In the May June issue of KM Review there is a comparison of Community of Practice software. CoPs and related software is one approach to supporting collaboration and communities. The Tomoye site, a CoP vendor, offers the following definition of Communities of Practice (edited down a bit):
“CoPs are distributed groups of people who share a concern, set of problems, or mandate. Often informal groups of experts, CoPs serve to reconnect individuals in self-organizing, boundary-spanning communities. They complement existing structures by promoting collaboration, information exchange, and sharing of best practices. A great deal of knowledge creation happens in these less visible groups. They are useful in environments where domain knowledge develops dynamically and future knowledge requirements are not yet met. Organizations also formalize CoPs when the content is highly reusable, of high strategic value and/or the source of significant competitive advantage.”
The following are CoP vendors are included in the KM Review article. These descriptions are taken from their web sites, not from the article which I encourage you to look at. I simply deleted the hype parts from the vendors’ descriptions.
ERoom (Documentum) allows people to work together on content, projects, and processes across their extended enterprises. eRoom.net provides a subscription-based, hosted version of eRoom, primarily for mid-sized businesses or department usage. For larger organizations, eRoom Enterprise unites two related sets of capabilities: enterprise content management (ECM) and collaboration. eRoom Enterprise uses Documentum’s workflow engine to integrate formalized, structured workflow processes within ad hoc, collaborative project efforts. This allows the development of content workflow processes that include the automatic generation of preconfigured eRooms.
Sitescape Enterprise Forum 7.1 is a collaboration environment that allows for group communication - both asynchronously and real time - and the sharing information in a secure, Web- based environment. SiteScape Forum facilitates knowledge management, document management, project management, communities of practice, workflow and e-learning. Users can also host online discussions; share and revise documents and files; chat; schedule meetings using shared calendars; organize tasks; and send instant messages. The integrated workflow makes collaboration more efficient by automating repetitive processes. Using the Forum eMeeting real-time collaboration add-on, users can facilitate Web meetings, virtual presentations, white boarding with mark up, application sharing, voice over IP (VoIP), and video conferencing over the Web.
Enable2 collaboration tool has been specifically designed to help companies collaborate across their supply chains. Easy setup of shared team areas by any authorised user. It provides secure document management and intranets, configurable email / SMS alerts that keep everyone in the loop, customisable discussion areas, and full audit trail.
Business Workspaces (Vignette) offers Web-based collaborative capabilities that support, simplify, and coordinate group efforts across multiple locations. It blends with and extends current productivity tools like e-mail, desktop document folders and calendaring. It can be used as a stand-alone collaboration software solution, or integrated with Vignette Application Portal. Business Workspaces has automatically indexing of incoming documents and attachments to help ensure access through searches on text, metadata, or many other options. There is also automatic notification of document changes, events of interest, even to specific searches, through a search agent feature.
SigmaConnect provides a platform for communities that allows you to: Distinguish Communities by type, Create Sub-communities (to any level), Search by name or topic, Distinguish between Member and Visitor information, Add links, documents and images, and Manage Community Membership. It also keeps track of personal expertise across the organization. Users maintain their own information, offering what they feel confident to share and each user has their personal page.
Simplify, by Tomoye, provides a platform for CoPs that offers administrative features such: Customizable Identity & Templates, Dynamic Community Taxonomy, Community Role Delegation, Approval Processes along with member features such as Awareness reports, Featuring & Highlighting, E-mail based Subscriptions, Community Calendar, In-Context Discussions, and a Knowledge Rating Tool. It also provides features to promote growth including: Customizable Contribution Types, Customizable Lexicon, Customizable Language Settings, and Customizable Security.
The article also discusses products from Microsoft and Lotus but appears to leave out Groove and Plumtree, among others. From these product descriptions it appears there has been a convergence on collaboration from several starting points. The content management vendors (e.g. Documentum, Vignette) have added these features. At the same time the portal providers (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Plumtree) have also added collaboration. There are also some niche players.
