BETTER THAN E-MAIL
E-mail stinks as a collaboration tool, particularly in today's business environment, where team members are often not in the same location at the same time. Users must send multiple copies of documents or files, wait for them to be marked up, and reconcile changes. Valuable project information may be buried inside long strings of correspondence or--even worse--users may be cc'ed on long, irrelevant discussions.
Enter specialized collaboration apps. Whether these products are deployed like conventional software, such as Microsoft's SharePoint and IBM's Lotus Quickr, or via software as a service, they make it easy for co-workers and business partners to create and share information. Take Skanska, a global construction company with 26 U.S. offices, which worked with 40,000 subcontractors in 2007. "Collaboration is core to what we do," says Allen Emerick, director of IT, applications, and integration for Skanska's U.S. business. A typical building project involves a large cast, from clients to sales teams to architects, plus engineers and construction crews.
Employees used to rely heavily on e-mail and FTP to collaborate, but this was cumbersome. So Emerick deployed SharePoint to address the problem. Now, SharePoint is used for both internal and external communications. Internally, it acts as a portal where employees can find corporate forms and documents. Externally, clients access SharePoint to get information about ongoing projects. Emerick says these external sites are used throughout the life of a project, from sales to completion. During the sales cycle, proposals, RFPs, and presentations are put on the site for clients. In the planning phase, initial design and specification documents are available. During construction, architectural drawings are posted as PDFs, and job site photos may be added. Throughout the project, a calendar function lets parties track major milestones and meetings.
But SharePoint and Lotus Quickr aren't the only options. Doug Cornelius, a lawyer at Goodwin Procter, relies on PBwiki, a popular provider of online collaboration tools, for a variety of projects. As a member of the law firm's knowledge management department, Cornelius uses the wiki to manage meetings and agendas and to plan conferences. "It's tremendous for capturing information," he says. "Instead of a string of e-mails, you just go in and edit the wiki."
While the firm also uses SharePoint as an intranet platform, Cornelius wanted to experiment with other options. "We didn't need anyone from IT to do anything. Training and setup took 30 seconds," he says. After a year of use, the wiki has more than 100 pages and gets several edits every day. Other departments in the firm are also using the PBwiki service.
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