Groupware Technologies and Applications

Preface "Groupware" is one of those mysterious and undefinable terms that have the ability to affect all of our lives. This book is an attempt to compile some of the wisdom, knowledge, and experience of technical and business communities that have dealt with groupware since 1989. This book has been written with both the technical and business-oriented reader in mind, and its goal is to enable both audiences to understand the benefits, issues, and methodologies of groupware well enough to determine how t o best use groupware in their organizations. The book is set up in several sections. The first section covers some of the technologies critical to groupware. These include email and messaging, workflow and process management, group calendaring and scheduling, collaborative document and image management, and electronic meeting systems. These are by no means all the technologies or services that fit under the groupware umbrella, but this introductory chapter lays out a functional framework for groupware that can serve as a guideline through the rest of the book. The second section is also product focused, but from a vendor rather than a technology point of view. This section has executives from the major groupware vendors discussing their products' architecture, history, and future development plans, as well as how the use of these products has affected their and their customers' organizations. Lotus, Microsoft, IBM, DEC, and Novell/WordPerfect are all in this section, and they all provide different views on groupware, including a desktop view, a network view, a messaging view, and a database view. We have encouraged these vendors to write these chapters with the view that they will be read in the second and third quarters of 1995, even though the chapters reflect the state of the art at the end of 1994. Because the groupware market is such a dynamic one, we are sure that by the time you read these chapters some of these vendors will have announced new products, marketing agreements, and distribution channels. The purpose of this section is to provide an overview of the direction in which each company is going with their groupware products rather than a strict product features and benefits description. The third section focuses on implementation and management strategies for groupware. These chapters are a combination of case studies of groupware implementations, as well as chapters on implementation strategies by experts at various consulting firms. This section also takes a look at some of the organizational aspects of groupware. The final section of the book is a reference section. This section includes a variety of resources about groupware. Included in this section is a listing of all the 300-plus vendors in the Groupware Buyer's Guide, a groupware reading list, and groupware newsletters, events, and newsgroups where information is exchanged. So in this volume we go from a technical and product focus to a more business and organizational orientation for groupware. The reason for organizing the book this way is to lay a foundation on what groupware technologies are; what products are available; how these products are best used and implemented; and finally, how groupware affects the organization. This volume addresses a subset of issues related to use of information technology to improve group and organizational productivity. However, we have covered issues such as desktop integration and user experiences with groupware in other volumes. Raman Khanna edited a recently published volume entitled Integrating Personal Computers in a Distributed Client-Server Environment. That volume deals with platform integration, application integration, and distributed systems management. David Coleman and Marvin Manheim (author of Chapter 12) are co-authoring a groupware case book. We believe such a book is a necessary follow-on to this volume, and it examines a number of groupware implementatioKhanna, Raman is the author of 'Groupware Technologies and Applications' with ISBN 9780133051940 and ISBN 0133051943.