Collaboration

Working together to achieve shared goals is the essence of team activity but in many cases technology has not been deployed to support the processes involved.

Collaboration is often used when:

• Undertaking Project work
• Creating bids and proposals
• Producing marketing material
• During Dispute resolution

Collaboration provides facilities for sharing documents, using discussion threads, working with team whiteboards

Collaboration enables groups of individuals to use document level security, generic and specific multi-step workflows, to enable activity for a shared purpose. By using a central repository, it avoids each team member sharing documents by email and it ensures everyone is using the same version. This also ensures that the information is kept together when team members change.

For Collaboration to fully support the team it needs to store emails as well as documents. In order to avoid re-inventing documents and processes, Collaboration needs to provide easy use of document templates, workflows and standard procedures. The ability to define "Virtual Folders", avoids the copying of information to achieve the grouping required by multiple teams. By encouraging standardisation, it improves quality and enhances the opportunity for effective monitoring of progress and comparison with other similar activities.

A repository or library alone will not normally achieve the full benefits of Collaboration, this can only be realised through the integration of active processes. With the Oracle ECM solution this includes the ability:-

• To subscribe to documents, so that team members are notified about updates
• To work across the Web to allow remote access for 3rd party team members, or staff away from the office
• To create and contribute to discussion threads
• To take part in workflows for document creation and reviews
• To build information through collective views using Wiki technology
• To create and share "To Do" lists

Oracle products are available to extend the collaboration functionality to encompass Instant Messaging and SMS technology which for highly mobile team members can be an important aspect to ensure their partcipation.