Office 2007 improves collaboration 30 May, 2006 By Paul Weinberg

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"XML plays an important role because without XML as a common wrapper for all information being booted around, doing all of this would a lot more complicated," stated Warren Shiau, the lead analyst in IT research at Strategic Council.

He points to two improvements from Microsoft. One is the inclusion of an automation tool, Groove (courtesy of the company by the same name that Microsoft acquired) that facilitates the creation of a workspace in cyberspace with a few clicks and eliminates some of the previous barriers facing collaborative work.

"You can do things like share files between workers in different locations without fussing with the servers or networks; have everything sync'd for everyone else who is working on a project in the workspace -- that is all the files, etc. Which is great for version control, editing and so on. Some other things in Groove are alerts that show who's working on what documents and when files have been changed."

The second improvement for Shiau, involves easier access through a few clicks to SharePoint, courtesy of more built-in automation in the collaborative tool.

"Think of it as a centralized point for accessing data across all of an organization's systems. Plus, you've got search capabilities, business intelligence functionality, document/content/data sharing tools, content management tools (that is, you can set security settings, storage/archive policies for documents through SharePoint. And there are some pre-built workflows for things like editing/review/approval."

The breaking down of the silos within Office 2007 with an easier means to work on common files from the various applications in SharePoint represents a major advance for users, stated industry analyst Guy Creese at the Burton Group

Up to now collaborative work in organizations has often been done through email among the participants on a project, Creese said. But the difficulty here is that messages do not always arrive in a sequential manner onto one's desktop or notebook.

"We can all email to each other, but then that leads to confusion because it is hard to figure out what the current states of things [in the work] are."

The amount of time wasted in organizations with different people, in separate locations sometimes, having to figure out who has the latest corporate numbers for a financial report, for instance, will be thing of the past with a more user friendly SharePoint, Creese said.

"You can have a common spreadsheet [with common numbers from different sources]. That is a huge change from the past. The centre of gravity for all of the Excel files used to be on a separate PC."

Also, the process of accessing a database while one is still working within Excel on a spreadsheet has become less complicated, he noted.

Furthermore, one no longer has to classify files as to whether they are a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet or a Power Point presentation. Instead, they can be classified under the title of a specific project with content originating from different applications.

This is aimed at organizations that are developing policies on the retention of data for regulatory and contractual purposes, stated Creese. "That makes the back end process like records management a lot easier."

Down the road he foresees Microsoft making it possible for organizations to use future versions of Office to track the flow of documents currently being worked on internally.

"I wouldn't be surprised if over time Microsoft is able to create this database of well, which documents people have worked on, here is what they are about, and here is how long it took. And eventually you'll be able to figure out if it is costing us X dollars to write a memo or X dollars to create a contract."

Creese predicts we may be seeing the revival of interest in workflow in ad hoc collaborative work arrangements such as what occurs in lawyers' offices where a lot of time is wasted figuring out where a particular case file is located.

Workflow has primarily been a success in sectors like insurance where the progress of a client's policy can easily be traced, he noted.

"We will get to the point when companies look at how productive they are in creating content, just like today they look at how productive the shop floor is, at creating widgets."