Team SpiritTeam Spirit

Tammy Sweat-Chipman, I.T. director for phone-book publisher Phone Directories Co., wants to make better use of collaboration technologies. She wants to not only help dispersed teams work together more effectively but also tie collaborative capabilities to business processes.

Phone Directories, which didn't even have an intranet a year ago, now has one built on Oracle Collaboration Suite. One portlet that's scheduled to go live next month will make available shared document and file repositories and feature version control and integrated workflows. Other planned portlets will let employees track advertising artwork and pull sales-force updates into a Web conference or Oracle workspace. Everything will be accessed and viewed over the intranet portal, which is becoming the primary work environment for the company.

"If you're an employee of this company, you have one place to get information and collaborate," Sweat-Chipman says. It takes the guessing out of finding expertise and will make the $53 million-a-year company more agile, adaptive, effective, and, ultimately, more profitable, she says. "It's going to move this company to the next level."

It's no longer enough to collaborate in an isolated silo, no matter how accessible that silo may be. Rather, collaboration is a critical part of many companies' software infrastructures. Last week, a slew of vendors introduced new or updated collaboration products that address that trend. Documentum Inc.'s eRoom collaborative workspace software includes custom tools for tapping into enterprise applications and will soon get XML connectors for that purpose. ERoom also now has the ability to search across multiple workspaces. Groove Networks Inc. partnered with project-management software vendor TeamDirection Inc. to launch a project-management version of its peer-to-peer workspace software. And next month, Intraspect Software Inc. will begin selling tools that let companies build workspace communities into corporate portals, allowing for single-sign-on access beyond corporate firewalls and creating more flexible access to workspaces.

The latest version of Oracle Collaboration Suite, released last week, has real-time Web conferencing that includes whiteboarding, co-browsing, desktop sharing, and chat, all designed to integrate with the suite's other tools and with companies' Oracle databases. Oracle also added a customized workflow-building engine and the ability to access corporate directory listings from cell phones.

Looming in the background is Microsoft, which last week renamed its Real-Time Communications Server 2003. Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003, as the software is now known, will tap the infrastructure components of Windows Server 2003--security, identity management, directory services, and rights management--to make presence awareness available to other Microsoft collaboration tools, including Windows Sharepoint Services, Exchange Server, and Sharepoint Portal Server. Microsoft group VP Jeff Raikes last week said the trend is to shift from document-centric productivity to team productivity using those products with Microsoft's Office 2003 apps, due this fall.

Web services will play a key role in furthering the integration of collaborative features into enterprise apps. The strategy at IBM Lotus is to create collaboration-service modules, such as workspaces, that will be delivered as Web services. IBM is taking a step in that direction this week by saying that the new version of its WebSphere Portal software, due next month, will ship with its Collaboration Center, a set of Web services that can be used to access features from the Lotus suite, such as Web conferencing, presence awareness, instant messaging, and group workspaces, via a WebSphere-built portal. Microsoft is talking with PeopleSoft Inc. and Siebel Systems Inc. about using Web-services standards to integrate Live Communications Server into their enterprise applications. But Oracle's suite of established enterprise apps gives it a big advantage, says Daniel Rasmus, VP of collaboration and knowledge management at Forrester Research. "They've got a great opportunity to be the first to take a services approach to bringing collaboration into their own applications," he says.

The integration enhancements to Documentum's eRoom may be a good start for companies that want tighter links between their collaborative software and enterprise apps. Bausch & Lomb Inc., the $1.8 billion-a-year maker of eye-care products, has made eRoom the centerpiece of its collaborative product-development strategy. By automatically generating project workspaces for each product team, the company has cut 20% off its development time line, says Paul Loda, director of new product development.

Having a unified, top-level view of all the pieces of a product in development has brought numerous benefits, including more-efficient compliance with Food and Drug Administration requirements, but it isn't enough. "What's next is a project-portfolio management piece," Loda says. That would let Bausch & Lomb integrate its collaborative product-development platform with its supply-chain and other enterprise systems to create an integrated planning tool that could be used to manage re- sources, finances, and people. Loda says he hopes eRoom's integration enhancements will make that possible.

Carlson Wagonlit Travel Inc. is letting more people author and publish projects from TeamDirection to a Web-based view of Microsoft Project via Groove's software. "We're getting a lot more feedback, and a lot more projects are being entered into the system," says Daniel Oertli, IT director of the company's Australian operations. Before, that would have required buying desktop licenses of Microsoft Project for every team member at a cost of up to four times that of Groove and TeamDirection software.

But Oertli also wants to see Groove and TeamDirection create triggers for enterprise processes, such as using XML messages to spur transactions within an enterprise resource planning system. "We're seeing a crossover between project-management tools and business-process management systems," he says.

Oertli may have to wait a bit longer. It will be awhile before collaboration software is so tightly tied to a company's infrastructure, says Forrester analyst Rasmus, but vendors are "starting to think about it." And that's good news for companies that want to make collaboration central to the way they do business. --With John Foley