Product planners, helpdesk personnel and IT managers have different agendas. Why should they use the same generic toolset? That's Intraspect's philosophy and the driving force behind the Intraspect 5 Applications.
Intraspect has developed three applications -- Product Collaboration, Customer Collaboration and Services Collaboration -- that meet customers' collaborative needs. We tested the Product Collaboration application. All these applications share similar capabilities, such as discussion areas, document approval and routing, but include templates designed to help your project teams work through the different requirements for product, service and customer collaboration.
Beneath all three applications lies the Intraspect Platform. The platform handles core services -- data management, message handling, security, information retrieval and subscription services -- and an applications framework for building the collaborative applications.
When you hit the "Top Level" button prominently displayed on every page of the Product Collaboration application, you are transported to a "group memory" page, the heart of an Intraspect collaborative environment. Intraspect 5 grew out of the company's goal to combine knowledge management with asynchronous collaboration. Group memory stores all of Intraspect's objects -- cabinets, folders, discussions, documents and so on. Intraspect 5 offers the choice between two database back ends, Oracle and Microsoft's SQL Server.
Through the day-to-day use of Intraspect, project teams add content to group memory. Intraspect indexes the content and makes it available to users through a well-designed custom search page that lets you detail the content and context of the search.
Any user can create a custom collaborative work space, known as a c-space, within group memory. The day-to-day work in the collaborative environment takes place in the c-space. Because the out-of-the-box templates in the Product Collaboration suite are geared toward product development, a new c-space automatically gets populated with folders for background, deliverables, issues, schedule and project discussions. You'll probably decide that you want to create your own templates based on the way your company works, and Intraspect provides a check box during the c-space creation wizard for just that purpose.
The owner can add both internal and external users, such as partners, vendors and consultants, to a c-space. Each user can then be assigned different access levels: reader, contributor, organizer, editor or publisher. Rights are cumulative as you move from reader to publisher. One final assignment, No Role, blocks all access to an item. C-space members also can be assigned to an approval-routing chain for documents with automatic e-mail notification sent to the next member in line after the previous member grants approval. Document versioning is also supported.
Readers can view content and cover pages; contributors can add items to cabinets, folders and discussions; organizers can delete items; editors have all rights except the right to change access rules; and publishers can change access rights. By default, all Intraspect users are assigned to each c-space as readers, and all the members of the project team are assigned to the editor role, which means that project members can add and delete content. A wizard walks you through the process of creating a c-space, assigning internal and external users, and setting all access rights. Once the c-space is created, project members can add documents, discussions, Web links and other content.
Intraspect could have been a runaway winner if the product had kept up with the Joneses in the features race. What's missing? Intraspect has no real-time features -- not even chat. Intraspect's answer to this shortcoming is to help you integrate third-party solutions.
Also missing are shared task lists, shared calendars, electronic polling and custom database support. Intraspect has developed the Productivity Pack add-on that offers shared tasks, calendars and polling that will be available at no cost to Intraspect users. The recycling bin will let users retrieve mistakenly deleted items. These features weren't ready for testing, but if they're implemented with the same attention to detail as the features we did look at, Intraspect will have an offering for the large enterprise that will be tough to beat by any of the competition.
So, even with all of these missing features, how could Intraspect share the Editors' Choice award? Simply put, Intraspect has done a great job combining the features of collaboration and knowledge management on an enterprise scale. Intraspect gives its customers platform choices at the operating system, database and browser levels, at a competitive price. We were especially impressed with the product's ability to let users create c-spaces and securely incorporate and automatically notify internal and external users about the project.
Because Intraspect includes its own e-mail server, it handles inbound e-mail better than any other product we tested. Every container can have its own e-mail address, which means that users can e-mail documents, discussion items or comments directly to a particular container in a c-space and copy all relevant correspondence to the c-space, making that information available for indexing and searching. Intraspect also supports Web folders, giving users drag-and-drop access to c-space cabinets and folders.
Intraspect 5 Applications -- Product Collaboration, starts at $650 per seat, with discounts based on the volume of seats purchased. Intraspect Software, (888) 846-8727, (650) 246-5200; fax (650) 869-6000. www.intraspect.com or sales@intraspect.com
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