Collaborative Solutions
Work changes
In recent years there has been an increasing use of closer cooperative working practices in organisations of all sizes. Many organisations have mobile staff in the field, partnerships with other organisations or cross departmental project teams. Underpinning this is collaborative software or groupware. Basically this is software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve their goals. Many popular applications like wikis, blogs, social networkings have crossed over into the business world.
The widespread availability of high bandwidth networks has allowed for growth in videoconferencing and real-time collaboration involving rich and complex media such as video, and complex engineering models and graphical situations.
In general, collaboration solutions can be said categorised into three main areas:-
- Collaborative management (project management, workflow, extranet etc)
- Conferencing (video conferencing, application sharing etc)
- Electronic communication tools (email, instant messaging, revision control etc)
There are a number of clear benefits of groupware:-
- Enable users in disparate locations to work together
- Sharing applications
- Handle offline and online messaging
- Reduce costs
- Facilitate group problem-solving
Solutions
There are a wide range of solutions from many vendors such as:-
- GroupWise - Novell produced one of the first groupware products.
- IBM Lotus - product group includes Notes, Quickplace, Sametime, and more.
- Microsoft SharePoint - product group includes collaboration tools and services, a development platform, and a portal server.
- Intuit QuickBase - has collaboration products for the Web or the corporate network.
MailSure primarily deals with Sharepoint. This is a web-based collaboration and document management platform. It can be used to host web sites which can be used to access shared workspaces and documents, as well as specialized applications such as wikis, blogs and many other forms of applications, from within a browser. SharePoint functionality is exposed as web parts, such as a task list, or discussion pane. These web parts are composed into web pages, which are then hosted in the SharePoint portal. SharePoint sites are actually ASP.NET applications, which are served using IIS and use a SQL Server database as data storage backend.
The SharePoint family is composed of three different applications:
- Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (SPD)
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)
MailSure is ideally placed to setup, configure and integrate sharepoint into your business systems. Call today to find out how we can help you