Recent piece at InformationWeek by Tony Kontzer (brought to my attention by Hylton Jolliffe at Corante) highlights the explosion of technical advances that the leading collaboration players are making, and also prompts me to rant a bit about the near-term convergence of collaboration and business process technologies.
Does not get into great detail about the various technologies, providing snippets of info about Oracle Collaboration Suite (I am particularly intrigued by the workflow-ish features they are introducing, and the fact that they have not yet integrated IM: I am interviewing the VP of Development Friday, so next week I will know more), Groove's integration with TeamDirection (I have looked at it, but not in great detail -- basically it interoperates with Microsoft Project), Microsoft's chameleon-like name changing for the-technology-formerly-known-as-RTC (apparently now it will be called Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003, instead of Real-Time Communications Server 2003 (I wrote about this endless name-changing recently)), an update from Lotus (which doesn't sound like anything new, really), and some new news from Documentum re: eRoom technology (supporting XML-based integration with enterprise applications).
The thread emerging from all these announcements is a very interesting one. Collaboration systems are intended to support various sorts of communication in a more structured, persistant (usually), and content-rich fashion than telephone or email interactions. (Some lump email in as a collaboration tool, but unless email is supported by a collaborative infrastructure like Exchange or Notes, it is only marginally collaborative.)
Historically, collaboration systems have been relatively unintegrated to the more-or-less automated information chains within large companies: supply chain systems, or CRM tools, for example. I have long argued that the increasingly structured "communication chain" than is enabled by collaboration tools (including real-time tools, like IM and web conferencing) should be, and soon will be, integrated to the underlying information chains that are the bloodstream of today's business.
What we see emerging in these competitors' solutions is exactly the lineaments of what is to come: XML-based linkage between the information chains (largely an application-to-application, or application-to-person interaction) and the communication chains (person-to-person interactions).
Email-based or pager alerting solutions have been around for decades, but what is now appearing is much, much richer.
Communication chain management -- channeling human communication through sophisticated collaboration frameworks, and cross-linking that to mission critical workflows -- will lead to a small 'r' revolution in business operations. This will be the place where real-time communication (IM and its cousins) becomes the primary mechanism of synchronous communication, driven by presence and availability management. Presence and availability will become threaded into the business rules that control the flow of information and decision making in the enterprise, and people can be brought together in real-time to respond to time critical events. Slow-time collaboration -- people working together asynchronously -- is equally important, and will likewise need to be linked to the underlying information flows of the business. However, the acceleration of business that arises from real-time collaboration will trump the benefits form better slow-time collaboration, so I expect that to be the most significant element in the rise of communication chain management.
