BOSTON - Corechange is the latest to beef up the collaboration capabilities of its portal, introducing a suite of collaboration components that are designed to let business users easily set up community workspaces and interactive projects.
The Multi-Mode Collaboration services are being announced this week and will be included as part of Coreport, Corechange's enterprise portal product. With the collaboration services, business users will be able to turn on whatever type of collaboration capabilities they need, including threaded discussions, chat, document sharing and a feature that enables portal users to find colleagues with particular expertise.
In addition, Coreport will integrate with Groove Network's collaboration platform, Microsoft's Exchange-based Instant Messaging and SharePoint Team Services, and Ideal Science's Ideal Bulletin Board.
"We're recognizing all the different ways people collaborate and we see the portal as the center of it," says Jeff Spotts, executive vice president of marketing at Corechange.
Applied Knowledge Group, a collaboration consulting firm in Reston, Va., is a Corechange partner and also uses the Coreport portal internally. Andy Campbell, senior vice president and chief knowledge officer of AKG, says the new collaboration features are exactly what portal users need.
"What we have not seen yet, prior to the Corechange initiative is a well-integrated collaboration system hosted within the portal framework," Campbell says. "You can have the best portal in the world, but if you put a collaboration tool in there that's horrendously complicated, you haven't solved anybody's problem," he says.
Observers say portals are becoming the centerpiece of how companies do business. Rather than being satisfied with a simple static interface to content and applications, business users want a dynamic workspace that lets them manipulate what's delivered via the portal, analysts say.
Matt Cain, a senior vice president with Meta Group, says collaboration capabilities are being added to portals to let businesses get more out of the portals they deploy. "It lowers people coordination costs," he says.
"Corechange is very much on top of the trend whereby we're seeing collaboration services being embedded in portals and business applications and other third-party applications, as well," he adds.
In March, Plumtree unveiled its collaboration server, and, in April, IBM introduced upgrades to its WebSphere Portal, with collaboration playing a leading role. A key aspect of that release was a focus on making it easier for business users to create collaborative work environments within the WebSphere portal.
That's a focus for Corechange, as well. The Coreport Community Administration Wizard lets business users set up community portal pages, decide who can be a member of that community and what content, applications and collaboration features will be available.
"We're focusing on the self-sufficiency of Coreport and allowing the business end user to be the owner of the corporate workspace," Spotts says.
Previous versions of Coreport allowed for collaborative work, but IT intervention was required to set up those functions.
"With the Community Administration Wizard we're hiding all that technical administration and putting the capability in the hands of the business user," he says.
Coreport, with Multi-mode Collaboration Services, is available through Corechange's early availability program and is scheduled to be available widely in the third quarter.
Pricing for Coreport begins at $250 per user, with a discount schedule for volume purchases. Server pricing is available upon request for extranet portal configurations.
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Corechange: www.corechange.com
IBM unveils latest portal, focuses on collaboration
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