This issue contains ideas on the different kinds of collaborative applications you can build for your product or buy for your company’s or team’s use.

For the past few weeks I have been researching collaboration and how it is impacting project teams and also business as a whole. Collaboration is not new; it has always been the practice of working together. What is new is the use of IP or Internet based tools as a means of opening up new ways to collaborate, ways that address today's business styles. Here is a quick look at how these tools are impacting how work gets done.

Opportunities...

Meeting replacement is one of the most competitive areas. These tools use the Internet to provide virtual meeting spaces. The meetings would generally share a document (often PowerPoint) with a small number of participants.  Also common are meetings for large numbers of participants in "lecture mode" with the interactions controlled by a moderator. Examples of these tools include www.eroom.com,  www.groove.net,  www.webex.com, www.placeware.com, www.spectel.com, and many others.

Product Design companies such as www.rational.com have promoted collaborative software development and have products that deliver the promise. Because of the large team sizes involved in many software development projects, most software tool companies have been delivering collaborative solutions for as long as ten years. Since these tools predate most collaborative offerings and software teams are familiar with these types of tools, using these software development tools may have provided the inspiration for building virtual meeting companies.

For mechanical design www.solidworks.com and www.ptc.com have features for design collaboration and publishing. Their tools are designed to integrate into the design and/or selling process. These tools provide solutions to the increasingly global project teams and customer partners by providing tools that make it easier to work together synchronously or asynchronously on specifications, designs and reviews.

Customer Service and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) are hot topics as companies struggle to improve their customers’ satisfaction with support. Companies are always looking for ways to better serve customers and to lower the costs of great service. High end, all-inclusive companies such as www.peoplesoft.com compete to provide company-wide solutions while many midsize companies such as www.rightnow.com provide narrower solution spaces. I saw an early example of great customer service about 10 years ago when a map kiosk at Walt Disney World switched to a live videoconference when I touched a "more-info button" on the interactive display.

Selling using these new tools is a hot application. Many of the meeting replacement tools are used extensively during the selling process. This application is driven by both buyers and sellers.

Sales calls cost several hundred to a few thousand dollars each which motivates lower cost solutions. Most potential customers would rather get their information asynchronously off of the Internet to at least pre-screen a company before committing time to talk with a salesperson. Additionally, companies find it more cost efficient to talk to a customer who has read some product info on the web. Moving to collaborative selling is indeed a win-win for company and customer (although it is hard on the golf game).

Everyone wants to get a product selected or a sale made with less cost, and asynchronous availability of product data, presentations, and training via a virtual meeting lowers everybody's costs. Technologies such as Flash can build a six-minute over-the-internet asynchronous sales presentations with narration, text, graphics, animation, and product simulation into a 1.5MB file. Online presentation development companies include www.presentek.com, and probably hundreds of local advertising and technology companies.

The meeting replacement tools mentioned above are always useful for impromptu or scheduled sales meetings, but my warning stands… reading a prospect's body language is critically important to a salesperson. Collaborative tools without visual presence or having met the person on the other end of the conference can easily allow a sales team to misread a prospect, or a prospect to misread a company.

Project Management teams benefit from many of these solutions. Projects and teams require meetings to build consensus and communicate directions with team members located all over the world. Meeting replacement and selling collaboration tools both help project teams. Most project management collaboration tools also support sharing of project PERT charts, documentation review, document management, and provide a complete project-manager working environment. Midrange project management solution providers include www.onproject.com, www.projectdesk.net and www.planonthenet.com. A provider of high-end project management solutions is www.frametech.com

My caveat here is the same as for sales calls; having a manager or team member report on their work in person allows the reviewers to judge the complete communication of words, conviction, and body language. Slides can be carefully worded to dance around project problems but a live interactive discussion is far more revealing.

Short Messages is the segment that includes a variety of devices. AIM (AOL instant messenger), messaging PDA devices such as www.blackberry.com, and cell phones are the dominant players.

This segment clearly has the most users... AIM claims 100 million registered names. While many users are teenagers with multiple addresses (mine included) there are large numbers of business users. It is common to use your AIM buddy list see who might be in their office, coordinate an informal meeting, or coordinate leaving for lunch. Assistants locate people with AIM and many people use AIM to get a question answered by an associate while they are still on the phone with the person who caused the question.

Since Blackberry is wireless, it is the ultimate tool to find out if someone is really coming to a meeting or to get a short question answered.

I believe that cell phone messaging is the up and coming player in this segment. Most new cell phones can send or receive messages up to 128 characters in length. Since most folks already carry a cell phone, this is a convenient and natural application.

All of these devices also have to contend with unsolicited messages. Unfortunately during the last week I have received my first SPAM on both AOL instant messenger and my cell phone.

The risk with this kind of communication is that since a typical knowledge worker requires 15 minutes to get into deep thought, an instant message every 15 minutes will prevent their working productively and they will eventually turn the instant messaging off. If you haven't used AIM, go to www.aim.com and try it; my AIM address is companysmithinc.

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If You are Using Collaborative Tools...

I am writing in-depth about collaboration and would like to hear about your experiences with collaborative tools; good, bad, or indifferent. I am particularly interested in hearing from you if you are using collaboration in a manner not discussed above, or if you are using Internet-based collaborative tools in a manufacturing environment.  To contact me...

If you have a particular interest in this subject, please click on the "edit" link at the end of your copy of my email newsletter and put a checkmark in the "Collaboration" category. This group will receive additional ideas on collaboration.