New Tools Let Users Team Up Over The Web

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May 17, 1999 (12:38 PM EDT)

By David Drucker,

Enterprises are turning to an emerging class of Web collaboration tools for sharing information over extranets, while sparing IT managers much of the administrative workassociated with traditional groupware.

Known as teamware, these applications lack some customization features, but are less complex to deploy because they normally let users perform the majority of management functions and also feature a browser interface.

"In an extranet where you have multiple organizations, you can't dictate what client will be used, so you have to orient your applications toward the universal client -- the HTML browser," said Burton Group analyst James Kobielus.

One of the main areas in which teamware falls short of traditional groupware, such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, and Novell GroupWise, is in connectivity to back-end databases and in scaling to handle large volumes of data, he said.

When Diamond Technology Partners, a technology consulting company that uses Lotus Notes/Domino, needed to collaborate on documents and other projects with clients and vendors, it had trouble collaborating with non-Notes users.

"We were looking for something we could get up and running very quickly and that was intuitive and easy to use," said Drew Jemilo, manager of Diamond's internal Web technology group.

Diamond selected Instinctive Technologies' eRoom teamware application. According to Jemilo, eRoom was easy to set up and administer and has met Diamond's needs, letting it collaborate effectively with clients, as well as on internal projects and knowledge-management processes.

Jemilo likes eRoom's security model, which lets him set various security modes as well as extend access controls to project leaders, so he doesn't have to set up every user ID himself or constantly administer security.

Instinctive will ship version 4.0 of eRoom next month, which will include better archiving, remote-server management, and integration with Microsoft Office 2000.

Lotus shipped its own teamware product, QuickPlace, in April. Other teamware products include IntraActive's InTandem, Open Text's Livelink, and Involv's Involv, which was spun off from Changepoint in December.