Collaboration race still alive

Collaboration
Full collaboration solutions would ideally allow a number of services, from a range of devices (phones, PCs, Web devices) and be fully integrated. The various services include:

• Instant text messaging (i.e. IM, SMS)
• Non-instant text messaging (i.e. Email)
• Voice communications (e.g. VoIP)
• Video conferencing
• Presence awareness
• Document production (e.g. Office suites)
• Document sharing
• Content sharing
• Integration capabilities i.e. into applications (in-house and hosted)

The key enablers to open solutions are standards i.e. for IM/presence, document production and video conferencing. The other are already defined by standards. If standards in remaining areas are adopted the landscape could change quickly.

Instant Messaging and Conferencing
The battle over collaboration technologies remains alive. The different types of players are in and of themselves interesting e.g. SW vendors, NW vendors, eCommerce vendors, Search engines/Portals - as it is the convergence of modes i.e. voice, messaging, video and desktop sharing e.g.

• Microsoft's latest IM acquisition (Parlano/MindAlign) provides them with persistent IM. Of course they also have MSN and integration into their office/email/document suites.
• IBM's - Sametime offers most of what WebEx/Skype/IM vendors offer.
• Cisco's - Webex remains a strong offering from a powerful vendor, but it is hard to see it not getting marginalised as the other suites start to offer most of the conferencing and sharing capabilities.
• eBay - Sykpe while mainly used for voice offers a IM capability
• AOL/Yahoo - holds a significant portion of the IM market
• Google's - Gtalk, seems to not taken off (despite its support for standards).

Document production
There is not common agreement on the use of Microsoft's proprietary formats, but nor has OpenDoc yet established itself as an open defacto standard for document interchange.

On-line office suites: Zoho, Google etc. are starting to offer the off-line capabilities that are necessary to them truely viable for most users.

PC based suites: Microsoft's suites continue to get more bloated and now seem intent on consuming screen real-estate in the same way they have historically consumed CPU and memory capacity - with little if any benefit it terms of productivity or ease of use. OpenOffice provides a perfectly viable i.e. functional, fast, efficient, open alternative for Windows /Linux users. Apple users already have good alternatives.

If the on-line suites become viable, and along with all other suites all adopt an open document interchange standard - then the market could quickly change and people would become agnostic regarding the tool set.

Email
The email market remains open as while Microsoft dominates the PC based suites - it does not hold the same dominance in on-line email, nor does it hold the same position on the mobile/phone based market (and increasingly this is where email is being read).

Document sharing
This is a large and complex area with a range of technologies e.g. blogging, wikis etc. IBM probably has the best solution (on-line, off-line, synchronisation etc.) now based on open-source Eclipse Rich Client Platform, but Microsoft has a popular solution.

Content sharing
This area is evolving so quickly it seems that the traditional vendors will struggle to establish dominance except through acquisition e.g. Youtube, Facebook, Flicker etc. Though if anyone can get dominance it is probably be someone like Google.

Search - excluded for no good reason from this.

Some conclusions

• IM - there is no ideal solution for IM at present - and most people continue to need to use a range of products/services.
• Email - any client except Outlook (which is closely couple to the OS) should be fine.
• VoIP - hard to determine what the best solution is investments should be tactical
• Video conferencing - as for VoIP
• Presence awareness - as for VoIP - and likely to be affected by location awareness
• Integration capabilities i.e. into applications (in-house and hosted)
• Document production - people should not allow the use internally of the extended document formats e.g. .pptx. It probably matter too much what Office suite most people use.
• Document sharing - It would not be a good time for organisations using Lotus to move away from it. Sharepoint doesn't offer the same synchronisation capabilities - and is fairly closed (Cf. IBM's standards oriented offerings).
• Content sharing - as for VoIP