New Collaboration Challenges

Controlling access to data and files is important, but enabling effective collaboration and use of the data is equally, if not more, important. Although there will most likely never be a replacement for the face-to-face meeting, handshakes, fresh donuts, and whiteboards, the modern business can't afford to have all collaboration take place this way. Meetings can be difficult to coordinate and expensive in terms of the costs associated with the participants for the half hour to one hour a meeting typically takes.

Conference calls and videoconferencing solutions evolved to facilitate meetings over long distances, but attendees need to be present at the same time and have access to specific types of equipment. Online meeting solutions such as Microsoft's Live Communications server provides an excellent set of tools for organizations that have the most demanding needs for virtual meetings.

SharePoint 2003 technologies provide a number of features and capabilities that facilitate digital meetings that don't require physically assembling all the attendees, or even for each attendee to be available at the same time. Unlike online meeting solutions, SharePoint 2003 sites can be customized quickly and easily for the specific type of meeting. If external participants need access to the digital meeting space, all they need are a browser compatible with SharePoint 2003 and allowed access to the SharePoint website, and they can participate. No special hardware such as a videoconferencing setup is required. No software needs to be installed on their workstation in most cases either.

The Complexities of Sharing Documents

Email has evolved from a replacement to the written letter or memo, to a collaboration tool and means of sharing documents. Although this process works for simple projects involving a handful of people, it can quickly become cumbersome and counterproductive. If the document is sent to a number of people, and several people make changes to the content and document title, it may be difficult to collect and manage input, collate the changes, and finally save the document to a place accessible to all.

Some software products such as Microsoft Word offer change tracking capabilities, but many others do not, making it difficult to determine what may have changed between versions. And versioning processes are seldom clearly defined; one careless click of the Save icon can destroy hours of work.

SharePoint technologies offer a number of features, such as workspaces and discussion boards, that provide a more conducive environment for sharing documents and information. Instead of emailing a document as an attachment to a group, a workspace can quickly be created that contains the document, and members of the group can access the document in the workspace. A discussion board can quickly be created to track threads of a discussion and offshoots of the original discussion.

SharePoint technologies also offer a document check-out process that makes it clear who has the document reserved for editing. Different versions of the document can be automatically saved, and comments can be added to different versions so that it is immediately clear what changes have been made.

Certain users of SharePoint libraries or workspaces can be limited to read-only access of documents as well, to ensure that they don't change the documents but can still see their content. Part III, "Using SharePoint 2003 Technologies," provides additional coverage of these features.