Collaboration cure

AMONG THE IT FOLKS we've talked with, there seem to be two primary reactions to Microsoft's born-again push for the Tablet PC. Most of them see it as a ho-hum, here-goes-Bill-again product in search of a market to conquer -- they're not interested and will likely not buy it. A minority truly believes the Tablet PC is the beginning of a new way of working together, much more than just a tweak to existing technology.

We're bullish on the Tablet PC because even before the public announcement, we were seeing brand-new applications being written for it that will let us do things we couldn't do before.

The real opportunity behind the Tablet PC involves collaboration and markup. Consider how two or three people work together on a project involving anything from engineering to marketing to corporate strategy. The collaborators get together and explore options by tossing out ideas, writing them down, and sketching them on whiteboards, flip charts, lunch napkins, or the backs of memos. One person puts up an idea, and another modifies it, striking out some parts and adding others. More ideas go up for review, discussion, and change. Through such back-and-forth discussion, an action plan emerges.

Consider two important characteristics of that process. First, it's synchronous: People have to interact in real time. A meeting, like a phone call, only happens when people coordinate their schedules to be available at the same time. Second, much of the communication is achieved via hand-drawn, much-modified graphics -- by one person writing over the other person's sketch.

Traditional groupware addresses the first issue through network-based collaborative workspaces. These have been helpful because they make the group communication and interaction asynchronous: One person sends a message or a document when he or she is ready, and the recipient reads it and acts upon it when he or she is available. That's efficient. Still, much of what passes for collaboration and groupware today is little more than glorified e-mail.

The second problem, impromptu graphics, isn't as amenable to any input system using a keyboard. Without the Tablet PC or something similar, creating diagrams quickly on a computer just isn't easy, and marking up others' graphics is tedious and time-consuming, a long way from instant changes. Simple e-mail doesn't coexist well with graphics because it's also keyboard-based. Without a Tablet PC, the best one can do is sketch a picture on paper, scan it, digitize it onto the network, then e-mail it as an attachment or Or one can fax it. That's a cumbersome, one-way process that's a long way from collaboration.

While reviewing recent Tablet PCs from HP and Fujitsu (See " New faces for PCs "), we got a chance to use and see beta versions of several third-party applications that hold the promise of simplifying life for many workgroups. Many of these new apps allow individuals to separately mark-up documents, images, and graphics in layers, yet still see the original and easily sort out changes. Apparently, digital ink simplifies a lot of tasks.

Among them, Corel's Grafigo lets you take a digital image or document and mark it up on onionskinlike overlays that can be easily hidden or shown. WebEx Meeting Center offers wireless interactivity that removes the one-way barrier -- we could look, but we couldn't really interact -- from demonstrations and presentations.