Groupware.

High on the agenda for many organizations these days is the creation of an environment that will provide multiple individuals with common work goals with a means to coordinate their tasks and share information effectively. Groupware is the response to this need. Groupware tools fall into many categories, from the simple to the complex.

At one end of the spectrum, we find electronic mail systems, group schedulers, and electronic bulletin boards. At the other end, we find more sophisticated tools that provide, in addition to the capabilities already cited, advanced data base functionality, forms generation, document routing, meeting management, and teleconferencing. At the high end of the spectrum, the tools generally fall into two categories: different time/different place tools and some time/some place tools.

Different Time/different Place

Tools

These tools are located on a network to which all team members have access through their individual work stations. The most popular example of this groupware tool type is Lotus Notes. These tools provide the user with a mix of capabilities, including advanced electronic mail and bulletin board functionality. In addition, they may offer data base capabilities that provide the user with easy access to valuable information repositories, such as federal regulations or corporate procedures.

These repositories can include text, tables, and graphics'. The tools may also provide forms generation and maintenance functionality to support, for example, generation of weekly progress reports. Some of these tools provide users within a defined work group with the ability to manage document flow of large sets of records (e.g., personnel records). Members of the work groups that have access to these capabilities can be located in offices in different cities and work on different schedules. A key to the value of these tools is the way in which they enable virtual work groups" to function just as efficiently as those groups whose members are co-located.

The typical user of this type of groupware tool works for a large corporation, although smaller organizations and some government agencies are starting to get involved as well. If that user is the VP for Systems Development, he may use it to check on his mail first thing in the morning and then call up a bulletin board that was created to gather user input on a new release of the inventory system. He might consult a data base containing federal regulations that must be satisfied by a new environmental reporting system that is being developed.