Big Three: What Microsoft, Lotus, And Oracle Are Up ToBig Three: What Microsoft, Lotus, And Oracle Are Up To

There are lots of powerful collaboration tools made by small vendors, but from this point forward, the market likely will revolve around Microsoft, IBM Lotus, and, to a lesser extent, Oracle. Here's what they're working on:

Microsoft: When it raises the curtain on the Real-Time Communications Server this summer, Microsoft promises an infrastructure tool designed to make instant messaging and the key technology underlying it--presence awareness, or the ability to detect others' online availability--a pervasive part of business. "Presence is going to make its way into every application that's collaborative or communications-centric," says Gurdeep Singh Pall, general manager of Microsoft's real-time collaboration group. "The sooner companies adopt presence, the sooner they'll realize productivity gains." The catch: Companies that want to run the RTC Server will have to run Windows Server 2003 on the vendor's Active Directory architecture.

Lotus: It has the most complete suite of collaborative tools on the market, and it's breaking those tools into components so they can be exposed as Web services, thus making its Domino messaging server and application-development environment more compatible with its WebSphere E-business and integration tools. It's also rolling out a Lotus Workplace product line, a suite of Web-based tools built on Java 2 Enterprise Edition that's touted as a less costly way to extend collaboration and messaging to workers without access to a computer. The first of these tools, Lotus Workplace Messaging, hit the market in January. The goal of creating components is to let customers buy only the tools they need and to make them easier to deploy, such as being able to drag and drop a collaboration capability like presence awareness into an application, says Lotus general manager Ambuj Goyal.

Oracle: After a lackluster launch of the Oracle Collaboration Suite last summer, the company hopes real-time capabilities in a second version this year will sparkle. The current version has the usual messaging tools and some lightweight collaboration capabilities. The updated version will be Web services-ready and will feature presence, online meetings, shared browsing, chat, and white boarding. Expect Oracle to play up fears that Microsoft forces customers to adopt upgrades. But Oracle's greatest potential is probably selling collaboration tools to its customers. That's not a bad start: Gartner predicts Oracle will own as much as 20% of the collaboration market by 2006.