Applications

On the applications front, the main themes continued to be integration, collaboration, and business process management in 2003. The big three collaboration platforms, Lotus Domino/Notes, Microsoft Exchange, and Novell GroupWise, slugged it out, with Exchange Server 2003 arriving as a major upgrade and Domino/Notes and GroupWise receiving significant enhancements in x.5 releases. Documentum eRoom and SiteScape Enterprise Forum zeroed in on workflow and document management, while Groove Workspace, the darling of peer-to-peer collaboration, exposed core functions as Web services for integrating with other applications.

Even ASPs felt the need to play well with others. Salesforce.com, in its Winter ’04 release, now offers, in addition to a Web services API, a hosted application server that allows customers to build and deploy custom apps — and integrate them with Salesforce’s CRM application, of course. Finally, 2003 was also the year Microsoft entered the CRM market, and the year Microsoft Office became a “system.” Office 2003 not only features XML-enabled versions of Word, Excel, and the InfoPath forms tool, bringing structured data to ordinary business documents, but also hooks to SharePoint Portal Server and Live Communications Server for tighter collaboration.

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Collaboration

Documentum eRoom 7
Documentum
Very Good (8.0)
Cost: $200 per seat; $275 per seat for enterprise version
Bottom Line: eRoom offers a straightforward pricing model, a nice synchronization tool for Outlook, and a great selection of templates that can be used to create various types of collaboration environments. It is powerful, easy to configure, and offers a granular security model, but it is limited to Windows.

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Groove Workspace 2.5
Groove Networks
Very Good (8.4)
Cost: Standard Edition, $49 per user; Professional Edition, $149 per user
Bottom Line: Despite their limitations, e-mail and the Web are the bread and butter of daily work, but Groove sets out to change that. Groove's Web-services-based integration hooks make it easy to connect Groove shared spaces to the mainstream, offering up a richly integrated collaboration experience.

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Kontiki DMS 3.0
Kontiki
Very Good (7.7)
Cost: Enterprise license starts at $87 per user
Bottom Line: Kontiki DMS 3.0's content delivery solution lets you reach employees and customers with full-screen video and other media at low cost and with minimal network impact. Version 3.0 introduces security features and Microsoft Producer plug-ins that make DMS even more attractive for corporate communications.

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