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After quite a long break from blogging due to sabbatical and lack of time, I'm starting to pick up where I left out - obsessing over collaboration. Currently I'm prepping a VMWare image of Ubuntu 7.04, which seems to be the distro of choice, as a base for some collaboration software installs. I'm quite excited about a few projects - the upcoming release of ActiveCollab 1.0, Mindquarry 1.2 with email and posting features, and the Openmeetings real-time collaboration server to name a few. I'll also be moving to MovableType 4 for blogging.

In the interim I've moved a number of projects onto Wetpaint for wikis. I pretty easily moved this server to CentOS 5 from Fedora Core 5 (I'm done with the updates every six months). At work we're moving several communities and websites from a number of tools onto the common Drupal 5 platform. I've also been trying to spread the good word of Zimbra, which has worked quite well with both the commercial and open source versions. Currently I'm experimenting with a number of to-do and GTD (Getting Things Done) sites, including Remember the Milk and Vitalist.

More comprehensive blogs to come...

iPhone, We All Phone (and Collaborate) 

Continuing the sequence of blogs in which I keep up my responsibilities as a blogger in the tech blogosphere, I thought I'd offer a few of my own musings on the rumored Apple iPhone (or ApplePhone or whatever it may ultimately be called). 

For those of you who don't know, the iPhone is the long rumored Apple branded cell phone/media player.  There has been speculation that it may be announced at next weeks MacWorld Expo in San Francisco.  I have no knowledge as to whether they will make that date next week or not.  But what I do firmly believe is that some time in the next 3-6 months Apple will introduce a phone.  There are a lot of good things that Apple could do to (for?) the cell phone industry, which is in need of a shakeup. Currently there are too many "standards" across carriers and manufacturers, which is supplemented by too much control by the carriers (witness "crippling of many features when the carriers release phones on their networks). 

But that is not what I am going to muse about today.  Nor will I speculate on the multimedia features that are likely to be the advertising focus of this phone when it does appear on the market.  What I will speculate on is the role this phone might play in communication and collaboration.

One of the oft rumored features of the iPhone (which will not be its name BTW, since that was recently snatched up by Cisco for a VOIP phone) is integration with iChat.  For me iChat video has brought the video phone to reality.  Real time collaboration with individuals and groups is a breeze with this technology.  If Apple can put that on a phone (which I believe it can) it could make this technology ubiquitous, permitting voice, text and video streaming from anywhere.

Even iChat video may not be the iPhone's greatest contribution to collaboration.  For that feature we may need to wait until the 2nd generation iPhone.  Most of the rumors that have circulated convey a small and simple device being introduced initially, followed later by a "smartphone".  It is the smartphone that could make the difference.  Look around today and you can tell people's professions (or role in an organization) by the phone that they carry.  There are the Blackberry/Treo (B/T) users and there is everyone else. The B/T crowd work for large organizations, or are in management/executive positions.  The exclusivity of this club comes not from the cost of the device (or perhaps even how geeky it is), but from the back end servers that are needed to power them.

Apple has the potential to bring groupware (email + calendaring/scheduling) to the masses through a standards-based sexy device.  A simple device that has IMAP and iCal/CalDAV support (of course to hook into .Mac accounts, but usable anywhere) would free the devices from the expense and complexity of the servers that are required to run them. Consumers and people in smaller organizations, and even the "regular' people within organizations who have been excluded from the B/T club can have access to their information through these devices.  While it is true that many phones can now sync data through SyncML, it still hasn't been easy for regular people to set up, and perhaps more importantly it has not been touted by the industry.  Apple will change that.

Updates on Epiware and Zimbra

Enough speculation and now for some feedback.  I've been hacking away at Epiware the last couple of weeks, and testing out Zimbra and I have some further thoughts.

In my previous post on Epiware, I had some issues getting the calendar to work correctly.  I posted my issues over in the Epiware Forums, and it took some time to get a response (understandable during the holiday period).  Finally I got a response, which directed me to replace one of the files in my installation.  No luck. However, the file pointed me towards some PHP settings to manipulate.  Through some trial and error I found the conflicting setting and go the calendar to work.

Epiware does need some updating of their code for newer installations of PHP, but I have otherwise found the code to be quite stable.  Further, I think it has an excellent set of features.  Between tasks assignments, calendars, document versioning and even the Wiki, it has a good size feature set.  Not too much to be overwhelming to manage, and not too little to feel constrained.  As I tinker further, it is quickly becoming my top choice for project management, particularly when documents are central to the project.  I'll do some comparisons to ActiveCollab (the BaseCamp) clone in an upcoming blog.

