Collaboration changes focus

Future of enterprise collaboration based on expanded reach, less reliance on all-in-one solutions

This is simply another sign of the maturity of enterprise collaboration. Although industry watchers foresee some ICE growth in Asian/Pacific markets, that growth will merely replace seats lost in other markets. The worldwide market is pretty much saturated (see chart, right). Where are the ICE seats from Europe and North America going?

In some cases, they’re simply going away, as enterprises eliminate layers of management or outsource operations to specialty service providers. In other instances, businesses that never fully embraced the application development features of ICEs find that their collaboration needs are better met by systems that offer simple e-mail and calendar management without the extra overhead of development environments.

Some vendors are approaching the trend toward lighter messaging systems as an opportunity to address the needs of the so-called deskless workers. These aren’t necessarily the shop floor worker or the bank teller, to cite two common examples. This term includes remote workers, people whose jobs involve heavy travel, and other categories where the end-user has access to a Web browser and wants the features available to him or her in the office but can’t run the traditional rich client. This flexible, lightweight model is a perfect fit, given the ubiquity of the Web browser. The genie of Web access to collaborative resources is out of the bottle, and vendors are embracing the concept as fast as their development cycles will permit.

For an example of this stampede, one need look no further than the meshing among Microsoft’s Exchange mail server, the Live Communication Server for IM, the Live Meeting Web conferencing service, and the SharePoint Portal Server, which enables Active Directory-based management, provisioning, and integration of IM technology into mail, meetings, and portals.

But Microsoft’s not the only player with a flexible, modular strategy built around a mix of rich clients and Web browsers. IBM and Novell offer similar product offerings: Big Blue’s portfolio includes an e-learning component, fleshing out its vision of what collaboration involves, whereas Novell’s is distinguished by the uniquely open Virtual Office, a portal that doesn’t tie the customer to a particular vendor’s database products.

Presence accounted for

All of the Big Three ICE vendors — IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, and Novell — took advantage of new releases of their flagship collaboration products in the last year to push their interpretation of “presence awareness,” which involves determining whether a user is immediately reachable or is in a less-available status. Based on IM technology, presence awareness is built into or is about to show up in all sorts of applications, from e-mail and portal products, to CRM and HR applications. Although the potential for misuse of presence features will someday collide with traditional notions of privacy, it’s clear that the convenience of presence awareness outweighs the dangers.

Although it may be too much to ask that the competitors make their IM products transparent to one another, these products do hold some promise for a “presence awareness détente.” IBM and Microsoft have embraced signaling-based IM industry standards such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leverage Extensions), and Novell is working on building the XML-based XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) into its IM technology.