The concept of enterprise collaboration tools is nothing new. After all, Lotus Notes, a pioneer in this technology, dates back 25 years. And computing visionary Douglas Engelbart famously showed off early collaborative software in his 1968 "Mother of All Demos." Yet in the past few years a host of new collaboration products has hit the market, and they differ from their predecessors in ways both big and small.
Yes, the new tools, like the old, promote collaboration and idea-sharing in the workplace. But the new crop is, generally speaking, Web- or cloud-based instead of living on a server inside the firewall. They are also, mostly, much easier to use and set up than the older generations. There are also some new kinds of collaboration built around tools such as task management, chat, social networking and even document sharing.
"A common thread among these really highly disruptive vendors is they're always born in the cloud," says Rob Koplowitz, a Forrester Research analyst. "They're not retrofitting something to the cloud. They are very easy to access and start using, even on an individual basis and certainly by a small team."
In contrast, Notes, for instance, was a big piece of software tied to a specific version of Windows. That meant users got updates only when they got a new OS. "You sat around with 4-year-old software you hated," says Alan Lepofsky, who spent over a decade working on Notes at IBM and is now a Constellation Research analyst.
Plus, a Web-based offering is easily accessible by mobile devices, without requiring users to download an app. That makes the products useful in today's work environment, where people want to work wherever, whenever and with any device.
Also, and perhaps most notably, a culture of sharing and social networking has become much more ingrained. "We spent a lot of time trying to explain what Notes was," Lepofsky says. Today, people expect to be able to share and communicate at work as easily as they do in their personal lives.
Despite the advances, the new breed of services faces similar implementation challenges that products such as Notes and Microsoft's SharePoint have faced. "We do see a lot of failures" in deployment, says Jeffrey Mann, a Gartner analyst.
Still, with forethought into how best to roll out a new tool, some businesses say they have gained notable efficiencies.
The benefits
Companies that use collaboration tools say they find real value in them, often much more than they had with some of the older products.
Take Ricoh, the office equipment and IT services company. It has used SharePoint, WebEx One and Notes. One of the biggest problems with all of those products is that they require enterprises to establish sites designed for a specific set of individuals to collaborate, says Courtney Zentz, social collaboration manager at Ricoh. "They'd be hot for a week and then die," she says. "Projects would eventually go back to email. It never had that lasting impression."
In late 2011, Ricoh started using Jive. Users can easily set up workspaces on the fly, inviting whomever they want to collaborate. "It has the ability to look like the user intends, not as SharePoint intends," Zentz says.
Ricoh once had around 500 SharePoint sites but has since shut down most of them. It retains a few because SharePoint has some advantages, Zentz says. For instance, it's ideal for managing workflows, she says.
That's exactly the environment in which SharePoint excels, says Gartner's Mann. "SharePoint works well in a largely curated, pre-defined environment," he says. "It's 'post your weekly report here' or 'request a bigger PC here.' It's not so much 'I need to get a group together to figure out what to do with a product launch next week.'"
Ricoh is using a wide range of features available from Jive. One of the most important is the Microsoft Office plug-in, Zentz says. "Five people can work on a presentation with seamless integration," she says.
The social features have also had real impact at Ricoh. For example, an IT administrator started a discussion on Jive about an inefficient process and many colleagues chimed in. Ricoh's CIO took notice and five days later made a policy decision that improved the process, which had been in effect for 10 years.
Populous, which manages major sporting events including the Super Bowl and NCAA tournaments from the Big 10 men's basketball games to the Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl, turned to collaboration tools to help coordinate those huge events. The company designs and manages the building of the physical space and oversees the operations planning. It must coordinate the activities of hundreds of people who work for dozens of different companies, ranging from fence builders to broadcasters.
"We got to the point with the large events that they were absolutely unmanageable," says Marc Klein, associate principal for Populous. The company had a full-time person whose job it was to receive emailed spreadsheets of worker schedules, pore over them to find the updates, make changes to the master and then send it back out to everyone. "There was no true live schedule information available at any real time," he says.
As a result, mistakes were happening too often.
Populous needed a service that didn't require a client application because some partners, such as the NCAA, have strict requirements about the kind of new software that can be loaded onto workers' computers, Klein says. He also wanted a service that could be easily accessible on a mobile phone.
Around four years ago, the company settled on Smartsheet, which offers a spreadsheet-like interface that teams can share -- adding notes, attaching documents, setting up alerts and linking to calendars.
In the past, for an event like the Super Bowl, Populous would have a schedule on a spreadsheet with 5,000 lines. Now, using Smartsheet, it creates one master schedule but can sort it and send only the relevant parts to various vendors.
Smartsheet also offers a cost structure that works great for Populous, Klein says. He pays only for licensed users, a small group of people who travel from event to event. The additional 200 to 300 people who are invited to collaborate for each event can do so without cost. That makes it easy for him to predict the cost when he's budgeting.
Implementation can't be an afterthought
Whether a company uses an array of features for different applications, like Ricoh does, or benefits from a more focused use case, like Populous, a careful approach to rollout is key. Otherwise, the tools are unlikely to be widely used.
