The collaboration ecosystem generally consists of people, productivity software, collaborative software and collaboration methods.

How organisations are using Collaboration Tools

The demand for virtual interactions between individuals within the same premises and from different locations has been increased significantly over the past few years.

• Many organisations are now using Collaboration Tools chiefly to enable both the co-located and the geographically dispersed employees to get work done and achieve common goals.
• Collaborative technology is being used to build virtual communities, to improve business processes and enhance customer service.
• Enterprise portals are now being developed to improve content aggregation and the integration of business applications.
• Organisations are also looking for opportunities to strengthen security around their collaboration technologies and initiatives.

The value of the tools is more pronounced where they facilitate real-time on line collaboration between individuals or groups located in different places and in different time zones. A typical example includes Alfresco (an Open Source company) that is using Skype to maintain collaboration of its widely distributed staff. In a recent article in The Economist, the promise of collaboration was also highlighted.

In addition, Collaboration Tools have created on line platforms with a high affinity to innovation. These platforms have the potential to nurture innovation at different levels of an enterprise and breakdown silos traditionally associated with legacy systems. The CSCW Matrix below highlights a number of play fields for Collaboration Tools.

Collaboration Tools Features

Although commercial and open source solutions are found in various collaboration facets such as project management, file and document sharing, event scheduling etc, their collaborative features are more similar than different. Here are some basic capabilities of the tools:

• Mail Transfer Agent
• Mail Storage
• IMAP Server
• Shared IMAP
• Calendar & Formats
• Shared Contacts
• Shared Files
• Web Admin UI
• Anti-Virus
• Spam Filtering
• Shared Calendar
• IM Server
• WebDAV and Web UI

ASCTs

Apache, Mozilla, Wikipedia are cases in point of the most successful open source projects driven by collaborative environments. ASCTs have become more attractive to budget constrained businesses looking to maximize their cost effectiveness. Reduced time to market with lower total cost of ownership and greater transparency into the engineering process are balanced by governance challenges, and to a lesser extent issues with conflicting terms and conditions and/or licensing dichotomies. They offer a central hub to communicate a shared vision allowing information and knowledge to be captured and be made available to all members of a user community. The solutions offer real-time updates, real-time help requests and self-service archiving capabilities. In recent years, open-source productivity tools and collaboration suites have advanced in reliability, feature sets, and overall sophistication. Since open-source technologies are community-driven and not tied to commercial interests, they can often address community needs better, more quickly, and potentially at lower cost. In the corporate world collaboration projects mainly involve streamlining business processes, and the interfaces between legacy closed systems.

In the ASCTs category, SystemicLogic Research Institute recently conducted an assessment of Scalix, eGroupWare, OpenGroupware and Open-Xchange Server . The tools were compared based on how well they match a client’s business requirements. A set of attributes were used to build focus areas for measuring the applications. Two major performance metrics most relevant to this category namely Collaboration Tools support and Collaboration Tools technical quality were examined. A decision model was used to present the relative position of measured products and was normalized to show strengths and weaknesses compared to other products.

Read more…

One very hectic day ended on a relaxed note as staff at SystemicLogic shared an assortment of gifts from Red Hat as part our ongoing collaboration with them and several other Open Source Software (OSS) companies in the field of research. Hats off to the great work SystemicLogic has done in the realm of OSS in 2008.  Thank you!

Last year was a hive of activity for the Open Source Software (OSS) team. Clients in the banking and insurance sectors were offered wide ranging consulting solutions on OSS. The main consulting focus was placed on articulating to clients the benefits of OSS realisation. Big lessons were learnt, huge opportunities were identified and made available to the clients.

(more…)

A good site to look at is the http://polishlinux.org.

It does paired comparisons of 19 different Linux variants.

A list of vendors to look at this far include:

• Novell
  Red Hat
  Obsidian
  Systems    Business Systems Group
  TSI-Local Systems
  Arivia.kom
  Tetra-Information Services
  ATOS
  Jumping Bean
  Cerebra
  Astidian
  i-kno
  GlobeTOM
  Gijima AST

No catgorisation has been done on the offerings yet… stay tuned.

The Coin Phase that Doesn’t Seem to Cut it…

When one looks at contemporary documentaries, and start diving deeping into the concerns of industry users of Open Source technology, one starts to quicky realise that its not about “Open Source”. The name was coined as part of the growth period of the FOSS movement, but it does not reflect the thinking in its entirety.

