Collaboration changes focus

Assessing the future of any technology is  difficult, but in the case of enterprise collaboration, it’s made easier by the dramatic evolution of tools and technologies that has taken place in recent years. For once, the future is now; it’s just going to take some time for the installed base to catch up with flexible and modular collaboration platforms. The transformation of ways in which people interact through and with computers may be as dramatic as the way the technology itself has developed.

Whatever the future of enterprise collaboration may hold, it will never be as dramatic a sea change as in the past. When Lotus Notes debuted in 1989, it was a radical departure from the prevailing norms of electronic collaboration. By combining rich development tools with the well-established concept of e-mail, it unleashed a flurry of competing attempts at developing the ICE (integrated collaboration environment).

Almost 15 years later, both user interfaces and back-end services have morphed to meet the needs of users. Integration seems to have given way to modularity. It’s fair to suggest that the most drastic change in the way people work together has been the expansion of IM, which has evolved from a rogue application that small workgroups might adopt on an ad hoc basis, into one of two important load-bearing walls of the collaborative ecosystem.

The more significant of these walls, e-mail, hasn’t gone away, and is more useful than ever, now that anyone with access to a computer — even folks who lack a fixed domicile — can be assumed to have at least one e-mail address. To complete the analogy, portals and Web conferencing form the other two walls of the collaboration structure and are just now coming into their own as user-provisioned parts of the ecosystem. These will undoubtedly see more widespread use if they can be deployed without putting an undue burden on already-stretched-thin IT staffs.

Some of the important changes to collaboration environments are transparent to the vast majority of users. For example, databases that store documents and mail have traditionally been built around so-called “flat” databases. Vendors claimed their products were so efficient that they didn’t require more complex relational database technologies. But that’s about to change, as vendors seek to improve the scalability of their offerings.

Oracle’s already there, using its renowned database as the store for its messaging system — although only a handful of customers have followed the Pied Piper of Redwood Shores. IBM’s DB2 will be supported in Version 7 of Lotus Domino, scheduled to ship next year; and somewhere around 2006, the Kodiak release of Microsoft Exchange and the SQL Server Yukon release will share a common database engine.

Another case of behind-the-scenes evolution is in the development tools used to fit each installation to the needs of its corporate users. Formerly, an integrated collaboration environment was defined by the inclusion of integrated development features that could make even relatively unskilled users feel like “real” application designers. But that’s no longer a taxonomical requirement; even IBM has seen the folly of maintaining multiple development environments and is making its Rational and WebSphere tools as friendly as Lotus Domino Designer.

Enabling the deskless