Reply From: Bob Buckland
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.office.intranets
Hi Ray,
One of the targets of the Office 2000 product was to increase its use and capabilities for
Collaboration. The Office Server Extensions (a superset of FrontPage 2000 extensions) is one
piece which allows a user to
- 'subscribe' to a folder or documents so that they get email
notifications if someone else modifies the documents (i.e.
may be collaborating on work within a team or department)
- post comments about the documents that others can also see,
similar to the comments feature of Word but they're actually
stored in a separate SQL database and can be seen and modified
by others, with just a browser, without modifying the actual
documents (as you would be doing if you used the Word comment
feature).
Much of the 'collaboration' feature supposes that people will change
their work style and work habits and this may be the most difficult
part to implement :) . For example if you presently email someone
a copy of a document, they look at it or work on it and then email
it back, the Office 2000 collaboration approach would be to work
with the document in a single place and to perhaps send an email with
just a hyperlink to it (the files could be on either a file server
or a webserver) if subscriptions weren't in use.
-Another piece is that in the menus of the Office 2000 apps you can
initiate a Net Meeting session with others on your team and collaborate
on work that way.
-Using the MS Digital Dashboard with Outlook you can create customized
'web pages' that can pull active content from a number of sources
that would be of importance to a workgroup. For example, you can
have an inserted 'nugget' (the name for items in the Dashboard) that
allows you to pull up 'current' data in what might be a rapidly
changing spreadsheet, or input to a MS Project 2000 status.
-Using the 60 Minute Intranet Kit you get a set of templates that
would let you setup a workgroup 'website' to access schedules,
and news and doucments etc.
-The use of the Data Access Pages (Office 2000 users can work
with a Database from a web page) or the other apps ability to
'save as' a web pages that look a lot more like their Office 2000
original format items and that can be pulled back from a web page
into the Office 2000 app and resaved as a .DOC or other app original
again (round tripping) may also be useful for people who need to
see only the document content with a browser to be able to contribute
opinions or comments. Part of the idea of 'collaboration' is that
there is likely a need for a company to be more likely to be able
to find and catalog all of the information that is developed by
knowing where it's located and with a reduction on passing around
copies via email and printed copy. :)
For some folks, they may find it useful to use these or other tools,
for others, they can do this with non Office2000 tools and for
others little or none or a lot may make sense with the way people
are spread out or choose to collaborate to get their work done.
Some folks prefer to work live, face to face to get ideas flowing
and produce results and the Office 2000 approach, aimed at trying
to get people to do less moving of data between users than in the
past, would not be as widely implemented.
There is a Microsoft Press book, 'The Power of Intranets' which
was to show how some of this could work (among others). As Outlook
is the 'collaboration client' for MS Office, a lot builds on
your 'inbox' as the center piece of how you get to information.
The new 'MS Windows Powered'PocketPCs are showing this 'idea'
even more.
On the Microsoft Office website (revamped this week) some of the
links that may be of use to you would be:
From http://microsoft.com/office/evaluation/solutions/default.htm
