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Instant Gratification on World Wide Work

Why ICQ probably can help your project team, and Office 2000's collaboration tools probably can't.

Eric Bender, PC World

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Ten years ago I stayed in daily contact with colleagues around the country by e-mail and voice mail. Then came high-powered PCs, the Web, high-speed Net connections even in my home office, and much-hyped collaboration tools like Microsoft Office 2000.

Now I work with, well, e-mail and voice mail ... and ICQ, America Online's soup-to-nuts instant messaging client.

Instant messaging can be an enormous help in getting business done right now with folks who might be in the office or at home or on the road, or work for another company or themselves. You don't need to remember where they are: If they're working on a PC, you can get to them in a few clicks and a few seconds. And you can send a file almost as quickly--so you don't have to tap your fingers for an hour while some e-mail gateway takes a little nap, a surprisingly common occurrence.

ICQ is far from perfect. It is the Lotus Notes of instant messaging, with its clunky interface, heavy demands on your PC, and more bells and whistles than the average Rube Goldberg machine. There's a reason the company calls all versions beta; ICQ is not the world's best-behaved software. Not all of my colleagues are crazy about it. And there are many times, of course, when it's better to pick up the phone.

But ICQ (or something like it) looks like a permanent addition to my work tools.

Some other highly touted new collaboration tools, though, don't necessarily bring much to the party. The leading example is Microsoft Office 2000.

Office 2000: Thinking (Too) Big

A friend once ran a Congressional investigation into certain indiscretions of the nuclear power industry. One of his lines sticks in my head: "First, you hire the fleet of lead-lined dumptrucks..."

That should be the first instruction for installing the Office 2000 collaboration tools. You start with NT Server running Internet Information Server or NT Workstation running Personal Web Server, and then you need two proprietary server extensions on top.

I've installed a fair amount of this stuff, but this is no quick job unless or until your information systems people bless your effort. Understandably, ours don't want me plopping another NT server on our main network. And I've had bad luck each time I've installed Personal Web Server. At least on our machines, what's really personal about it is the frustration, since it demands much troubleshooting just to get it launched the first time.

How Do You Really Work?

Okay, let's assume you bypass all these back-end problems when your Internet service provider agrees to provide Office 2000 services for you. (Many ISPs will, and this approach also solves the problem of accessing information outside your company network.) Now here's what you can do with Office 2000:

First, call up a document you want to share, save it nicely in HTML format, and publish it to the Web server as easily as if you were simply saving a file. This works fine and is all to the good, although most of us actually post HTML documents far less frequently than Microsoft seems to think.

Second, you can add discussions to these documents--you and your group can post comments right alongside the material. This feature also performs reasonably well, even if you're running Communicator rather than Internet Explorer.

Third, you can automatically send an e-mail alert when a posted document is changed. This might save a little time over manually sending a message. But Office 2000's approach is clumsy, you run the risk of false alarms, and of course you've still got to track all those alerts.

The big problem with all this is that people don't seem to want to work this way. Oh, I know that we should, and I've written many an article promoting discussions. But nobody revises documents more than PC World, and we simply never show interest in any kind of online revisioning or group discussions.

The lesson seems to be that if the discussion is too complicated for e-mail, you need a live meeting.

Punch: When Push Comes to Share

Start-up Punch Networks targets one of these problems--making sure everyone automatically gets the latest version of crucial documents like price lists and status worksheets.

You can take a look at a free version of Punch WebGroups on Excite. It functions like a Web-based document management system, letting you post, share, and update files with whomever you choose.

What's really slick is that it can update the latest documents directly to your hard disk--no manual downloads required.

Currently you must go to Excite and click a few times to get updates, since Excite wants to show you ads.

But this summer Punch will begin offering a corporate version that works in the background. That is, whenever you log onto the Net, the latest version of key documents can be downloaded transparently to your hard drive. So you'll always have the latest version without ever lifting a finger. That is instant group gratification.

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