Suddenly, they are breaking free. As their focus shifts towards the standards-driven web as the universal medium of communication, global connectivity has become routine. Now, their screens are free to show the applications, services and communications tools that reflect the changing tasks they face and the roles they play. Enterprise collaboration is a new frontier for users and IT staff.
Collaboration starts with communication, and as users demand enterprise IM, VOIP, and video, the pressure increases for more integration with productivity applications.
A popular solution is Microsoft Office Communicator 2005, which provides 'rich' presence (additional information on location and availability to communicate) and unifies real-time communication modes, such as IM (instant messaging), voice, video and access to voice conferencing and web conferencing into a single application. In conjunction with Live Communications Server, it enables presence and real-time communications from all Microsoft Office applications, such as Outlook, SharePoint portal server and Live Meeting.
Telephony may become unrecognizable as it merges with PC communications. Microsoft is working on voice/PC integration and Office Communicator already enables PC-to-phone integration, including mobile phones. "In Office Communication Server 2007, emails, voice mails and faxes are consolidated in one mailbox, for a faster response. With a 3G phone, I can use Outlook on a browser to sort my emails, while maintaining firewall security," said Gary Lee Sweeting, Microsoft's product marketing manager for unified communications.
Communications mix
According to Marc-Alexis Remond, director for marketing & business development for North East Asia at Alcatel Asia Pacific, "collaboration means operating more quickly and efficiently across the entire interaction and decision-making chain."
He advocates the use of web, audio and video conferencing as well as data sharing as a suite of integrated communications tools to enable more timely and better interaction among staff, partners, customers and suppliers.
"In a global business environment, the cost benefits of such rapid online interactivity are becoming business critical," he said.
The emergence of "presence" technology, already exhibited by IM tools, is making communications suites more relevant in collaboration initiatives as it enables users to assess in real-time the availability of people.
Remond notes that knowing when to contact a person and via what medium can potentially reduce wasted time in people waiting for replies or leaving voicemail and email reminders.
He also observed that the growth of enterprises based in Hong Kong brings ever more complex communications demands, such as the need to cover more geographic zones, increased employee mobility and remote working practices.
To address today's business challenges companies should become more "virtual" and build their activities around people interactions and communication, stressed Remond.
"Convergence enables this to happen with video, data and voice sharing the same infrastructure resulting in both lower initial investment and ongoing IT administration costs," he added.
Alcatel is partnering with conferencing provider Polycom to provide integrated voice, video and data communications in an effort to aid enterprise collaboration efforts.
Workflow revolution
Lotus Notes is still a byword for workflow automation, and there is a huge global market for replacing paper by electronic documents. Notes also provides calendaring, scheduling and contact management and in all these modes, presence awareness now supports communication. "Whenever you see a name in Notes, the user can always see the presence awareness of the individual and right click to start a chat, write an email, or perhaps even click to call them on his IP-enabled phone," said Tony Lee, sales manager for IBM Lotus.
Available with Notes is Sametime, a browser- based instant messaging application, which supports electronic meetings with integrated communications.
Communications systems are only tools, and management needs to create a culture of open communication to profit from them. "We have been using Discussion Forums-part of Microsoft SharePoint-for several years, and it's very useful when you have specific topics to discuss," said Ken Chih, CIO and corporate director, OOCL.
On a similar theme, OOCL has introduced an intranet service called 'Knowledge-a-Day.' "Anybody from any department can come up with some interesting information or views, and the corporate administration will publish it. That is true knowledge sharing within the company and it often plays a part in job training," said Chih.
"We are also considering building a Wiki, which is a website (like Wikipedia) that allows visitors to easily add, remove or otherwise edit content," said Chih, "The benefits include the encouragement of collaborative authoring and other forms of knowledge sharing that can give OOCL an edge in competitive market conditions."
Virtual meetings
A web conference provides audio and video communication, plus other collaborative services. Application sharing enables two or more remote users to edit the same file and view the results in real time. The applications shared are usually text editors, AV programs and spreadsheets, but the system can handle more specialized software such as CAD if required. Another tool is a virtual whiteboard, which can be used in presentation mode, or with simultaneous editing.
The Sametime meeting room supports audio and videoconferencing. Meetings can be scheduled, and instant messaging and chat functions are available. Sametime provides presence awareness and users can see not only whether others are online, but may be able to see whether another person is working from home, or from a remote office, as indicated by the IP address. The Sametime system can be extended to IP telephones.