Ricoh has 29,000 employees worldwide and 26,500 have accounts to use Jive, Zentz says. Of those, 25,000 log in at least once every 30 days. Ricoh uses Jive like an intranet, so some users may log on to read about new policies or other internal documents.
Around 5,500 have actually participated in collaboration spaces or discussions in the past month. During that time, 2,600 have created something in Jive, including a blog post or a discussion. "We're very happy with the employees who are contributing to and participating in the community," Zentz says.
She launched the product with 500 Ricoh salespeople. However, she allowed them to invite other employees. "We were curious as to what would happen," she says.
Within about 60 days, 3,000 Ricoh employees had signed up. From there, a controlled rollout over the next year and a half brought on current users.
In retrospect, Zentz says she wishes she harnessed excitement around Jive at the beginning as a way to help out newcomers. Initially, she and a half-time marketing employee were the only support people available to help employees. She says she wishes she had put together a program that would have allowed the people who were really excited about Jive to serve as advisers for others who wanted a helping hand.
At Ricoh, using Jive is voluntary for most employees. But at some organizations, adoption of a new collaboration tool can be mandated because it's business-critical.
Institutional Review Board (IRB) Services recently began using Intralinks Via. The vendor's related product, Intralinks, is perhaps best known for setting up secure online spaces to share sensitive documents related to mergers and acquisitions. Intralinks Via is for more general-purpose sharing, designed to be easy to start using.
IRB handles ethics approvals for drug companies conducting clinical trials on humans. Initially, IRB used FedEx to send sensitive paper documents regarding research, says Simon Corman, IRB's director of business operations. Because IRB's clients began scanning those documents, they asked IRB to do that task for them and deliver them via email. "Then the clients' IT departments started saying, 'whoa, you're sending these documents over regular email?'" Corman says.
In search of a better solution, IRB looked at Box and Dropbox, but the company wasn't convinced they'd be secure enough.
Then Corman came across Intralinks Via. "A key part is there's accountability that is built into the system," he says. "Now we can see whether an investigator has downloaded and viewed the documents. If they haven't, we can feed that information back to the sponsor." If the investigator, or researcher, hasn't looked at the documents, it typically means they haven't actually started work or they might be out of compliance. The sponsor, or drug company, might want to follow up with them.
IRB has about 30 internal licensed users authorized to create new work streams. Collaborators, who are invited to access the documents but don't have to pay to do so, include several hundred clients and several thousand researchers, Corman says.
Researchers and the drug companies need to access the documents if they want their projects to be approved by IRB, so adoption wasn't much of an issue. That said, the new technology solved a pain point for workers.
Tools like that aren't hard sells, says Lepofsky. "Don't make a choice like 'we're going with SharePoint' and then figure out how to use it." That's a sure-fire way to ensure nobody will actually use the package, he adds.
Because of privacy issues and regulations, companies like IRB aren't always eager to take advantage of new kinds of products and services. Gartner's Mann sees companies that won't consider new collaboration tools because they are in industries with tough compliance regulations. "The irony is, then they keep with email, which has even fewer controls," he says.
However, that doesn't mean companies should just throw open the door to any and all collaboration tools, he says. Some groups might prefer a curated environment, or might find a space for open communications to be too big a cultural change. Pushing a collaboration tool into that environment can be more disruptive than it's worth, Mann says.
Other users might need to be taught about appropriate use of collaboration tools. "People need to think about who's in this group," Mann says. For instance, if a manager creates a group for colleagues to work out forthcoming layoffs, the group shouldn't be accessed by all employees.
Fieldstone Architecture & Structural Engineering carefully creates groups to discuss potential new hires. It adopted Kona, a collaboration service, to ease the management of a hiring spree that last year grew the company from 15 to 50 employees.
"We created an onboarding template to put in place a process and structure so when each employee came on board, on their first day" all their forms were available in Kona with due dates for each form, says Ryan Rasmussen, president and CEO of Fieldstone. Human resources has visibility into how the new hire is progressing through the process. Because it's all done in Kona, there's a record, which provides accountability for the HR department.
The HR department also uses Kona to manage the recruitment process. It tracks candidates as they move through the interview process, letting interviewers add comments. If candidates aren't chosen for a particular job, they remain in the system in case a more suitable position opens up.
Fieldstone also uses Kona with some clients to manage projects, but not all of them are interested in using the tool, Rasmussen says.
"It's best to accept that not every attempt at using a collaboration tool will be successful," Mann suggests. "What usually happens is it will be spotty," he says. "But it's better to have a few good successes than to bang your head going after areas that don't work."
This article, Collaboration 2.0: Old meets new, was originally published at Computerworld.com.
Nancy Gohring is a freelance writer covering cloud computing, mobile phones and wireless networks. Follow her on Twitter @ngohring and contact her at ng@ngohring.com.
This story, "Collaboration 2.0: Old concept meets new tools" was originally published by Computerworld.