If team members have Office XP, they can save files directly to their team site's document library rather than having to first save the document to their hard disk, then move the files to the Web site's document library, as they would have to do with the other products I cover here. The tight integration with Office XP also lets team members move lists that reside in Microsoft Excel 2002 directly into a SharePoint list from within the Excel application. When a team member makes changes to a document within a document library, SharePoint Team Services sends an email message about the change to other team members who subscribe to the document. Team members can choose to be notified of these changes immediately or at any time interval they select. Team members can also pull calendar entries and contacts from Outlook 2002 into the team calendar, although SharePoint Team Services doesn't have the ability to send these entries in the other direction. With Outlook 2000, bringing calendar entries into the team calendar is a less-convenient two-step process.
At press time, I learned that Microsoft intends to release SharePoint Team Services 2.0 in mid-2003. Microsoft will integrate it into the next version of SharePoint Portal Server and make it available as a download for Windows Server 2003. SharePoint Team Services 2.0 requires Windows 2003 to run; it won't run on Win2K.
SharePoint Team Services 2.0 will offer tighter integration with the next version of Office. For example, SharePoint Team Services 2.0 will let team members collaborate on an Office document in the team's document library from within Office. With version 1.0, participants can achieve this collaboration only by using Microsoft NetMeeting's or Windows Messenger's application-sharing feature. Version 2.0 will also feature a presence capability.
BrightWork
BrightWork is a full-featured collaboration product with a digital workspace that's strikingly similar to Outlook's UI. Although participants access BrightWork through their Web browser, BrightWork runs on top of Exchange (or SharePoint Portal Server) and stores participants' files in Exchange's IS. The product is available through a perpetual license ($5000 per server and $200 per user) if you prefer to keep all corporate data behind your firewall. (If you install the product behind your firewall, it must be on a machine running Win2K Server.) Alternatively, you can subscribe (starting at $100 per user per month) to its hosted equivalent, BrightWork Online, through Cable & Wireless.
BrightWork lets the team leader customize the appearance of the team space to meet the project's needs. For example, the team leader can select the tools needed for the digital workspace and label database lists. BrightWork provides preconfigured templates for some common project implementations; the team leader can modify these templates or define new templates. The team leader can even define the workflow process. For example, the team leader can arrange to have the marketing team members forward their finalized marketing brochure to the engineering team members, as Figure 3 shows. The engineering team members then either approve the brochure and forward it to the legal team members or send the brochure back to marketing with suggested changes.
You can design a workspace portal for each participant. The workspace portal provides a quick update of each item in the digital workspace so that the participant can tell at a glance whether tasks have been added, what project elements are due today, and so forth. Because the portal feature is based on Microsoft's digital-dashboard specification, a portal window can show up-to-the-minute information from other applications that conform to the standard, such as Microsoft Project. Team members can even pull information from an application that conforms to the digital-dashboard specification into a BrightWork tool.
As with many of the other products, BrightWork tightly integrates with Outlook. You can import and export entries between digital workspaces and Outlook. BrightWork has a good set of asynchronous-collaboration tools, including polling, common document storage, threaded discussions, group calendars, and a database for constructing lists. BrightWork doesn't have synchronous-collaboration tools, such as IM and realtime document writing and editing. However, it can feature NetMeeting and Windows Messenger within the workspace portal, so team members can see who is online and engage other members just as easily as if BrightWork had IM built directly into it.
IntraConnections and Intra.Net
Vialect recently acquired IntraConnections from Inclusion Technologies. Vialect also acquired another groupware product, Intra.Net. IntraConnections offers a broad array of collaboration tools and customization options, whereas Intra.Net provides a basic set of collaboration tools. Both products store the digital workspaces' common files on a central server. IntraConnections comes with an open-source database called Post SQL. Intra.Net requires you to supply a Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle database.
Participants access both IntraConnections and Intra.Net through a Web browser. You can customize both products' digital workspaces with your logo and color scheme. IntraConnections even lets you define whether the digital workspaces' calendars display 7-day weeks or just business weekdays, as Figure 4 shows. If you want only certain participants to view some project documents, IntraConnections lets you create a second document library in the digital workspaces and put access controls in place so that only those participants can access the library and view those documents.
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