TechWeb News' article, Documentum Ships eRoom 7 (July 24, 2003) provides information on some of the enhancements included in the new releases:

"eRoom 7 now includes collaborative project and program management tools that provide Gaant charts and an executive console to summarize wide-scale projects, said the Pleasanton, Calif.-based software vendor. It also includes out-of-box tools for deploying the collaboration software to specific business applications, such as regulatory compliance, finance and program development.

A 'My Rooms' page, accessible via a single sign-on, gives end users access to all of their collaborative projects.

eRoom Enterprise 7 adds workflow features, content publishing from a central repository to multiple workstations running eRoom 7, and connections to content management applications so that administrators can feed content to teams as collaboration ebbs and flows"

links: eRoom 7, eRoom Enterprise 7

4:05:25 PM    
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From the TechWeb article, Microsoft Changes Name of RTC Yet Again (July 24, 2003) (emphasis added):

"Once Real-Time Collaboration Server, and then Microsoft Office Real-Time Collaboration Server 2003, the product will now go by the slightly shorter Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003, the company announced Thursday.

"At the same time, Microsoft changed the name of its PlaceWare Conference Center, e-meeting and collaboration software it acquired in May, to Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2003. "

links: Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003, Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2003

3:58:12 PM    
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In an Always On blog posting by Ken Fromm, "An Accelerated Period in History", part 3, Fromm discusses Mark Forman's, Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), remarks when he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform. Forman says "All homeland security IT investments must accelerate our response times and improve our decision making, and doing so requires significant changes in long-standing organizations, processes, information flows, and IT investments.

"Other projects more directly targeted at identifying and countering asymmetrical threats, however, may indeed have far-reaching impacts on enterprise thinking. These projects are funded from federal law enforcement, defense, or intelligence funds as part of programs such as RISSnet, Total Information Awareness (now named Terrorism Information Awareness), and other edge programs. The program topics include adaptive planning and advanced collaboration tools, data analytics and visualization programs, semantic-based interoperability tools, autonomic computing, and open grid service architectures. There is also growing interest in "self-aware" IT platforms and middleware that can be self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting. "

(emphasis added)

Change is hard, but necessary in today's world. The increased pressure on government due to the threat of Terrorism may change the recent pattern of innovation and adoption - to one where innovation occurs in the government and is adopted by private industry. This pattern was clearly in place during the early days of the space program. One familiar example of a technology developed there that migrated to private industry is Teflon. And just as during the space race, the pressure on the federal government to respond to terrorism will perform a forcing function for innovation. Will adoption by private industry be faster than before? Perhaps, since today's federal govenment is augmented heavily by private industry contractors, the information may flow more freely than before.

3:00:58 PM    
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Groove Makes Project Management a 'Team Sport' from Computer Business News Online (July 24, 2003)

"Groove Networks has rolled out a new version of its desktop collaboration software that targets distributed project management applications.

...

Groove Workspace Project Edition offering integrates collaboration tools from TeamDirection Inc, a Bellevue, Washington-based software company that specializes in project management software tools. TeamDirections' flagship product - TeamDirection Project - includes project creation tools, status view, role-based permissions, and integration with Microsoft Corp's Project application. A front-end component, called TeamDirection Dashboard, provides cross-project views, filtering and sorting capabilities, and related discussion access."

links: Groove Networks Project Edition, Microsoft Project, TeamDirection Dashboard

2:21:59 PM    
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From the article Collaboration for Portal Platforms by Jim Ericson, Line56 (Monday, July 14, 2003)...  

"Collaboration has recently become portal high ground and research from META Group states that collaboration and knowledge sharing rank only behind aggregation of disparate applications as priorities in portal deployment."

The article specifically addresses Intraspect's recent move to provide a portal collaboration plug-in solution for use with industry standard portals such as BEA, Oracle, SAP, SunOne, Sybase and Vignette, but it also goes into a fair level of detail about the state of the collaboration and portal markets. 

2:11:48 PM    
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