Special: ASPs in Australia Part 2

Collaboration

When you're little, you have to make up for your lack of size with agility. As you get bigger, you need to make sure that your sheer size doesn't become a bureaucracy that gets in the way of innovation and communication, leading to lost opportunities. Collaboration tools can help employees at either kind of company work more closely together, whether they're on-site or off-site, in disparate branches, or participating in multiple teams.

The most obvious example of a collaboration application--and the most common ASP implementation--is email. Most companies have more email traffic than phone calls/voice mail, so it's not surprising that email tools are among the fastest-selling ASP services. What email ASPs have to offer

ASP-delivered email gives employees the ability to read and respond to critical e-mails from remote locations, whether hotel room or airport lobby--or even home. To do this without an ASP would require setting up an in-house management messaging (email) server, which could cost up to US$20,000, plus about 40 hours of manpower to develop the email application. And that doesn't take into account the huge amount of time required to maintain and support the program, especially fielding the support calls from employees hundreds of kilometres away with widely varying levels of technical expertise.

Available ASPs range from simple Web mail services like Excite Inbox, Microsoft Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail, all of which provide basic mailing functionality. Although services like these are not specifically slated for business use, a small business might find them good alternatives to paid hosting, because an unlimited number of mailboxes are available, although disk space per mailbox can be limited to as a little as 2MB. For a much larger system, a company might use an ASP which manages even the largest company's entire email system by providing Microsoft Exchange and Outlook programs through its own Exchange Server. The virtual office

The most complex ASP collaboration programs are known variously as virtual offices, digital workplaces, or teamware. These are suites that generally build on Web email by adding such features as instant messaging, shared calendars, document sharing, Web-based presentations, and project management tools.

These applications are similar to non-ASP programs like GroupWise and Lotus Notes, but without the vast drain on IT resources that setting them up and managing them entail.

What virtual office ASPs offer

On the low end, ASPs may be able to provide you with services such as shared calendaring, basic document management, and Web-based email services free, supported by ads; or with a fee charged per user per month. Either way, to set up a low-end virtual-office ASP is generally simple, as the level of customisability is low with such tools.

On the high end, you may also be able to pay to use tools like collaboration with customisable databases that can be used for such purposes as customised project management.

Collaboration ASP tip

When you're choosing a digital workplace, the collaboration features need to be carefully integrated. If employees are likely to participate in several virtual workplaces, for example, all of them must be linked, with employee calendars and task lists synced across them so that there's less information to keep track of, with fewer places each employee must check, and the interface is easy to navigate.

--Sean Carroll

Contents

1.   Intro      2.   Network & Telco ASPs      3.   Collaboration ASPs      4.   Packaged applications ASPs      5.   MIS ASPs      6.   Data Management ASPs      7.   Looking forward

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