Groupware suffers a crisis of identity

The groupware market has turned out very differently from the way in which software vendors expected it to a few years ago. Heralded as a new way of bringing business functions together in a single, unified view from which workers could organise their time, keep in touch with each other and work in collaboration, groupware was expected to find its way onto every desktop. Instead, it seems to have found its way into the back office.

"Although groupware is still a vital part of any IT requirement, businesses are now seeing a convergence between groupware and knowledge services," said Peter Joseph, corporate business strategist at Novell. As the industry evolves, the definition of groupware is becoming blurred. "Today, those applications are being delivered through portal interfaces that make email, fax and voice available over the browser and integrated with other information systems," he added.

Neil Hudspeth, director of product management at Metastorm, which describes itself as an e-process automation tools developer, said: "Its true meaning has been lost, but groupware is much more than just email. This term was coined when Lotus Notes became well known. As with many terms in our industry, it has been adopted to mean anything and everything that includes email."

"Email, whether it is intelligent or unintelligent, delivers only a fraction of what groupware should provide. The term itself has been devalued," he added.

Garry Tugwell-Smith, exchange product manager at Microsoft, said that groupware is not a term that you hear very often these days, unless you are with Lotus. "The market has moved on and is talking more about collaborative working," he said. In fact, Lotus does not disagree.

"The term groupware has become [outdated]," said Jim Moffat, UK product marketing manager at Lotus. "It is now part of many of the things we do when we interact with others via devices, which today include phones and personal digital assistants. People-to-people applications interact with an individual's diaries, to-do lists and email in order to facilitate decision and action."

The hard sell
From a sales perspective, the picture is simple. "When groupware was conceived, collaborative working was an embryonic idea. The internet and ebusiness have changed the practice of working together. It has moved on, with large numbers of individuals collaborating in the supply chain through the same site," said Andy Shepperd, general manager of the networking division at Computer 2000. The internet - and the concepts of supply chains and portals - has engulfed the groupware concept.

Tugwell-Smith believes that groupware's days in the enterprise space are over. "It is all about messaging, collaborative and line-of-business applications now. Groupware as a term and market sector has had its day. In fact, web applications are the main driver for innovative companies now, and the key success factor is integrating your existing business applications with a whole new way of communicating with your partners and customers, whether they be internal or external," he explained.

"Groupware is certainly a much maligned and misunderstood subject," said Moffat, referring to it as a combination of group and team applications.

But whatever you call the applications, they are not currently in vogue in the IT business. "They tend to be well understood by consultants, some developers and many business people, but poorly understood by technologists," he continued. "On the other hand, the mechanics and benefits of unified messaging are well understood by technologists, but poorly understood by business people who haven't experienced it."

According to Moffat, the term groupware has come to mean any application that enables person-to-person interactions across the intranet/extranet - applications that go beyond messaging. It is, and should be, strategic to businesses, he insists. "Messaging using your computer is a commodity and not a tool for competitive advantage. Groupware has evolved into the people-to-people facet of ebusiness. When you understand that, you can begin to grasp the enormity of its breadth and its strategic significance to business," he said.

Joseph shares at least part of this vision, but interweaves the groupware concept with other applications much more vigorously. "People are still buying groupware, but they are now integrating it with the information elements of the business. They see the results as part of a bigger portal interface. One of the biggest value propositions we have is delivering information to the end user, and that means not tying them down to one interface or one device. We are no longer in a position to dictate to people how they should use these products," he claimed.

Blurred boundaries
The concept of groupware as a distinct software product area has all but disappeared. It has been consumed by the internet and all its possibilities for unified messaging, communication and collaborative and team working. It is, says Moffat, becoming part of the knowledge management tool set.

This is evident both in the language that the chief vendors use and the areas on which development is concentrated. Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) is now central to all three major groupware products, and most competitors in the web tools space already use XML.

Microsoft's most recent release of Exchange has enhanced support for a wider range of document formats so that developers can use any language as well as XML. Microsoft has also added support for mobile and wireless devices, and tightened up integration with its Conference Server. It is strongly emphasising the use of Exchange 2000 with other applications - the Web Storage System and SQL 2000 - using XML as the unifying tool to build collaborative applications.

Novell has a concept called XML integration services, which enables other developers to 'snap-in' fax, workflow, imaging and other services to Groupwise. They are trying to make groupware appeal to all web situations, at all times. "For our strategy to succeed, you have to have internet services that are not tied to one operating system and are universally available on multiple platforms and devices," said Joseph.

Moffat said: "There are also plenty of advances in increasing the reach of collaborative applications, hence the Martini approach to collaboration: any time, anywhere, on any device." Additionally, he says, there is a growing recognition that communities play a large role in driving commerce. Individuals with similar interests interact to match up customers with individuals inside supplier organisations for faster, higher quality communications.

According to Hudspeth, the development of groupware is being strongly influenced by the internet. Indeed, the web may give groupware the opportunity to fulfil its initial objective of providing an application that will allow teams of people or individuals to work together.

"Users are beginning to understand the limitations of email systems as the use of the web, intranets and business-to-business applications grows," he said, adding that many organisations are now using groupware-type applications to build web-based workflow solutions. Hudspeth calls these e-process applications.

"One example is a customer support application that allows customers to submit requests via a website and track their progress. The requests are handled in the organisation by a team of people working together to provide customer satisfaction. These systems typically are not email dependent. They are quick to build and install when compared with the older groupware tools such as Lotus Notes," he explained.

What Hudspeth describes sounds like a part of a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Notes is often used as a platform for CRM applications, accessing and manipulating database information and providing customised views for teams of workers. However, Notes and other established groupware products are too rigid, argues Hudspeth. And Notes programmers are expensive. These applications need to provide more flexibility.

"If you define groupware as software that helps teams work together, e-process across the internet is the latest incarnation of groupware, and where the growth in the market is. The software used to build e-process systems must recognise the fact that businesses change frequently," he said.

Not a castaway
But don't expect groupware to be lost entirely in the relentless waves of internet applications development. Exchange 2000 is sure to heighten its profile for a while and is still highly focused on store and forward messaging - features which are given high prominence in the latest version. This will do little to clarify the definition of groupware, however, and Microsoft is no longer referring to Exchange as a groupware product.

The software giant is releasing this product with the .Net strategy as a backdrop. Because that entire strategy is geared towards enabling the web as a platform for collaborative applications, Microsoft may not want to place too much emphasis on the inherent collaborative capabilities of Exchange. In one respect, the very existence of the .Net strategy is an indication that groupware, as a product definition, will inevitably lose its identity.

The sophistication and cost of developing and maintaining applications with groupware products make users unlikely to abandon them. Groupware is changing and becoming part of the web applications development interface, but it has not disappeared entirely.

Conclusions:

• Groupware is mutating and becoming an integral part of the web applications development environment.
• Increasingly, groupware products are being integrated with back-end applications to form part of information-enabling and knowledge management solutions.
• Sales of 'traditional' groupware products are expected to rise only moderately, but major growth is expected in the new generation of web-based team applications.
• Development of groupware centres on web standards, and in particular XML. Multiple interface and device support is also a key area at the moment.