o Task Management

• Social Networking – Microsoft delivers social networking using the functionality contained in SharePoint. SharePoint provides
o Blogs
o Wikis
o Discussion Groups
o Personalization through MySites
o User Profiling. The integration with Active Directory provides an easy way to provide employee lookups and profile searches.

Selecting the right solution for your company is a difficult task as both IBM and Microsoft have developed collaboration capabilities that can meet the needs of most organizations. Key decision points will center around your strategic direction on messaging and architecture platform. Those focused on Microsoft Exchange and/or .Net will likely look towards Microsoft for their collaboration needs. For those organizations that have standardized on Notes/Domino will find IBM’s direction as a better fit. Also, we are seeing organizations that are standardized on J2EE as a development standard being bettered aligned with the IBM solutions.

Michael Porter, Michael.Porter@Perficient.com, is a Principal, Portal and Collaboration for Perficient. Michael has more than 15 years working with technology and helping customer meet their content management, portal, and collaboration needs. He has worked with many clients in understanding and defining how to align business needs to the available technologies.

Alan Weintraub ( alan.weintraub@perficient.com) is a Principal, ECM Solutions for Perficient ( www.perficient.com). Alan has extensive experience in all phases of Enterprise Content Management solution implementations. He has worked as a Research Director at Gartner, focusing on the Content and Document Management markets and a consultant where he designed and implemented document management systems. Prior to his consulting experience Alan engaged in technology management for major pharmaceutical companies. He has over twenty five years of experience in the information systems profession.