I came across a very enlightening article on the intranetjournal.com site titled "The Intranet Model: Strategy for Success". The article lists our four main objectives of an intranet:-

1) Communications -- e.g. News and events

2) Business Processes -- e.g. Absence Booking workflow

3) Knowledge Management -- e.g. Best Practice documentation

4) Collaboration -- e.g. Cross-department working group discussion board

According to the article, early intranets were mainly communication driven, but slowly evolved to include productivity tools to encompass these other areas.

Let us assess HyperOffice, a popular web based intranet software on these four counts.

Communication - HyperOffice has an inbuilt email tool, as well as has the ability to publish company events, announcements and news on the group dashboard.

Business Processes - They have an inbuilt database management tool, which enables users to set up automated workflows for common business processes like lead tracking, order processing etc. It may be argued that the tool lacks sophistication, but on the other hand, their target market - small businesses - don't need to set up very complex workflows, and ease of use is a very important factor for them.

Knowledge Management - HyperOffice includes document storage features, and the ability to customize the structure and content of group pages from which links can be provided to specific documents. It may be noted that it is not sufficient to simply have knowledge stored away in a document repository. It is equally important to provide content around knowledge and make it more compelling for users. The ability to create customized group pages with links to documents goes a great length in acheiving this.

Collaboration - HyperOffice includes the ability to collaborate on documents with features like versioning, notifications, document locking etc. They also include th ability to collaborate through wikis, a popular modern collaboration technology.

All in all, HyperOffice does account for itself pretty well against the criteria of the internet model.

HyperOffice recently announced the private beta of its award winning online collaboration software, which rebuilds the entire suite ground up in AJAX. According to company sources, the new version is a result of 2 years of rigorous R & D conducted on tens of thousands of HyperOffice clients scattered around the world.

The company is specifically targeting the small business end of the now explosive online collaboration market which includes players like Google Apps, Microsoft BPOS, SalesForce Chatter, IBM LotusLive, WebEx Mail and Acrobat.com. The company brings one of the most comprehensive feature sets in the market, and certainly the most comprehensive in the small business segment, integreating email, collaboration, database applications and online meetings in a single solution.

According to Shahab Kaviani, VP Marketing, HyperOffice, there are many good collaboration solutions in the market, but most of them are "point solutions" meaning they serve only one aspect of the collaboration problem - calendars, document sharing, project management etc. Using multiple solutions leads to confusion and the inefficiency of data lying in the compartments of different solutions. HyperOffice solves this problem by bringing most of your tools in a single solutions, where data and freely flow back and forth between different solutions.

This new developement has been widely recognised by the tech media, with coverage from eWeek, Readwriteweb.com, ComputerWorld, InfoWorld, CMSWire and many other well known online publications. It is being seen as a formidable competitor for Google Apps and IBM in the small business market. Check out a video of their new version:-

I came across a recent article at ebizq which conceptualizes the state of the collaboration market. Such articles have been written before also, and help you see the larger picture of where a highly dynamic collaboration market is headed, with new entrants pouring in everyday, each promising something new.  some notable articles of this category, written by some very well known IT analysts are as follows:-

Robin Good's Collaboration Map

Map of the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 Marketplace - Dion Hinchcliff

The current article i am talking about is called "The Collaboration Continuum" creates a segmentation with the purpose of identifying the "SMB sweet spot", i.e., the ideal solution or type of solution from an SMB perspective. On one end of the continuum are placed "free form solutions", solutions which are devoid of any structure and extremely easy and intuitive to use. Google Wave and acrobat.com have been identified as solutions of this category. Such solutions are ideal for ad-hoc teams which come together for a temporary purpose and disband thereafter. 

The next type of solutions come under "the workspace model". Tools don't cater to pure collaboration needs, but also to the need to work together on an ongoing basis.Tools are grouped together in "workspaces" for each group, where the members of that group can access tools to collaborate, access information and coordinate tasks and schedules. Google Apps, Zoho and HyperOffice Collaboration Software have been identified as solutions in this category. These solutions are suitable for small businesses, which need a balance of ease of use and structure. 

The final type is highly structured solutions ideal for large enterprises. These solutions are ideal where an IT department manages all the software tools and technologies used in the organization. These solutions need to integrate with a complex technological environment - databases, security systems, hardware etc. Moreover these companies have highly specialized workflows and need tools to reflect these workflows. Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Notes have been identified as solutions in this domain. 

A very insightful article overall. 

Research firm Gartner, recently released a report listing the "Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010" as part of its well known Gartner Symposium which concluded recently at Florida. At the cost of sounding immodest, even without the elaborate information, methodology and experience that Gartner analysts have, I could have gotten many of the candidates in the list on the basis of gut feel. And i think many of the readers would be able to as well. So the technologies are:-

1. Cloud Computing. SaaS services delivered through the web rather than residing on the servers of the company.
2. Advanced Analytics. Optimization and simulation using analytical tools and models to maximize business process.
3. Client Computing. Virtualization is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. As a result, the choice of a particular PC hardware platform, and eventually the OS platform, becomes less critical. Enterprises should proactively build a five to eight year strategic client computing roadmap outlining an approach to device standards, ownership and support; operating system and application selection, deployment and update; and management and security plans to manage diversity.
4. IT for Green. Environ friendly IT initiatives.
5. Reshaping the Data Center. A pod-based approach to data center construction and expansion. 
6. Social Computing. Enterprises must focus both on use of social software and social media in the enterprise and participation and integration with externally facing enterprise-sponsored and public communities. 
7. Security.  Monitoring activities and identifying patterns rather than a "perimeter based" security strategy.
8. Flash Memory. 
9. Virtualization for Availability. The movement of a running virtual machine (VM), while its operating system and other software continue to execute as if they remained on the original physical server. 
10. Mobile Applications. 

One technology I would have expected to be on the list but is not, is online collaboration software.

How many did you get right? 

There is a lot of talk going around about virtual teams, distributed teams, global teams; and indeed, it makes sense because increasingly these terms describe the new realities of working. But at the same time, people in the IT industry may be lead to believe that lingo that they use without a second thought, is equally understandable to those outside the IT industry. This is often not true, as "web 2.0", "enteprise 2.0", saas, virtualization, or even "virtual teams" may not mean much to many business owners. Ironically, these are the very people this technology is supposed to benefit.

In the spirit of educating small businesses, HyperOffice has recently created a video exhibiting what day to day working in a virtual team consists of, stripped of all high level talk. Titled "another day in a virtual team" you can check out the video below.