Collaborate Freely

A curious thing is happening in the world of collaboration software that threatens to make the entire category moot. Increasingly, major corporations are turning to Weblogs to communicate and share ideas.

The Weblogs, which are typically hosted on a low-cost server, allow anyone to post their ideas in a format that for all intents and purposes functions like a personal journal.

MICAHEL VIZARD Can be reached at (516) 562-7477 or via e-mail at mvizard@cmp.com.

The cool thing about Weblogs is that they allow the author to point to content on other people's Weblogs to enhance the overall discussion. And unlike, say, a traditional bulletin board system, the author can choose to not link their ideas to ideas from other people they want to ignore. This prevents the general conversation from deteriorating into a series of unintelligible rants.

Originally, collaboration nirvana was to be provided by software such as Notes or Groove. But today, many people are starting to wonder if the collaboration functions provided by these products have become little more than expensive redundancies. After all, a Weblog that resides behind a firewall should be secure enough for most companies, and the cost of deploying collaboration software on every client is a time-consuming task that dwarfs the expense of the initial software licenses.

Taken to a further extreme, Weblogs may even one day make e-mail the primary distribution vehicle for irrelevant content, with all relevant content communicated via Weblog links that implicitly provide a trusted source of context. Of course, there will always be the need to communicate short messages not worthy of a Weblog, but for that we have instant messaging.

For solution providers, instant messaging and the advent of Weblogs provide new collaboration mediums that allow them to greatly expand the number of businesses using this type of software well beyond the existing base of Notes users. That's because the costs associated with using these tools are minimal; what has previously hampered the broad adoption of traditional collaboration software has been the total cost of ownership. And truth be told, what most companies are waiting for is an intrepid solution provider to show up at the door and show them how to do it. How do you choose to collaborate? I can be reached at (516) 562-7477 or via e-mail at mvizard@cmp.com.