Collaboration Boosts Productivity, Efficiency

By BobViolino

Onlinecollaboration tools are transforming the way people work together and keep upto date on projects. Among the biggest benefits for companies: improvedemployee productivity and greater efficiency.

Some of thebiggest measurable productivity gains come in areas such as customer problemresolution, development of sales proposals or marketing campaigns, and productlaunches, says Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at ForresterResearch in Cambridge, Mass.

"If youget down to that level, you start to see some hard benefits in terms ofproductivity, time savings and reuse of assets," Schadler says. Ingeneral, electronic collaboration products allow people to work together ineffective ways when other means of communicating aren’t effective. "Iwould advise people to think about specific situations where tools such as thephone or email are not working very well," he says.

Burr &Forman, a full-service law firm in Atlanta, uses several technologies toimprove collaboration. The firm has used Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007 as acontent and document repository for one of its practice groups for three yearsand will soon deploy a new electronic content management (ECM) system based onSharePoint 2010 and Office 2010, says CIO David Michel.

"Thenew SharePoint ECM was designed in a such a way that every matter or ‘file’ hasits own folder structure so that all electronic information can be created,saved and searched in a very easy way through Outlook," Michel says."This includes email, voicemail, documents, PDFs, electronic transcripts,etc. Our current document management system did not offer any flexibility andwas originally designed only for documents and PDFs, so it’s usability was muchmore limited."

The newsystem will make it easier and faster for users to share and find the documentsthey need. "We will also be able to very quickly, easily and securelyprovide clients with access to those documents when the situation calls for itwithout having to create entirely new systems," Michel says.

SharePointECM "will allow us to consolidate nine different document libraries into asingle ‘Burr’ library, which means that all forms of electronic communicationrelated to client matters will be easily available and highly searchable toeveryone in the firm," he adds.

Anotherresource the firm uses is an enterprise collaboration service from YouSendIt. Untilrecently, Burr & Forman used the service primarily for large file transfers,but now it will also use the new enterprise Workstream offering, which allowsthe firm to send files and content directly from its SharePoint libraries intoa shared folder for clients to see.

"YouSendIt[allows] us to more quickly share large amounts of information with clients andoutside resources in a secure and auditable way," Michel says.

Anothercollaboration tool, AdobeConnect, provides online training so the firm cantrain multiple people in different offices at one time. "We also use itfor continuing education training, where input is required to prove that thestudent is watching the entire session," Michel says. The product has madetraining easier and more widely available, he adds, which helps users becomemore proficient with the software they use to do their job.

Finally,Burr & Forman uses Cisco System’s Tandberg video conferencing system forinternal meetings, depositions, interviews and other events. Michel says thefirm has benefitted from decreased travel costs as a result of using videoconferencing.