MITRE | The Edge Perspectives | Collaboration Marketplace Evolving to Meet Emerging Needs

The collaboration marketplace has been evolving over the last 10 years, delivering technologies that enable coordination and information sharing, virtual meetings, and more recently virtual collocation. The promise of these technologies is to improve our ability to collaborate, coordinate, and share information to facilitate inter- and intra-organizational teams. With these technologies, we have an opportunity to better support the mobile workforce and leverage personnel assets, wherever they may be.

Most organizations use asynchronous collaboration tools that enable the work force to coordinate and share information with each other. Examples include e-mail, discussion groups, information sharing tools, and group calendaring systems. These tools allow people to work together, regardless of whether team members and work products are physically collocated. Tools such as e-mail enable team members to exchange electronic messages with attached files. Discussion groups enable teams to conduct threaded discussions, which are available to the team. Information sharing tools such as Web servers and Lotus Notes enable teams to publish information and can provide an interface to share information in corporate directories and databases. Group calendaring systems enable teams to schedule meetings and the necessary resources for the meeting.

This market segment has been maturing over the last 6-10 years and provides a stable technology base, with scalability to support the enterprise. Most of these tools have support for security (e.g., authentication, encryption, and firewall support). Tools from different vendors are largely interoperable, with most vendors conforming to common standards or exchange formats. It is quite common to find many of these complementary tools bundled together as part of a product suite. Key vendors with offerings in this area include Microsoft, Netscape, and Lotus.

The marketplace for real-time conferencing tools has been very active over the last 2-4 years. Real-time collaboration tools take us to the next level of collaboration and provide us with the ability to conduct virtual meetings and share information in real time. Examples include text chat, audio/video conferencing, and data conferencing (e.g., shared whiteboards, and real-time application sharing).

Text chatter has gained in popularity over the last 1-2 years with the emergence of a new class of chat tool that supports online presence awareness in addition to the chat capability. Tools such as AOL Instant Messenger and AOL's Mirabilis ICQ (I Seek You) allow users to create tailored "buddy lists" so they can be made aware when users of interest come online and are available to chat. These tools make it very easy to conduct one-on-one or group discussions. These tools are highly scalable and require very little network bandwidth resources.

Audio and video conferencing tools have started to become more viable over the last 1-2 years, but still suffer from issues of stability and scalability to support large conferences. These tools require sufficient network bandwidth and quality of service to be effective on any scale, though users can effectively use audio on low bandwidth connections such as dial-up. Multipoint conference servers, such as those provided by DataBeam, White Pines, Onlive, and PictureTel, are required to enable multiple users to participate in an audio/video conference. There are many audio and video conferencing tools, which are interoperable through their support for the International Telecommunications Union ITU H.323 conferencing standard. However, there are still proprietary vendor solutions in the marketplace that are not interoperable with other tools.

The use of data conferencing tools, especially application sharing, has become more popular in the marketplace with the free availability of Microsoft NetMeeting and similar free tools for Sun and SGI platforms. Most vendors are adopting a common implementation for real-time application sharing into their products (e.g., PictureTel, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun), based on the ITU T.128 standard. Shared whiteboard capabilities have remained constant over the last few years, and only custom solutions provide the additional capability required by the Department of Defense (DoD), such as support for geo-registration and specialized image formats (e.g., National Imagery Transmission Format). Many shared whiteboards are not interoperable with each other, and there has been a noticeable lag in adoption of common standards by the vendors. Both application sharing and shared whiteboard data conferencing tools are limited in scalability, and suitable only for smaller work teams. The ITU T.120 family of data conferencing standards, although followed in part by some vendors, has not been adopted as a whole by the vendor community. There has been recent activity in lighter weight approaches to data conferencing that are more Web friendly that will challenge the ITU T.120 standards. (See ITU article and IETF article.)

Security has not been adequately addressed by the real-time conferencing tools. Although most chat tools support some form of authentication, they typically do not support encryption of the chat conference data, and some tools introduce firewall risks. Audio/video and data conferencing tools can introduce serious firewall risks, typically have no support for authentication, and we are only beginning to see encryption support for some data conferencing tools, as Christine Eliopoulis chronicles.

