Collaboration Software Clients: Email, IM, Presence, RSS & Collaborative Workspaces Should Be Integrated for Business Communication ... Part 1. Strengths & Weaknesses, But Nothing's Perfect, Aug 23

Collaboration Software Clients: Email, IM, Presence, RSS & Collaborative Workspaces Should Be Integrated for Business Communication ... Part 1. Strengths & Weaknesses, But Nothing's Perfect is a free white paper from Shared Spaces Research & Consulting. The paper was written as an independent publication, without sponsorship from any vendor, so as to give a totally unbiased view of the needs of users from a collaboration software client.

Extract
Email—the collaboration software client of choice for most people—has been a wild success, with user adoption and message traffic growing rapidly since the mid 1990s. However, what we know as "email" today has some major problems, to which it must adapt or fade from relevancy. In addition, there are a plethora of new software clients that facilitate communication and collaboration, but they remain separate and non-integrated. The purpose of this paper is to return to first principles, discussing the types of software-facilitated interactions the information professional deals with on a day-to-day basis, and to propose a unifing vision for moving forward with collaboration software clients

.... Of the plethora of separate collaboration clients types on the market today, no single client is sufficient for the communication and collaboration needs of information professionals. A re-integration of the common key services of all of these offerings into a collaboration "super client” is needed.

The White Paper outlines Part 1 of an argument for a re-integration of capabilities in disparate software clients into a new collaboration "super client". Part 2, "Architecture & Key Capabilities of the Super Client" will be published in September 2004.

Timeline Update (11/09): Due to a significant up-tick in client consulting engagements, the publication of Part II has been pushed back to early 2005. Sorry!

(PDF, 27 pages, 836 KB)

Want more? Then check out the services on offer through Shared Spaces Research & Consulting, or take advantage of either a one-hour consulting hour or a full day strategic discussion forum on this topic. Contact Michael via email for more details.