Traditional process management applications are monolithic in nature but a big change may be on the horizon. Business Threads believes the future of process management is in assembling the smaller components that make up the…

Today, peer-to-peer is more marketing hype looking for a problem to solve than a real solution that provides positive value. It’s likely the strong points of peer-to-peer will be incorporated into existing collaborative products in…

The payback period of an application is an important indicator of risk. The shorter the payback, the less likelihood that new technology will make your solution obsolete and the greater the flexibility your company has…

Data mining can help organizations to uncover patterns and trends in their customer, product, or other data, to drive improved customer relations, fraud detection, and reduced risk.

Breadth and repeatability are the key points to remember when deploying or upgrading an application. Help a lot of people many times, and you increase the likelihood that you’ll receive a positive return from your…

New product bundles represent significant cost savings for some Lotus customers, but may not be the best value for all customer needs. Customers considering two bundles may want to explore an enterprisewide license agreement. When…

To assure the success of a knowledge management initiative, focus the tools that increase the productivity of the employee rather than gather information for the company. Autonomy’s portal product is useful in some situations but…

Investment in Windows, careful planning, and teamwork between J.D. Edwards’s Exchange 2000 and Windows 2000 support teams were critical to the success of its rollout of Exchange 2000. The company should reap the rewards of…

Managing static processes and information is only the first step in an effective CRM strategy. Companies should look to tactical collaboration tool and agent technology to provide flexible, efficient responses to “exceptional” customer needs.

TCO provides an understanding of future costs that may not be apparent when an item is initially purchased. However, the metric focuses only on cost and companies that rely entirely on TCO end up following…

This financial modeling tool has been developed to evaluate the value of Microsoft Exchange Server. It is designed to help you build a business case and support your technology decision by evaluating the real impact…

Exchange 2000 is not a revolutionary new groupware solution; rather, it is targeted at fixing the reliability and administrative issues of previous versions of Exchange by tightly integrating it with Windows 2000. Upfront investment in…

Siebel’s eBusiness Mid-Market Edition is a comprehensive package that brings the organizational and structural power of Siebel’s software to the small and medium business. It provides a significant set of features that many medium-sized companies…

In a distributed organization such as a franchise, the communication and collaborative problem solving between members can be just as valuable as the top-down communication from headquarters. A groupware platform can support such collaboration, but…

PeopleSoft’s announcement mirrors the announcements of many other vendors considering E-enabling of traditional enterprise applications. Although this is a necessary step for ERP, the long payback period of many traditional solutions make them high-risk choices…

Unified messaging can enable organizations to improve competitiveness, reduce sales cycles, and increase customer satisfaction by coordinating communication streams for global and consistent filtering and delegating. Companies moving from a basic groupware or messaging environment…

This financial modeling tool has been developed to evaluate the value of Centrinity FirstClass. It is designed to help you build a business case and support your technology decision by evaluating the real impact to…

First-time groupware purchasers will find significant business vbenefits in FirstClass support for tactical and strategic collaboration, information organization, and information access. For those already familiar with groupware, the reliability and scalability of FirstClass can present…

Documentum’s partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers provides a prepackaged content and document management solution for pharmaceutical companies. Potential users will find benefits in the templates and predevelop processes that may accelerate deployment, and may find additional benefits…

For Exchange 2000, Microsoft retains its server and client license (CAL) pricing model with slight increases in both CAL and server prices. Existing customers without an enterprise license agreement should expect to pay between $35…

Users can considerably reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by utilizing Livelink ASP services. Additional benefits can be found in extending collaborative tools to business-to-business transactions and leveraging other integrated offerings provided through KPNQwest.