Collaboration for all
Although it can point to Project as one of the most senior applications in collaborative project management, these days Microsoft places the emphasis firmly on collaboration for everyone, every day using tools like SharePoint, Lync, Office365 and more recently Yammer. “Our view is that smart communications and collaboration tools today have simply transformed the world of work,” says Mike Hughes.
“Ever since SharePoint 2013 it is online for the masses (although it can be on-premise) and very easy for anyone and any business to use it, to work and collaborate from a wide range of devices anywhere and anytime. You can create groups and provision shared project or other information sites in minutes, quite literally. I can combine that with Yammer, which functions rather like a Facebook for business and can be the conversational piece, and can use OneDrive for a shared data storage space. But all of these tools can be controlled from a security point of view. The business can decide who shares what in any group or network. It also makes sure that we don’t have multiple instances of elements such as documents.”
Partners or other third parties can be added into the group, explains Hughes, with the permission of the administrator in the enterprise that ‘owns’ it. Such third parties can access only the resources of that specific group. Another feature is that, with group policy permission, an individual can be permitted to share certain elements of the group resources directly with an outsider.
Lync 2013 is a UC solution that works fluently with Office365 and the other Microsoft collaboration tools as a cloud hosted platform. Where collaboration comes in is using Lync for ‘meetings’ or document sharing within the group. From a security point of view, everything in Lync can be recorded if that is required, even instant message conversations. “But as so many users are discovering, ‘presence’ is a feature of Lync and helps enormously in facilitating any kind of spontaneous communications and responses in a collaboration group,” Hughes adds.
Managed service
O2 Ireland as a telecommunications company is a Microsoft partner, so the complete set of SharePoint, Lync and other collaborative and UC tools can be taken from O2 as a managed service, says Nicola Mortimer, head of business products portfolio. “There are very smart, easy to use solutions for organisations to enable their staff to collaborate on work and projects any time, anywhere and on a wide range of devices. We can deliver a set of such tools to a business as a comprehensive managed solution, based on Microsoft’s proven range of software applications and it and Cisco’s unified communications. The delivery is, of course, through our own network and the Web.”
Mortimer makes the salient point that for many organisations, regardless of scale in the sense of having in-house ICT expertise, setting up and configuring and managing these 21st century collaboration and communications systems is either outside their direct capabilities or a potential capital project expense. “We can set up and deliver a complete managed solution, tailored to each client’s needs and specifications. That ranges from the software applications such as SharePoint, the data hosting, the web or cloud resources and the management of multiple mobile devices—tablets are now figuring very large in this area.”
For the most part this is appropriate for the employees of a single organisation, Mortimer says, and current clients include the agribusiness division of Glanbia and leading beverage distributors Gleesons. “Every employer today is trying to give people the best tools for their work, for productivity and economy and also so that employees can work the way they want to. But very few of us work in isolation and cooperation and collaboration is basic in any organisation. In addition, special projects often have additional needs in terms of collaborative systems. We are simply saying you don’t have to specify and set up your own collaboration environment. We’ll do that for you, state of the art, as a service.”
Regulatory needs
IBM Connections is an integration of social networking with the other forms of enterprise communication and collaboration, used within the organisation itself and in the wider ecosystem of partners and clients or customers. In the market since 2007, Connections has been evolving from in-house solutions to the cloud like so many other enterprise systems, according to Mike Roche, IBM Ireland chief technologist. “Depending on the organisation and the activity, some collaboration between business partners will be in traditional and highly secure systems still. But most is going to the cloud for flexibility and economy and all of the usual cloud arguments, with sufficient security for most normal commercial relationships and projects.”
There are also compliance requirements like HIPA in healthcare or FISMA in financial services that inhibit collaboration in the cloud so far, he adds, although even in those highly regulated sectors there are hybrid solutions emerging as in so many other enterprise systems. “We work with clients in these industries and look at specific use cases and special features required and then see where they can securely work across the firewall. The IBM Smart Cloud provides a platform for secure solutions and includes UC. You can have global collaboration between users within the enterprises, business partners and customers that satisfy the appropriate security requirements at each level and for each participant.”
Role-based access is in many respects the key, Roche says. “Who you are, what you can do, what you can see are all relevant factors that decide your status in any particular community. A leader can see everything and do everything, members have all the resources they need while third parties invited in are restricted to whatever their role requires. As a managed, cloud-based solution for collaboration, this is where IBM scores. It offers all of the rich features of collaboration applications and related communications, combined with global, end-to-end enterprise grade security and performance.”
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