FEATURE EDITORIAL

Extending Single User Applications for Collaboration

The core applications that most information workers use on a daily basis are designed for individual use, not group use. Individuals would work in Word, Excel or PowerPoint until they were contented with the state of their work. Then collaboration was undertaken in one of two ways: hollering for an in-the-office colleague to come and look over the shoulder, or emailing the document or

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spreadsheet to an out-of-the-office colleague for review at an opportune moment. One provided synchronous interaction ("Sally, how about we word that paragraph a slightly different way?" or "John, let's change the forecasted market growth to 20 percent and see what happens"), the other asynchronous ("Sally, I have looked at your document and made some changes; please see the new version attached" or "John, thanks for the market forecast. I have made some changes and attach a new edition for your review"). When just one other person was involved, the ping-pong effect by email worked fine, but when multiple people were asked to review and comment, the original author faced a tremendously difficult job of incorporating all the suggestions into a new master document or spreadsheet. For such group situations with Excel, eXpresso is trying to change the paradigm for collaboration by going back to the underlying application and adding capabilities to make it more group-friendly.

eXpresso's approach is to provide a Web repository for users to store Excel spreadsheets, and then to render those spreadsheets within a Web browser so that one or more people can work on the spreadsheet simultaneously. Thus the initial user creates her spreadsheet on her local machine using Excel (an application most have and know how to use), and then when done, it is uploaded to an eXpresso account. The spreadsheet's creator can invite others to work on the spreadsheet in real-time (that is, multiple people can have the spreadsheet open in the browser and each can make changes to cells that the others get to see immediately), or the others can come in at any time and work on it. But there is always only one version, and the changes made by anyone are incorporated directly into the master edition.

There are some subtleties in group work that eXpresso has recognized and made provision for in the eXpresso service. Invited collaborators can be assigned different levels of access to the spreadsheet as a whole—some can only view it, others can edit it, while others can download and copy it. Going a step further, specific people can be given access rights to only a portion of the spreadsheet; meaning that edit rights aren't a binary decision ("yes" or "no") but rather give the ability to ask certain people to provide input on only some of the modeling (a point that I make in my 7 Pillars reference architecture for team collaboration. When multiple people are working together in real-time on the spreadsheet, they have an integrated instant messaging service so that the conversation about what's going on can be undertaken within the context of those changes (and the transcript of these sessions can be captured and stored with the spreadsheet for later review). In addition, eXpresso has added alerting, notification and audit capabilities so that others can be kept up-to-date with the changes that other people are making when they're not looking at the spreadsheet.

eXpresso is cognizant of the offline nature of work for people that travel frequently, and using a plug-in for Excel, permits a user to take a spreadsheet offline for local editing on a laptop, with full synchronization when the user next connects to the network. When someone takes the spreadsheet offline in this case, the eXpresso one is locked ("checked-out") so that others can't edit it.

Other spreadsheet collaboration service providers take a different route; EditGrid and Google, for example, provide an online spreadsheet where people can work together, and the resultant work can be exported as an Excel file when the collaborative work is done.

All in all, eXpresso is a great addition to Excel, and teams that work extensively with Excel should investigate further.

Michael Sampson

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

O3Spaces Workplace 2.2.1

O3Spaces released O3Spaces Workplace 2.2.1, a document management and collaboration suite. The company says, "O3Spaces Workplace 2.2.1 incorporates a greatly enhanced Workplace Assistant. This trademark desktop component now sports an 'application style' user interface, with a generic Workplace repository file browser. It allows you to upload multiple files and folders to the Workplace by drag & drop, or download a selection of files and folders for off-line work. The new Workplace Assistant makes it even easier to share any type of file from any application, while retaining the benefits of the Workplace repository's security, versioning and locking mechanisms."

The SharePoint Report 2008

CMSWatch released the 2008 SharePoint Report, a comprehensive evaluation of all things SharePoint. The report runs to 190 pages. "Probably one of the most interesting findings in the report is that SharePoint is fast becoming the next IBM Lotus Notes—and not in a good way. For years people implemented Lotus Notes databases like crazy, seeing them as the best way to store and share information. Now you hear more about moving all the content and data into SharePoint. But what's the point if you are just going from one messy datastore into another?" See CMSWatch for licensing details.

Central Desktop Delivers Enterprise-Grade Security to Business Teams

Central Desktop released a security pack for its hosted collaboration service. According to the company: "This new feature set addresses security requirements that Central Desktop's customers have been asking for to help them comply with internal security requirements. The enterprise-grade security offering delivers state-of-the-art perimeter, network, server, application and data security to ensure greater data privacy and availability for customers. This applies to both SMBs and organizations that work within industries that require security compliance such as, healthcare and financial services, as well as business teams within larger organizations that have more stringent requirements enforced by their IT departments (Corporate Governance, HIPAA, etc)." The Security Pack is an optional add-on for Company Plans.

We welcome your ideas and your news for Collaboration Newswire's News & Trends in Collaboration. Let us know what you think by sending your comments to editorial@messagingnews.com. Written or compiled by Michael Sampson. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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