12th Annual Well-Connected Awards: Messaging and Collaboration

Messaging and collaboration products are all about facilitating communications. In the past year, we've tested hundreds of such products. The winners let co-workers, customers and partners share ideas and data seamlessly and effectively.

Communication, of course, goes beyond the printed or spoken word. Technologies like Web conferencing, videoconferencing and streaming media help convey vocal inflection, gestures, body language and tone. If that's too touchy-feely to justify the expense, consider that the ability to see a person, view presentations, scribble on virtual whiteboards and work with physically distant co-workers is all part of the digital communications revolution. And instant messaging has helped colleagues keep in contact and form bonds, both formally and informally, with less interruption than phone calls.

Outside the office, your customers have more ways to contact you. E-mail, Web chats, IM, faxes and phone calls are all points of contact. A customer may initially e-mail you to request a price quote, then call to complete the sale. If your agents can't reference the original e-mail to give the same quote over the phone, you might frustrate the customer or lose the sale.

The rise of IP networking has fueled these new collaborative technologies. We now have enough bandwidth and advanced compression algorithms to send decent real-time video across the Internet for videoconferencing. Polycom's VSX 5000, for instance, proved ideal for conducting conferences with minimal setup. Streaming media, however, still leaves much to be desired. During testing, we asked our editors to judge the quality of each vendor's streaming video and nobody was overly impressed. Streams still dropped, quality of service wasn't great and picture quality was so-so. Fortunately, our highest-ranking streaming server, Apple Darwin Streaming Server, is free. Meanwhile, audio and video podcasts have potential to change the streaming market. Many people prefer to download podcasts, to avoid dealing with buffering, dropped streams and lag.Like streaming media, Web collaboration tools are being upstaged. Although top-tier products, such as WebEx Meeting Center MediaTone 3G, make it easy to conduct meetings, share presentations, transfer documents and hold VoIP-based audio conferences over the Web, many of these features have already worked their way into instant messaging systems. Microsoft Live Communication Server offers video, audio and screen sharing. We expect IM to evolve into hybrid IM-Web collaboration tools in a few years.

Points of Contact

Contact centers are often viewed as giant money-sucking holes, as customer support centers and tech-support helpdesks usually don't generate revenue. They are, however, necessities for most businesses. Migrating an existing call center to an IP-based contact center can save money and increase productivity. Home-based agents have reduced turnover and improved customer service at companies like Office Depot and JetBlue Airways. A home agent needs no commercial office space, facility support or parking lots. Agents can be located in geographically diverse areas, including domestic or international locations with lower costs of living. Unified messaging and IP contact centers require a significant up-front investment, but should pay for themselves in a short time. In an RFI we conducted last June, for example, Avaya said its $860,000 IP contact center solution has a payback period of six months to a year.

IP contact centers, rather than telephony-only solutions, make sense, since they deal with e-mail, fax, instant messaging and Web chats. Similarly, unified messaging is gaining in popularity, largely because of the growth and adoption of VoIP and SIP. With products such as Interactive Intelligence's Communité, e-mail, voicemail, fax, IM and presence management are all tied together.We expect to see collaborative technologies in more products: Web conferencing, videoconferencing and instant messaging all in the same box. Combined with unified messaging solutions, you're talking about unified communications. Implementing something of this magnitude won't be cheap. However, users will ultimately demand the kind of simplicity such a solution promises.

The New, New Media

Meanwhile, new Web media technologies are changing the nature of online applications. Collaborative and community-oriented projects, such as blogs, wikis and Web apps, are altering the conventional view of a Web page as static and unidirectional.

Take blogging, for example. Reduced to its simplest element, a blog is nothing more than a standard HTML Web page. However, the culture that has arisen, the blog user interface and the ability to syndicate content have all driven blogging's popularity. Top blogs happen through a social network, not IP networking. In other words, what matters is how the data gets to Point A and what happens to it at Point B.

Blogs, podcasts, wikis and social networks fall under an umbrella called new media, new Web or Web 2.0 technologies, depending on who you ask. We prefer the term new media for now. Regardless of the name, the ability of these technologies to communicate information effectively or generate revenue for the enterprise is still undetermined. Is blogging useful for a product manager? Should management be podcasting weekly company announcements?The new media we're exploring are still in the experimental stages, but at least they cost next to nothing to set up and use. Blogging can be enabled in a few minutes. Podcasts require about $30 for a decent microphone; time is the biggest cost. Network Computing maintains an internal, open-source wiki for keeping lab data and editorial policies updated and easily accessible to editors and freelancers. Currently, sorting and searching with these new technologies is a bit limited. Blogs have recently caught onto categorization, a big improvement over the old chronological-only format. Podcasts support a limited amount of metadata and search capabilities, depending on how much work the creator puts into it. Effective audio search tools, which can parse the spoken word into a machine-readable format, haven't fully emerged yet. Due to their sudden rise in popularity, however, better archiving and search methods should rise quickly. We'll be looking into all these new media formats later in the year and evaluating their enterprise potential.