Web conferencing is becoming easier to initiate, cheaper and more advanced. "Office Communication Server 2007 provides Roundtable, an automated videoconferencing session that delivers a 360 degree view of the conference room, and also use voice response to zoom in on individual speakers and track them if they move to demonstrate a point or use the whiteboard," notes Sweeting.
Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2005 is a hosted web conferencing service that supports online meetings, with the industry's first integrated conference call controls for leading audio conferencing service providers. It also has the ability to manage a live meeting session from any of the Office applications. It is multilingual, with seven language options.
Integrated task workspaces
Most organizations have team workers that make repeated use of a number of applications and services and communicate heavily with other team members. By grouping their tools on a single screen, significant gains in productivity and convenience can be made.
IBM Lotus Notes is part of a development platform for workflow applications and it now provides support for composite applications, which enables developers to combine their existing Lotus Notes applications with line-of-business application components, to solve specific business problems. Portals today combine components from multiple applications into a single, role-based work environment. A composite application for a sales team might combine a standard Lotus Notes collaboration application with components from sales force automation, customer relationship management (CRM) and an order-entry application.
Another kind of IBM workspace is activity-centric collaboration, which lets users organize, navigate, manage and share information-emails, calendar entries, documents, e-meetings-around a particular activity or project. "If you're working in a project team today, you probably manage the activities mainly through your email inbox, which can get confusing and difficult," said Lee, "Activity-centric collaboration let's you group together and manage all the varied information affiliated with a project, including e-mail threads, chat logs, documents, meeting minutes, web content, voice messages. It's a simpler and more natural way to work."
IBM's Websphere Portal provides a single point of personalized interaction with applications, content, processes and people, presented side-by-side through a GUI. Each user may have several roles, served by screens for productivity aids, customer support, and corporate information. Portals can be on an intranet for internal use, or outside the firewall supporting B2B and B2C collaboration.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server supports portals that access almost any kind of information, applications, or services. For example, a corporate search portal gathers corporate information from multiple content sources. An employee can have a gateway to departmental applications such as HR, marketing and accounts. A bank teller can have a unified view of an individual customer's interactions. An executive might have corporate performance indicators in the form of a dashboard.
Supply chain portals
An extranet or Internet portal can enable any organization to reach out into the supply chain and provide information, applications and communication services to a diverse range of supply chain partners, each viewing a customized version of the content.
For example, container port operator OOCL has an industry portal called Cargosmart (www.cargosmart.com) which is for managing shipments over the web and serves other carriers, including competitors. "It's a B2B portal used by ten carriers and their 45,000 customers and it provides many services, including shipment tracking, documentation, and billing," said Chih, "The focus is on our customers, who usually need to book OOCL and other carriers at the same time."
"OOCL has built other supply chain applications," said Chih, "For example, we built a portal called Depotsmart, which provides ourselves and other shippers with up-to-the minute status of containers at many locations. It's another example of how we collaborate with both our customers and vendors." OOCL bases its custom projects on Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, using SOA and XML standards.
The supply chain is becoming the focus of collaboration and by 2009, 60 percent of key collaboration projects will include suppliers, partners, customers personnel, compared with 10 percent today according to Gartner research. "We are in an age when every company operates in a complex business ecosystem, where the success or failure of each member of the ecosystem is dependent on, affects and is affected by the success of other members of the ecosystem." said a Gartner report: "Collaboration Comes of Age," November 2005.
There are many other suppliers for collaboration software. Where specialized tools from niche vendors are needed, they are generally standards-compliant and compatible.
Market merge
Networking providers like Alcatel, Nortel and Cisco are all integrating their communications platforms with IBM and Microsoft to complete the unified communications toolset.
Increasingly networking vendors will enter joint development of collaboration-driven products, which will include call-center applications, telephony and mobile access systems, and data-networking infrastructure.
Microsoft has made a number of VOIP/messaging interoperability partnerships with Alcatel, Cisco and Nortel that will help bring collaboration to the fore in all communications tools and processes.
Alcatel's Remond believes that for enterprises in Hong Kong and elsewhere, operational excellence is the next step. "Communications has the power to re-engineer business processes, and create competitive advantage for the enterprise. These are the goals of an effective communications and collaboration strategy."