The software industry has spent a lot of time and energy building collaboration technologies (like Groove, Lotus Notes, and Sharepoint) that help users share and sychronize documents and databases securely. However, they all rely -- practically speaking -- on a network connection for that sharing to take place.
However, imagine you and a couple of friends or colleagues are working together in an office, on your laptops, but without a network connection, and you need to share some files, or check each other's calendar. How do you do it? Pass around the USB pen drive? Set up IR? Configure a wireless network? All are possible approaches, but none is straightforward.
That situation is pretty common. Auditors working together at a client's offices, but unable to access the customer's network, face it more often than you'd think. Manipulating and sharing content while offline is a critical requirement for the professional services industry, since roughly half of their employees are on engagement teams that spend most of their time in the field.
The problem is chronic. Historically, Notes replication made it almost a de facto standard in the large accounting firms, but the "no network access" scenario still isolates each Notes user a lot of the time. Even with Notes, the auditors can't exchange information until each gets an internet connection
Colligo Systems addressed this common scenario pretty neatly with Colligo Workgroup Edition, which lets a team quickly set up a secure instant wireless network, across which they can share files and even (with a plug-in for Notes) synchronise Notes databases. As a result, Colligo’s solution has been deployed in over 70,000 seats at professional services companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Grant Thornton, Crowe Chizek, and others. The Notes plug-in has been a key success factor for Colligo.
Windows Sharepoint Services -- which offers shared docuent libraries -- has long suffered a technical disadvantage compared to Notes/Domino because it provides no automatic offline and synch support. Auditors using Sharepoint will not have a local copy of the Sharepoint files unless they copied them manually. However, Colligo now plans a plug-in for Sharepoint. They worked with Microsoft to develop a Proof of Concept implementation and refined and validated it with customers. The key features of Colligo for SharePoint are:
i) 2-way sync for Sharepoint document libraries
ii) 2-way sync for all Sharepoint list types, including custom lists
iii) Support for custom properties/metadata. Ability to view, edit, and synchronize changes to properties.
iv) Support for SharePoint views. I.e. the ability to view list items using one of the views downloaded from the SharePoint server. A view may include a query so that only a subset of the list items are displayed.
The first version of this product will be in Beta by November 2005 and generally available by late January 2006.
Many Notes-Domino customers are using, or weighing the use of, Sharepoint alongside Notes and Domino, or even instead of them. This new Colligo capability will likely help them accelerate that.
Colligo also has some other ideas. They have been closely involved in the Office 12 Technical Adoption Program this summer -- providing Microsft with requirements and feedback, and getting early access to code. At the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference in Los Angeles this week, Microsoft will preview Office 12, including "Offline Sharepoint" support in Outlook, and Windows Workflow Services. To complement this, Cooligo is mulling a Colligo plug-in for Outlook as an alternative to its own client. In addition to providing secure and integrated Outlook-to-Outlook sharing and synch capabiliies in the "no network" scenario, this might also support Office-Sharepoint workflows.
This would be another in a line of products extending Outlook, as Don Dodge mentions in his recent post on Newsgator.
Colligo offers a trial version of its Workgroup product. Check it out here.
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