Messaging & Collaboration Categories
• Streaming Media Server
• Videoconferencing System
• Unified Message System
• IP Contact Center

• Web Collaboration Services
• Wiki Software

Messaging & Collaboration Winners

Streaming Media Server
Winner: Apple Computer Darwin Streaming Server 5.5.1
Online multimedia would never have gained popularity without the aid of streaming media servers. Although sometimes overshadowed by podcasts and movie trailer downloads, streaming is still a big part of online multimedia. Training videos, corporate announcements, viral marketing and investor relations are all forms of stream-friendly multimedia.

Excellent stream stability and easy management helped raise Apple to the top of our streaming media comparison. Apple's server provides sharp, vibrant video encoding with easily readable text. Even with greater-than-usual packet loss during our tests, Darwin maintained a video stream where competitors couldn't. As an open-source product, it can run on Mac, Windows, Linux and other platforms.

Videoconferencing System
Winner: Polycom VSX 5000
We've had trouble with videoconferencing in the past, but this year we were pleasantly surprised. Polycom's entry-level VSX 5000 videoconferencing product, for IP or ISDN links, let us conduct smooth, high-quality meetings across high- and low-bandwidth links. We connected the VSX 5000 to a cable modem and were delighted by the quality of incoming streams. Sharp, full-motion video was enhanced by stereo audio. Unlike other Polycom units, the camera lens on the VSX 5000 does not move. Pan, scroll and zoom are all handled through digital manipulation--sufficient for this price range. S-video input and VGA output let you stream content from DVD players, VCRs and laptops. ID# 1616sp2

Unified Messaging Solution
Winner: Interactive Intelligence Communité 2.4
Today's communication systems combine more than just e-mail, fax and voicemail. You must deal with instant messaging, presence management and call routing. Interactive Intelligence's Communité 2.4 offers all these features and more, with a superior user management interface and customization options. Communité can be installed on your own hardware or purchased as a preconfigured server. Users can configure their own UM rules, notification options and voicemail inboxes through a Web-based interface. Users also can be provisioned for UM in Exchange or through the Web.

IP Contact Center
Winner: Avaya Interaction Center R.63 with S8500 Switch
Despite recent headlines to the contrary, call centers are alive and well in the United States. Big and small companies need to handle more than just telephony. Customers also can contact you by e-mail, fax Web forms and instant messaging. Avaya's solution to our contact center RFI offered the best mix of features, integration with legacy systems and affordability. Avaya even included a 21-page ROI analysis over five years. Agents could use traditional or IP phones, while home agents could use IP or PSTN connections. Avaya's switch and proposal provided a clear transition from TDM to IP-centric agents.

Web Collaboration Services
Winner:: Webex Communications Meeting Center MediaTone 3G
With Web conferencing software, users can attend meetings, share documents and collaborate without leaving their desks. WebEx, one of the biggest names in Web conferencing, provides an affordable service with easy management. Windows, Mac and Linux users can all connect into a virtual meeting room. The software supports VoIP and first-party PSTN conferencing, and allows some computer-telephony interaction. We could easily switch between displaying presentations, documents, whiteboards, Web pages and chat rooms. Upon exiting, users also are presented with the option to save content produced in the meeting.

Wiki Software
Winner:: Atlassian Software Systems Confluence
Wiki products let end users create and modify Web-based content easily. This technology is well-suited for collaborative writing or material that requires frequent updates. Atlassian's Confluence is a software-based enterprise wiki solution that can be installed and configured in minutes. Granular access settings allow for better control than the "everyone can touch everything" model some wikis employ. The software also is extensible through RPC-XML, SOAP, the Confluence Plug-in APC and the JAVA API. Source code is freely available to licensed users. Historical page versions and highlighted revisions allow for easy tracking of changes over time and undoing undesirable modifications.

Michael J. Demaria is a technology editor based at Network Computing's Real-World Labs® at Syracuse University. Write to him at [email protected]. 0