Messaging and Collaboration

Instant messaging, collaboration, messaging servers, videoconferencing tools

By Christine Burns and Keith Shaw, Network World, 02/23/04

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Winning company: Documentum
Winning product: eRoom 6.0

In 2003, if spam was the professional wrestler who got corporate messaging into a figure-four leg lock, then collaboration software was the manager who saved the day with a well-timed chair shot.

Many users see collaboration software as a way to improve productivity, through its virtual rooms and ability to gather project workers together without having to wade through e-mail. With many project team members working in different area codes, time zones or other remote locations, collaborating virtually has become a necessity.

With that in mind, we favored Documentum's eRoom 6.0, collaboration software that lets users get their work done in a virtual room setting through the great use of icons and collapsible navigation as our winner (see review). To simulate remote workers connecting to a central company, we tested these products from several physical locations (in California, Kansas and Massachusetts) across the Internet. Because it doesn't require a separate messaging server, we also loved this product from an administrative view.

"[Documentum's eRoom] is easy to install and configure, has a very intuitive and easy-to-use interface, and can be adapted to meet the needs of virtually any collaborative effort," Lab Alliance member Christine Perey writes.

Click to enlarge

We were impressed with how Documentum set up its workspaces. You can populate these virtual rooms with objects or files as defined in several templates included with the package or leave them blank so users can later fill them. The system is flexible enough to let users (with permissions, of course) create rooms as they see fit, using tools that best suit needs and creativity.

We enjoyed the flexibility of its user and access control - how it lets users decide who can "edit" a certain tool, who gets "read-only" access and who is banned altogether. The eRoom approach to polling - where every item or discussion can be used to launch a "user poll" - was impressive, easy to implement and very democratic, too.

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