EMC, Microsoft And Yahoo Zimbra Take Collaboration Tools To A New Level

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There's a certain irony in that a challenge often faced by solution providers that work with collaboration software lies in getting the products to work -- yes, collaborate -- with other IT systems.

Improved linkages between collaboration tools and other software products has been a common theme in new releases from EMC, Microsoft, Yahoo's Zimbra and others. Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0, launched in February, improved its connections to the wireless world by adding support for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, J2ME-enabled handsets and Microsoft's Outlook 2007. Microsoft is developing tighter integration between its Groove and SharePoint collaboration products. And last month EMC shipped Documentum eRoom 7.4 integrated with Documentum Information Rights Management (IRM).

"I think the days of a stand-alone collaboration tool are numbered," said Lance Shaw, a senior product marketing manager in EMC's software group. Providing a way for a team of people to come together and work on a project is no longer enough. That's the idea behind linking Groove with SharePoint, said Abbott Lowell, Groove product manager. Small teams of people both inside and outside an organization can use Groove as a workspace, then use SharePoint to push the results of their collaboration out to a wider audience. Sharing is largely limited to documents, but the release of Groove to be included with the next version of Microsoft Office will broaden the types of content Groove and SharePoint can exchange.

Elsewhere, Zimbra's API architecture smooths the process of integrating that collaboration application with other systems, said Matthew Porter, CEO of Contegix LLC, a St. Louis-based managed hosting service provider that sells Zimbra to its clients. One customer, for example, links the hosted Zimbra with a copy of Microsoft's Active Directory running on-premise.

Another integration driver is the need for organizations to exert some measure of control over collaboratively produced content and apply governance, compliance and document retention policies—hence the eRoom integration with IRM.

Methodology
The Test Center examined EMC's eRoom, Microsoft's Office 2007 Enterprise with Groove and Yahoo Zimbra. The products feature various communication tools, workflow and knowledge management features. Some of the collaboration solutions integrate with third-party or external messaging servers, including realtime tools like instant messaging.

Some vendors, like IBM, were omitted from our review because their products were too fragmented.

Because some of the products we reviewed are not direct market competitors, we did not compare them and did not calculate our scores based on market advantages. We concentrated on the technology of each solution and market offering. Reviewers evaluated application/file sharing, document management, workflows and APIs independently. We also looked into e-mail, calendaring, instant messaging, telephony integration, wiki and social networking.

Next: EMC eRoom

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