I have also been testing Zimbra quite thoroughly on my virtual server.  After the couple of days that it took me to sort out my DNS/Bind/Host settings, it has been running flawlessly.  I find the interface to be a joy to use, and its feature set seems to keep growing.  The forums are active, and there seems to be a good community around both the free and paid versions.  I've experimented with both calendaring and email and they work quite well.  I have to commend the interface again.  The one place it still falls short (for the free version) is in offline use.  It is easy enough to pull down ical feeds from all of your calendars into iCal or your client of choice, but that is unidirectional.  Indications are that this problem will be solved in the near future.  CalDAV support is upcoming, and there were postings in the forums about getting Sunbird working. And then there is the announced offline AJAX support, which could be the most intriguing.  I'll try those out as soon as they happen.

A Penny to Share Your Thoughts

This is the time of year that bloggers try to explain how the predictions they made last year really did come true, and then make new ones for the upcoming year. As The Obsessive Collaborator is much less than one year old, I can forgo the former formality and jump right into predictions for 2007. I really have just one - that online collaboration will become ubiquitously available. Some call this commoditization, collaborative software will become so standard that people can pick and choose from a number of interchangeable providers for the services that they need. This in turn drives prices down considerably, making this tool accessible to everyone. It is the latter part of this process that I am interested in, and hence like to think of it more as the democratization of collaborative software. The fact that it is cheap and accessible to individuals, non-profits, academics and small-businesses alike is what matters.

A couple of years ago Tim O'Reilly published a piece on the Open Source Paradigm Shift in which he described some of the market, engineering and design factors that lead to the commoditization of software in general, with open source software both hastening the process and growing as a result.

There are a number of factors aligning right now that set up 2007 to be the year in which collaborative software goes through such a paradigm shift, taking it from the enterprise, where it has been relegated for years and unleashing it upon consumers and small organizations everywhere.

Before I get to those factors, I think it is important to differentiate among the two kinds of people that there are in this world - those with servers and those without servers. This process will serve both of those kinds of people - through cheap and free "host your own" solutions and through similarly priced hosted services. There are costs and benefits of both approaches, weighing bandwidth, server capacity and maintenance against ownership and control of data. This line may be blurred as more places offer to inexpensively host sites with many of these tools already installed, and more people perhaps choose to control their data for fear of giants gobbling it up. But for now it is a distinction that is useful.

With that in mind, here is why 2007 will be the year collaboration comes to the people.

Standards, Standards, Standards
As my father always told me the three most important things in making something a commodity are standards, standards, standards. Well, perhaps those were not his exact words, but in order for commoditization to occur, there need to be standards so that services really can be interchangeable. Standards are what brought email to the mass market (I don't think everyone would be willing to type in 100 character properly formatted addresses like IN%"g824nn321"@domain.subdomain.server.net/BITNET" like I remember doing in the early days of email). And there are many standards that will enable this to occur in the collaborative software market.

CalDAV and GroupDAV, are two related standards that extend the WebDAV protocol already used for limited sharing of calendars (e.g in Apple's iCal). With the likes of Novell, Oracle, MIT, Mozilla and the OSAF on board, CalDAV can enable a fundamental change in the sharing of schedules, at the core of many groupware applications. Cosmo, OpenGroupware, and Apple are among the many incorporating this standard into their servers, and many others are following suit. This will permit the people-who-have-servers to choose among many free, cheap and open solutions. I believe that this will also make Apple's .Mac a relatively inexpensive hosted service, particularly for families (and what family can't benefit from greater collaboration?). CalDAV clients are also proliferating, including Mozilla's Sunbird/Lightning, and iCal in Apple's upcoming Leopard, again among others.

Even Microsoft is getting into the standards game. Integrating an XML standard (even if it is not THE standard) into the default file format for Office 2007 documents allows for many other tools to be able to handle these formats correctly. Specifically systems that support versioning and differencing of collaborative documents can now work correctly with these files. That is a big win for the document management portion of the market.

