Shared Spaces: Parlano whitepaper review

Michael kindly IMed me last night (evening for him,
night for me) to remind me to read the Parlano whitepaper that I had
downloaded and to ask my take on it before he posted his review.
I read it this morning, then read his review. I like Michael's
take on and do read his review for his points as well. My take is
a little different, I think external connectors are very important in
any corporate IM. If you want your employees to give up Yahoo,
MSN, AIM, etc you have to give them a good alternative to be able to
connect with external partners and colleagues (work-related).
Non-work related it tougher, but if your employees are IMing over MSN
all the time about projects, you better be sure that any new system can
fill that role for both groups.

The big
thing for me is not really how well it works within the company, I
think the whitepaper and information about Parlano's application makes
the case strongly, it's the outside of the company interactions.
One of the last projects I worked on with Glaxo was
one where we had two team members who were out here in B.C. who
telecommuted as Glaxo employees, some team members at head office, and
two external vendors. Groove was the tool of choice and I really
wanted to make Groove work.
But the license cost put up a couple barriers and some internal
barriers made it more difficult to boot. This experience made me
realize that in order to improve on a communications platform the
solution has to be: easy, inexpensive, and “adopt-able” (i.e. you don't
have to break any IT rules to use it or need a dispensation from on
high).

From the Parlano paper, and a conversation
with Michael earlier today, I think Parlano is trying to jump on the
Enterprise IM bandwagon, when their product isn't really about
Enterprise IM. It is about Enterprise info sharing and knowledge
exchange, and IM is a part of it. I don't think IM is the strong
suit of the application, but it is a core requirement. That's
okay in a way, but I would wonder if people become interested in them
as an Enterprise IM solution, when their product offering is really
more than that. It is, as Michael points out, a Workgroup kind of
application. Michael speaking highly of Parlano's offering, so I
would look at it if something comes up that would need that scale of
groupware, workgroup app.

If you download the
whitepaper, which if you're interested in Enterprise IM you should,
take it from the stand point of five really good points about what
Enterprise IM should do:

• Enabling Personal, Group & Enterprise-Wide Participation
• Delivering Presence & Persistent Communications Channels
• Integrating Enterprise Instant Messaging & Enterprise Applications
• Establish Secure & Trusted Methods Communication
• Managing Productivity

I would add to the list “Ability to connect with external partners and resources.”

Parlano
does a great job at not mixing in too much of their own product bias
and doesn't pitch their solution until the end of the whitepaper.
A good read.

Shared Spaces Research & Consulting

I
read Parlano's recent white paper, “Next Generation Communications: The
Value of Enterprise Instant Messaging” (July 2004, available with
registration) with a high degree of interest, as it overlaps directly
with a white paper I'm currently working on, entitled “The Future of
the Collaboration Client”. I wanted to see how well Parlano described
the 'next-generation' of enterprise communications – that being the
generation post-email – but overall felt that Parlano has defined the
'next-generation' in terms of what its MindAlign product offers, rather
than being willing to take an overall perspective. On balance, however,
given that they are a vendor of enterprise communication products
(instead of an “independent analyst”), I'll overlook that issue.