Collaboration And XML Coming Together Slowly

"Our customers and our prospects are looking to do more with less by leveraging the people and tools available to them," said John Keller, product business manager at TeamShare, a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based vendor that created TeamTrack, an XML-based collaboration product. "They don't want to bring in a new tool that will force them to expend time for training and ramp-up."

TeamTrack allows organizations to map, track and enforce business processes more effectively, and to distribute information across departments, the enterprise and beyond, said Keller.

To deploy TeamTrack, the vendor relies on a network of solution providers. "Our partners bring their expertise in a specific vertical and use our product to build better processes for their customers," said Kelly Shaw, director of strategic alliances at TeamShare.

Another vendor, Excelon, was one of the early adopters and advocates of XML. When the company recognized the potential of the technology in 1997, it shifted its corporate focus from object data management to XML-based development.

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"When XML first appeared on the horizon, it was misrepresented as a high-end version of HTML," said Coco Jaenicke, XML evangelist at Excelon, Burlington, Mass. "But if you're collaborating over the Net, most knowledgeable people agree that XML is the standard."

Excelon created its first XML product, a database that shares its name with the company, in 1997. After that, the Excelon product grew into a suite of XML development tools.

Solution providers that want to deploy Excelon products successfully need to understand just how extensible XML is, said Jaenicke.

While Excelon isn't targeting specific vertical markets with its XML products, it has taken note of the early adopters: the supply chain management, health-care and insurance verticals.

Groove Networks, too, has created a stir using XML to build its product portfolio. When Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, founded Groove in October 1997, his goal was to create the collaborative product that he had intended Notes to be. XML proved to be the perfect development language for the job.

"Building our program-to-program communication on XML is smart programming because XML is an open standard," said Steve Wilkinson, vice president of alliances at Groove. "Embracing open standards is key to Groove's decentralized collaborative platform."

UNDER THE

MICROSCOPE

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COMPANY:

Excelon

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COMPANY:

Groove Networks

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COMPANY:

TeamShare

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ANNUAL REVENUE:

$49.2 million

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ANNUAL REVENUE:

N/A (private)

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ANNUAL REVENUE:

N/A (private)

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MAIN PRODUCT LINES:

XML development tools and object management solutions

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MAIN PRODUCT LINES:

Decentralized collaboration software

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MAIN PRODUCT LINES:

Collaboration platform

Groove is also discovering that collaboration offerings such as its own are becoming important components of larger business intelligence solutions.

"XML is allowing [us to get to information that was previously considered unstructured data, and to create more content transparency," said Wilkinson.

ParallelSpace, a Groove development partner based in Beverly, Mass., was founded to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the Groove platform.

The vendor develops advanced collaboration solutions for information sharing, and XML allows ParallelSpace to easily develop the necessary back-end integration, said Michael Herman, founder and CTO.

"As we build collaborative editing solutions on top of Groove, it allows us to think in XML from a developer perspective," said Herman. "From a cognitive perspective, this makes our development process easier."