The next wave of collaboration technologies emerging in the marketplace are environments that support virtual collocation, often referred to as "place-based" collaboration environments. These environments integrate people, communications, and shared data, into a shared virtual space. The environment itself is persistent, which means that the shared space, shared data, and properties of the collaboration environment do not go away (such as in a virtual meeting) and remain available to support ongoing collaboration. Some key properties of place-based collaboration environments include rich communications (e.g., text chat and audio/video conferencing), a shared document store to make documents and other data available to others, tailorable virtual spaces to provide the location and context for the collaboration, conference management for managing chat, audio/video, and other conferences within the collaboration context, and presence awareness so that users are aware of others that are available in the collaborative environment.

Place-based collaboration is still an active research area, with two commercial products available in the last two years, TeamWave Workplace and General Dynamics (formerly GTE) InfoWorkspace. Place-based collaboration environments are not yet interoperable with each other, and there are currently no standards for virtual space environments. Although the environments support authentication, and privacy of the virtual spaces via access control lists, additional security is beginning to be addressed by the vendors, with a lack of secure communications and firewall risks.

Collaboration offerings have developed in the marketplace as individual applications and as bundled toolsets that offer a tight package of complementary functionality. As demand for collaboration grows from workgroup to enterprise and cross-organizational scale, we expect commercial offerings to evolve toward a system framework approach, where collaboration services become integrated with the information infrastructure. The services-based framework, as the longer term architectural approach, will give us flexibility in product choices to satisfy user requirements, competitive advantage to benefit from rapid technology evolution and innovation, and interoperability from leveraging existing enterprise services (e.g., directory, security, document, search, workflow, and network services). Implementing such a framework is challenging and requires time, as the components for the framework become available and the techniques for integrating the services become better understood.

In the near term, the bundled toolsets will continue to be viable, providing an "out of the box" capability that can be easier to deploy and administer, but with less flexibility with interoperability and tool integration. The critical factor will be for planning for the migration from the tightly integrated toolsets toward the system frameworks, with understanding of life cycle costs and impact of migration on users.

As the market continues to rapidly deliver collaboration offerings, organizations have yet to adopt many of these collaboration services into the enterprise. The state of the practice in most organizations is with the use of asynchronous collaboration technologies (e.g., e-mail, threaded discussion groups, Web/document servers, group calendaring). Adoption of real-time conferencing is occurring at a slower rate than initially anticipated, but is expected to grow in the next few years, with a focus on data conferencing. The Gartner Group anticipates that synchronous collaboration technologies will be in use by over 10 million users by 2002. The government is ahead of commercial industry with respect to understanding requirements for virtual collocation, and the demand from commercial industry is expected to follow.

But even in the government, there continues to be more of a focus on pilot programs and limited operational deployments rather than enterprise deployment of advanced collaboration services. Reasons for the slower adoption can be attributed to technical/infrastructure, security, and cultural issues.

In order for an organization to be able to successfully use collaboration technologies on an enterprise scale, the network and systems infrastructure must be able to support the requirements of the collaboration tools. Real-time conferencing requires available bandwidth and quality of service from the network. Some tools require support for IP multicast routing. Organizations must prepare a strategy for managing large-scale rollouts, network advances, administration, training, and support.

To enable cross-organizational collaboration, security policies and security solutions must be in place. Security is often weakly addressed by collaboration tools, requiring organizations to consider additional technologies (such as virtual private networks) and flexibility in security policy and an agreed upon concept of operations to enable collaboration across organizations. This poses a great challenge to adoption of collaboration, beyond challenges we face with technology, since there are no policies in place for supporting virtual organizations.

The most difficult challenge is that of dealing with organizational culture and organizational readiness to change to support collaborative operations. Even if the systems, networks, and security policies are in place, and the collaboration technology is the most capable and robust, it will not have an impact if the members of the organizations do not see a need or do not have a willingness to share information and collaborate. Organizations must work within to create a collaborative culture in the organization and help members to understand the benefits and rewards, how they are expected to work, and how they will be supported. Organizations need to work with staff to understand how to use collaboration technology to improve the business process and realize improvement. Members of the organization should be involved from the beginning in helping to define the concept of operations, understanding the rollout and training process, and evolving organizational goals.

All of these challenges in implementing collaboration take time, careful planning, and come with an associated cost. Piloting and early experimentation, with a plan to build upon lessons learned and expand to more members of the organization, can help to ease the rollout process. Organizations should expect failures, but examine them closely to understand the causes, so that the next iteration can become more successful.

For more information, please contact Esther Rhode using the employee directory.

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