The technical offerings of pretty much everybody out there doing
“Collaboration” has been pretty weak for a very long time, in my
opinion. Today tipped off my thought process and helped me to
understand exactly what I have been having a problem with for so long.
So, here it is:
Collaboration is not best accomplished by merely bridging the virtual
divide with voice, video and instant messaging. Companies like WebEx and Citrix’s Goto… suite
provide a good start by doing virtual meeting-places with web
demonstration capabilities, but that isn’t all that the “Collaboration”
sector should be.
No, what it should be was something I saw in a preview video a few
years back. There was a preview video that showed two people getting
together and working on the same report over the web. They both saw the
changes to the document in real time and they could add whatever sort
of data that saw fit. This is something that Google (and possibly Zoho,
but I haven’t previewed their application suite nearly as deeply as
Google’s) is starting to hint at with their ajax’d up Google Apps in
collaboration mode. That’s getting much closer to what I’m thinking.
People I know are getting really excited about that kind of technology,
even though they’re not techies by trade.
However, I would say that collaboration needs to go a full step forward
and integrate all of these wonderful technologies together in a truly
unified communications suite. E-mail, voice, video, IM, screen-sharing,
white-boarding, collaborative document editing, etc. All of these need
to work seamlessly together, which they now just don’t. Bits and pieces
are working together, such as Unified Messaging with e-mail, fax and
voicemail. Google adds to that with unifying their Google Talk chat
sessions, but I don’t believe that that archives voice in the same form
(that’s a small hint for you if you’re listening, Google).
The technologies are getting there, but very slowly. The sector
definitely needs a vision, and not just focus on the islands of partial
collaboration that exist today. It needs fully collaboration
applications that fully interact with each other using open, standard
protocols.
