Publication Date: January 17, 1997

Related articles: Lotus' Domino Theory and Net Asset: Intranets Have Much To Offer Businesses

Intranets and Groupware: Making Choices in a Converging Market

By Anita J. Freed

The meteoric rise of corporate intranets has added a new dimension to the groupware market, leaving some companies to wonder whether Web-based applications are a viable alternative to the more traditional proprietary software.

The short answer is yes, you can use intranet applications to solve many of the problems groupware is meant to address. But not all of them, and with mixed results.

It's a complicated picture as the leading groupware developers – Lotus Development Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. among them – move to integrate their proprietary products with the Web, while companies such as Netscape aggressively pursue open standards for a variety of groupware functions.

Open system or proprietary? Netscape or Notes? A mix-and-match solution, perhaps? How's a company to decide which groupware route to take?

The first step is not a product comparison. Rather, a company moving toward groupware must first establish its specific definition of groupware and evaluate its particular needs, says Ken Lownie, president of Connexus Consulting Group, Inc. in Andover, Mass.

"Can you use the intranet as groupware? It's a definitional issue. What do you mean by the word 'groupware'?" Lownie asks.

Groupware 101

It seems like it should be an easy question to answer, but "groupware" can mean different things to different companies, as well as different things to different employees within a company. Groupware is an umbrella term for any tool that allows workers to communicate, collaborate and coordinate. That's a broad enough concept to take in the ordinary telephone, though groupware is generally defined as encompassing such things as electronic mail; threaded discussions; chat tools; calendaring and scheduling applications; conferencing tools; document publishing and storage; tracking tools; and workflow.

The leading product in the groupware category is Lotus Notes, introduced by Lotus Development Corp. in 1989. Particularly strong in the tracking and workflow areas, and known for its customization capabilities, Notes is the standard by which other products are judged. In recent years, though, Notes has seen competition from Microsoft Exchange, Novell GroupWise and a number of second- and third-tier products. And the exploding interest in intranets has added pressure across the board. (Lotus, for one, has made inroads with its Domino server technology, which integrates Notes with the Web environment and eliminates two major obstacles to Notes: the need for extensive training and the maintenance issues related to a client-side application.)

Intranets have captured so much attention because they are a relatively inexpensive and simple way to bring together disparate groups of workers. To an extent, they have re-popularized the idea of groupware, in that companies instituting intranets can readily experience some of the benefits of shared information through document publishing and repository.

But intranet-based groupware, with few exceptions, requires mixing and matching to get the features you need. There is no equivalent yet to an all-encompassing product such as Notes. Only a select group of Web-enabled products provide tracking and workflow functions, for example, and the development of calendaring and scheduling tools has been slowed by a lack of agreement on common standards. So while some of the distinctions between traditional groupware and intranet applications are fading, gaps remain.

"There are massive misperceptions" that you can do it all with intranets, Lownie says.

Evaluating Your Choices

The key to finding the right groupware solution lies with users and their needs. And that means actually working with users to identify and evaluate those needs and to help create a shared perspective of the company.

"Typically this is done is a facilitated session, or 'dump' session. People start talking about what their needs are and about what the company's needs are, too," says author and consultant Mellanie Hills, founder of the Plano, Texas, company Knowledgies. Then it's a matter of distilling the list of needs into a cohesive set of requirements that are then prioritized by the group and used as a starting point for evaluating products.

The early involvement of I.T. personnel is also important in identifying key infrastructure and operational requirements and in eventually expanding the scope of the project from a departmental to corporate solution. "It's useful for IT to be involved from the beginning to prevent 'islands of groupware,' " Hills says. "If you don't tie the organization together at some point, you will miss a lot of the advantages of groupware."

I.T. also has an important role in evaluating products and guiding users to those applications that will best meet their needs. Hills, in her book Intranet as Groupware, offers a list of criteria for judging products. Among the considerations are:

• Which platforms will the product work with?
• How open is it?
• Do the features match your needs?
• Is it an integrated solution or a niche application?
• Is it easy to use?
• What are the training and support requirements?
• What will it cost?
• What are the deployment and upgrade issues?
• How well will the product fit in your current infrastructure?
• How stable is it?
• What can you expect from vendor support?

Lownie, of Connexus, says the "mantra" he repeats to business managers is this: You MUST have a strategy.

"Different people are clamoring for different things. In a big company, decisions may be made in a fragmented way. We start building redundant infrastructures." But a strategy provides a framework in which a company can choose the appropriate infrastructure for its groupware needs, he says. "Without that framework, you're going to pay through the nose."

Anita J. Freed is an Internet project manager at DCI.

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Ken Lownie and Mellanie Hills are featured speakers at DCI's Internet Expo. Please see the latest online brochure for program details and registration information.

Hills is the author of Intranet Business Strategies and Intranet As Groupware, both published by John Wiley & Sons.

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Related articles: Lotus' Domino Theory and Net Asset: Intranets Have Much To Offer Businesses.

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