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In this chapter we turn our attention inward, to the corporate intranet or extranet. The portal is a natural place to provide collaborative tools for users. By including collaboration in our portal, we encourage users to adopt the technologies we have invested so much to purchase and deploy, and to realize the potential productivity gains that too often are untapped. Collaboration and the related field of knowledge management are key enablers to allow organizations to achieve strategic advantage through information technology. Microsoft is making much of this fact in its marketing campaign around "the agile enterprise." The idea is that large enterprises have long since automated individual processes. Indeed, the fact that these processes are automated, along with the tremendous investment in current systems, may actually hinder an organization's ability to react to changes in its environment. For an organization to be agile, it must respond to changes in its surroundings. These could be market forces, the regulatory environment, technological change, and new management, for instance. Collaboration can streamline the decision-making process and provide a communication channel for news to travel inside an organization. Most collaboration takes little advantage of technology, except perhaps the telephone. Agility depends on management at least as much as, if not more than, it depends on technology. Organizations that will not or cannot use the knowledge gained through collaboration may be better off not opening Pandora's box. On the other hand, if you are planning to break down the barriers between your employees ' application "islands" or " silos " and to increase the flow of information up and down the organizational hierarchy, this chapter may just be the most useful one in the book for you. If the term "portal" is plagued by ambiguity and misuse, "collaboration" is not much better. There is no bright line dividing collaboration from other software tools. For the purposes of this chapter, we include the following collaboration features in the portal:
This chapter shows how all these collaboration features can be implemented in the context of the portal. My examples take advantage of several Microsoft products, including SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Office, InfoPath, Live Meeting, Windows Messenger, Outlook XP, SQL Server, Exchange Server, and Project 2002. In some cases you are given the opportunity to choose among two or more tools that provide similar functionality. |
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