Let's Work Together

Other well-known applications in this category are WebEx and Placeware, which have recently been acquired at fairly sizeable valuations (by Cisco and Microsoft, respectively). A recent presentation at Demo 2007, an industry confab showcasing new technologies, created a bit of a stir when DD Ganguly, CEO of the open source startup DimDim, opened by saying "WebEx is history," as he presented his vision for a free and open source web meeting service that includes two-way audio and video features for holding collaborative meetings.

One challenge that companies like DimDim are trying to overcome is the cross-platform issue, with some companies going to a Java client model, others building out equal applications for Macintosh and Windows (but ignoring Linux), and still others going for a "playerless" solution that uses a very thin client. A few (including several that are flying under the radar but should be launching by the time this article goes to press) are using Adobe’s Flash ActionScript 3 or Flex programming language to accomplish similar results using the ubiquitous Flash player, but these are somewhat limited in the video and audio space until Adobe releases a VoIP module.

Not everyone out there believes that free applications are a threat to the enterprise business model put forward by WebEx and others.

"The cost of bare-bones web conferencing has been dropping like a rock for some time with seemingly hundreds of new players entering the market," said Joe Gustafson, CEO and founder of Brainshark, in a recent blog post. "Maybe there is a market for free web conferencing in some very small accounts (is it really a market if it’s free?), but free works well with consumers—not businesses."

Gustafson continued his comments by mentioning the specter of Microsoft’s free web tool from the DataBeam days, noting they "had a free web-conferencing (NetMeeting) product many years ago when WebEx was just getting started, and see how that worked out (it was dropped)."

Desktop or Application Sharing
Digging a little deeper into the toolbox, one finds another tool that allows for more control and collaboration. Dubbed desktop sharing or application sharing, as opposed to desktop presentations, this tool allows the viewer to move into the driver’s seat and take control of the presentation (or the presenter’s computer) for more experiential learning or hands-on troubleshooting.

This tool is often built into today’s operating systems, as a direct descendant of the T.120 standard, with better-known examples such as Apple’s Remote Desktop. Like the old neT.120 Conference Server, today’s application-sharing tools often require a small server application to run on the host’s machine.

Many of these tools also derive their heritage from Virtual Network Computing (VNC), and several have VNC in the name, such as RealVNC, TightVNC, or Chicken of the VNC. VNC started as a way to monitor multiple machines within a data server farm, but the robustness and ability to traverse firewalls and do decent Network Address Translation (NAT) have made VNC-based products a force to be reckoned with. VNC is primarily open source, with the various VNC products using a VNC core and adding a "secret sauce" to the product to allow it to be resold. Commercial products using Citrix, originally designed for thin-client or network computing, are also available.

Two sidenotes should be made here: First, remote desktop access is not necessarily collaborative computing, as it can be one person accessing his or her own computer remotely; the tools can, however, also be used for collaboration between someone sitting at the remote machine and one or several other participants. Second, like many products and services under the collaborative computing umbrella, application sharing is also included in some of the products mentioned under desktop presentation software. Products such as WebEx—and even the old whiteboard-sharing-only products like NetMeeting—are primarily used as presentation platforms and not as collaborative computing vehicles.

Other products, such as GatherPlace (which is produced by GatherWorks, the company founded by ex-White Pine/ex-FVC CTO Frik Strecker), take a more formal approach. Bordering on groupware, which we’ll discuss in the next section, GatherPlace combines instant messaging, real-time audio, recording capabilities, and desktop presentation tools with a central storage repository. Therefore the overlap between these types of tools is quite significant.

Groupware
Even further down in the toolbox is a set of technologies that had been dubbed "groupware" in the past but that are now known by a variety of names, including instant messaging, content management systems, team applications, etc. These tools typically combine multiple modes of communication, as well as a central workflow repository. A recent example is Microsoft’s SharePoint Services, which provides centralized storage and access to particular collaborative tools in Microsoft’s 2003 and 2007 server products.A fairly well-thought-out, but still nascent and sporadically implemented example, is GoogleApps for Your Domain. Signing up for a Gmail account provides services similar to SharePoint, but at a very minimal—or even free—cost to small businesses and community groups.

Starting from the iGoogle dashboard, which displays emails, group documents, shared calendar, and status of other users of Google Talk (Google’s instant messaging and VoIP client), a user can monitor pertinent high-level details of a project or group of documents. Where GoogleApps shines is in the ability to edit documents together using Google’s proprietary GoogleDocs services, but where it falls short is in the integration of video and cross-platform audio into the toolset, requiring out-of-band or offline communication during a collaborative process. GoogleApps is also limited in that it can’t show or share a user’s desktop—or any application other than the GoogleDocs—but this limitation could easily be rectified at any moment, in classic Google style.

Even basic instant messaging clients are getting into the game. Apple’s iChat, a distant cousin to its QuickTime Conferencing from the DataBeam era, is primarily focused on text, audio, and—increasingly, thanks to the integration of cameras into many of Apple’s Macintosh laptops and desktops—video communications. The newer version of iChat, available via the Mac OS X Leopard operating system update, will also add iChat Theater (with desktop or application presentation functionality), plus the ability to mask out the background on video chats so that users can appear onscreen with a corporate logo or other backdrop, even if working from home. Add to this the additional integration of the .Mac service and its group folders via iDisk, and Apple’s not too far from a groupware solution.