Rolling Review: Web 2.0 Tools Demand A Cautious Approach
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Network Computing
August 16, 2008
• What are the costs?
Web 2.0 collaboration tools usually have a monthly or annual fee and relatively low up-front costs. Additional expenses are likely to occur once the tool is in use. For example, if you configure the components of a large project only to discover that your design is bulky and difficult to use, you'll incur the cost of the time needed to redesign the collaboration. It can be difficult to correct these problems once data has been stored. Our Rolling Review will look at the products' flexibility to avoid this pitfall. Training costs are a related issue. As we test these tools we'll consider whether they are easy to learn and use.
• How's the support?
Collaboration tools and services have to play well with other applications like ERP systems and desktop office software. Quick responses to integration questions will be crucial. This may be especially true for collaboration products and services because they may not have been developed with integration as a high priority.
THE VENDORS For this Rolling Review, we invited 10 companies that provide Web collaboration as a service or a product: CallWave, Central Desktop, Digital Samba, Google, Jive Software, Microsoft, Novell, PBwiki, Polycom, and Voce Communications.
THE PREMISE Rolling Reviews present a comprehensive look at a hot technology category, beginning with market analysis and wrapping up with a synopsis of our findings. Our extended testing span lets us accommodate today's accelerated revision cycles and focus our attention on individual products, while maintaining a consistent test bed.
THE TEST BED At our Phil Hippensteel Associates partner labs, we'll manage a collaboration project over time to evaluate ease of use, overall effectiveness, and security management, along with where project data is stored and who can access it. To test each collaboration tool, we'll open an administrator account, provision and deprovision users, assign people to groups, and administer rights (upload/download documents, make changes, share information inside and outside the corporate domain). Wearing our end-user hats, we'll put collaboration features through their paces.
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