In fact, Open Source is about more than “free source” and sharing. The new wave of OSS shifts really look at new commercially viable, industry grade Open Source business model, support structures, skills development and open standards. Finding a term to embody these ideas could be a tough call, yet may have some merit. Open Source is already stigmatized by the financial industry, branded as a paradigm with an immature process with “some good technologies” by several players.

Will OSS just fade into the background? Is it a “wait and see” scenario? It will depend on your viewpoint and the industry that you are playing in. The outlook for SMEs seem different to that of large corporates, and the industries also differ substantially in their opinion.

Bringing the real facts to the table will be the most important part of OSS. Objective education is needed, not “false benefit” advertising. The core problem resides with the understanding of OSS - what it means and where its going. The problem therein lies the fact that OS is a fragmented movement with one philosophy, but many directions. This lack of central vision presents one of the biggest challenges to OS adoption.

Can this scatter brain, social development movement be harnessed to present some good solutions, or are we all just suffering from the afterschock of the OS hype?

Things to ponder.

Locality
Several vendors are present in the Open Source market. Understanding the locality of support (i.e. regional marketing and development support services or purely international). This attribute contributes to the viability of an Open Source vendor as a supplier.

Service Offering Breadth
The breadth of offering provides insight into how diverse a vendor offering is and enables organisations to make use of a single vendor to manage a comprehensive set of services around a selection of products. More services are often regarded as better, but need to be traded off against the capacity of the vendor company to deliver and maintain solutions.
Product Offering Breadth The breadth of offering provides insight into the Open Source vendor’s ability to provide skills in various categories of products, A narrow range can indicate specialisation, where a broad range may be useful in providing a comprehensive solution offering to a large institution. Breadth needs to be viewed against service breadth and capacity to build a big picture view of vendors in the landscape.

Product (s) Community Size
Community support is often the backbone and support system for many established open source products. A large community is used as a support strength indicator.
Projecting many products into a single rating can be misleading. The approach in this measurement is to find the community strength of products relative to their functional classifications and find the appropriate average for the products out of the sample under investigation.

Product Community Activity
A similar, but even more crucial attribute related to the activity of communities. As an example, large communities may not be active for extended periods, which may lead to a lag in updates and fixes required in a corporate setting.

Licensing Structures
Several licence agreements exist for products that commercial Open Source vendors use. These licenses to place some restrictions on the usage and modifications of the Open Source products. Less restriction are often regarded as favourable, but also requires the necessary details to protect the corporate organisation, should any loopholes be present that may lead to significant risks.
License structures are not included in this report.
Year Experience New start-up organisations may have experienced developers, but are not established (from a performance brand or client reputation point of view.
This attribute considers the age of the company in the market and its visibility from a client portfolio perspective.
Supporting Case Studies Established commercial vendors develop case studies to indicate the type of work and client that was involved in a project delivery cycle. The existence and content of case studies either by vendor or independent research organisations is considered an indicator of success and an example industry strength application,

Company Size (capacity)
The company size provides information around the capacity that an Open Source vendor has in order to scale resources to the needs of the large corporate environment.
Smaller companies may however have appropriate sourcing strategies in place through contracting agreements to better serve growing and declining needs. Larger companies (or sourcing agreements) indicate a capability to ensure more reliable capacity.
Client Portfolio The type of clients provides an indication as to the industrial nature of the Open Source vendor’s application and capabilities. Some information can be extracted from case studies and public information.

Partner Network

A strong partner network also builds the credibility of an Open Source Vendor.
Membership Where applicable, additional certifications and accredited membership status contributes to the overall capabilities of Open Source vendors to deliver solutions professionally.

Roadmap and Vision
Even though Open Source products are highly fragmented, commercial vendors need to deliver on a vision for their product, steering it into a direction that is forward thinking and provides large corporate organisations with a clear path to manage risk and conduct planning for future implementations. An indication of directions score favourably, where the absence of a roadmap score less favourable.

The SystemicLogic Technology blog is dedicated to blog articles that cover current challenges and realities faced by organisations on a global scale.

Various topics will be covered in this blog, including the ongoing study of Open Source solutions and its overall application in the industry.