Chapter 12. Collaboration in the Enterprise Portal

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:

• Collaborative authoring tools . These include document management features such as version control, check in and check out, and routing and approval.

• Automated workflow . May relate to documents or to routing processes associated with electronic forms.

• Threaded discussion . Provides asynchronous messaging for a virtual community. May be related to a document or a standalone discussion.

• Real-time collaboration (audio, video, application sharing) . There is a large return on investment possible here, as direct cost savings from travel expenses and downtime are readily measured.

• Presence awareness . Show users who is signed onto the portal and provide a means to reach them.

• Instant messaging . Complementary capability with presence awareness and real-time collaboration.

• Project management . Web-based access to project plans, project management data entry, and other related features.

• Analysis tools . Once you open the corporate data coffers, you need web-based tools to mine for useful data and smelt it into information or even knowledge.

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.