I had Microsoft in to see me once. They were selling the benefits of the full range of Office products. Live Meeting was nice but didn't meet our needs of cross firewall meetings.OCS was good but a bit behind in what I was interested in (VoIP/IM/Video Conferencing all in one were my goal). Of interest though was Groove 2007. Groove 2007 is a clever tool for collaborating with co-workers and external parties. The local reseller who accompanied Microsoft was telling me how he used Groove 2007 to share documents and chat with his external Partner Account Manager. It was all very slick and made sense. I thought about how this could be 'given' to clients as a value added service and how it would make communication much more transparent.
Value Add to some is cost to others. I didn't take it to the stage of putting a case together as it's a difficult number to quantify. How do you put an actual price on value added service? You could look at the customer satisfaction abut there needs to be tangible evidence to prove that your investment of $229 per user (for example) was well worth the effort. Add on top of that the design, development, implementation and ongoing support and the total cost of that piece of Value Add spirals out of control.
The Open Source alternative that ticks my boxes is Collanos Workplace. Collanos works in the similar way. It can be used to share files, discussions, task assignment, notes and URLs. The premise is simple. You create a 'Workspace' or project folder on your machine and then invite your colleagues to participate in the Workspace. Then you add items to your Workspace. And here's the clever bit. When you add or make a change to a file, they are replicated to the users you invited to that workspace. Which means that everyone has the same documents and are all in sync.
Where can it be used? Projects where you have a client that is outside of your firewall. You might be working on a project plan and everyone needs the current version. As soon as it's updated, it gets synced to all the other participants so everyone has all the information to hand.
Perhaps you are holding a virtual meeting and are taking minutes. Once they are saved in the Workspace, they are replicated to all participants in that Workspace. You might say that these could just be emailed and that is true. But most will store their attachments in email, not file them properly or maybe delete them. This way, they are contained in the same structure and everyone has online and offline access to them.
The downside was that the performance was sometimes a bit sketchy. I noticed that it did slow with some file types. But all in all, it's an excellent piece of software and worthy of consideration in your corporate communication and project management strategy.
Collanos can be found at http://www.collanos.com.
Office Groove 2007 can be found at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/FX100487641033.aspx.
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