That Syncing Feeling
This is related to the standards argument, but with the proliferation of mobile devices, having the ability to sync multiple devices with your data is becoming increasingly valued. Blackberries are no longer solely the tools of CEOs on the move, but rather the devices of the masses. Everyone wants their data on their phone, PDA, and iPod, because coordination and collaboration can happen anywhere at anytime. While RIM has cornered this market, it is becoming easier to sync devices with multiple sources. SyncML and companies like Funambol/Sync4j are at the center of this movement, but credit is also do the manufacturers of mobile devices who are increasingly making compatible protocols available via bluetooth. Just look at the options of mobile devices and clients that ScheduleWorld allows you to sync with.

One Word - Google
For people-without-servers, Google has enabled and championed collaborative work. Keeping all of your data online with vast amounts of storage on Gmail was a start. But Google Documents and Google Calendar, are what really started to shake things up and open people's eyes to the idea of easy collaboration online. While these tools are still a bit of a mashup in and of themselves, and people are left wanting for offline availability, Google has radically changed this landscape providing a workable set of tools for free. While the mashup problem may take some time to solve, owing to the fact that many of the tools were inherited from various buyouts, the offline problem will be solved this year with the proliferation of clients that sync, and advances in offline browser capabilities. Google advanced the notion of blogs, and will likely do the same for Wikis in the coming year.

Other companies (Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) are not standing still. They are trying to grow their offerings as well. And in some cases these offerings (e.g. Zoho) may be even better than what Google has. I wouldn't count on Google to falter too much though, as I believe that the culture of Google will keep it moving forward, and while their software is not open many of their APIs are, which keeps them from becoming too isolated.

Talk is Cheap
It could easily be argued that VOIP communication is already a commodity market (and IM has been for a while). There are so many players in this market that I won't even attempt to list them. Skype is a dominant force and may in fact be the company that made VOIP a commodity. Two-way and multi-way videoconferencing are also commodities or nearly so at this point in time, again with Skype behind them as well as Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Apple. We have finally realized the videophone that EPCOT promised me would be here "tomorrow" 25 or more years ago.

And now webconferencing is on the verge of making a similar transition. WebEx has done well popularizing webconferencing, along with Microsoft's Live Meeting and IBM/Lotus Sametime. But these are enterprise (i.e. expensive) solutions. But times are changing. Webhuddle, DimDim, and others are offering free or cheap solutions. Even services like Vyew or the multitude of screen sharing sites are leveling the playing field. Webconferencing will be accessible to all in 2007.

Mixed Marketing
There are a lot of free (as in beer or speech) and open source options out there in the collaborative software market. Some of these are pure open source, or purely free (as in beer) while others are a mixed offering. Zimbra, Scalix and OpenExchange have both free/open source offerings and more expanded paid offerings. Hosted services do the same, offering the basics for free, as Basecamp and others do. This gives everyone a taste of what collaborative software has to offer, both helping them decide what they need and driving the market towards tools that people can try without an investment.

Because We Want To
While the collaborative software market may be commoditized partially by chance, there are in fact companies explicitly pushing it in that direction. In a recent exchange with Steven Tedjamulia of Collanos, Steven said, "We are trying to commoditize collaboration and allow everyone in the world to be able to have Collaboration for free as they have VOIP with Skype." Companies like Collanos, who are bootstrapping off of open source and standards will indeed shake up the market.

I will add that Collanos' approach to commoditization breaks down my global dichotomy of those with/without servers, as their product enables peer-to-peer collaboration. While peer-to-peer is an interesting part of the market to explore, more importantly their product emphasizes the "invisible hand" of collaborative software. To make collaborative software accessible to the masses it needs to be so easy to use that it becomes invisible. While no one is there yet, companies like this are coming close

Email is Broken
There are many things broken about email. SPAM is a major culprit, as are the multitude of messages that I get from friends and family taken straight from the pages of Snopes. But even the volume of legitimate messages is becoming unmanageable for many information workers. There are many great features of email (allowing asynchronous and nearly synchronous exchanges, archival, etc.) but for work that centers on electronic artifacts (designs, documents, spreadsheets, code, movies, etc.) it is simply not sufficient. Documents are getting too big, conversations are involving too many people, and it becomes difficult to effectively collaborate. While proprietary systems enable more effective work within enterprises, even this breaks down in cross-organizational collaboration where license "seats" are counted.

This collaborative software paradigm shift is enabling email to be put back in its place (if I could only say the same for the SPAM and Snopes sightings), and collaboration to happen when and where it is needed. And that when is clearly going to be in 2007.

Let's see how I'm doing on my predictions next year at this time.