Gaining Synergies of Concurrent Collaboration!!!

Collaboration might be an easy term on the face of it, but it does bring with it, lot of advantages. Collaboration, in the present day solutions can be done in two ways:

Sequential Collaboration, in which a user will be able to work only after his coworker submits his work for collaboration. This can be best put in as a sequential work flow.

Concurrent Collaboration, in which multiple users would be able to work simultaneously on a single object, and would be able to view the changes being performed by other co-workers real-time.

Today, most of the authoring, designing and case management solutions provide sequential collaboration, but comparitively few numbers support Concurrent Collaboration as well.

Concurrent Collaboration finds its way in the application areas of authoring, designing, modeling, knowledge management, Front Office Case Management etc., there is no end to this list!

With open source, tools like Google-Docs, Google-wave etc., many solutions and organizations are gaining synergies. Kudos to google and other open-source vendors for that! Organizations can have brighter tommorrows.

Reducing the need for thick-installations, high end machines and premisis based limitations, these tools help reduce the Turn-Around-Time for Organizations to produce quality outputs.

Through increased availability of knowledge team members, Organizations can certainly look forward to greener pastures.

Enterprise Solutions offering Concurrent Collaboration would greatly help Organizations, thus, this should be sought out as a sure-shot functionality to be offered by all the Software Vendors.

Vendors Offering Power of Reusability!

Though, Software Vendors today claim of great level of automation. Business Users are still crippled from attaining full synergies from the solutions deployed. Inspite of having the ability to streamline the operations, the systems are still not delivering the required level of output. General contribution to this gap of actual from expected can be attributed to the non-user friendly interfaces of these solutions, Insufficient training to the business users and absence of the complete scope while making or designing the solutions. While the first two causes can be eradicated easily, architecting the solution as to increase the ease amongst its users is a completely different ball game.

Before going any further on how to solve this issue, one should have clear understanding of the skills, working pattern and business requirement from the end-user's perspective. With scores of resources involved in delivering each product, the functionalities like collaboration, simple UI, Clicks make the solutions look and work better.

Going further, as these teams of users are going to work on similar projects, they might be cases of reusing an already existing template created earlier in the solution. As a product architect, one should identify the various artifacts that are going to be created, managed using the tool.
The list may vary from a simple logo of the company, signature of the person etc.,

Best in breed solutions, structure the different artifacts, identify the properties and help the user call, modify these properties very easily. While, the basic functionality is met by most of the solutions in the market, only some solutions provide this functionality helping them stand apart from the crowd. Going a step further, the solution architects must identify proper clouds and components to help the business user own the solution.

Ability to reuse components thus should be treated as one of the prime evaluating factors while hunting for an appropriate solution.