calendaring and collaboration for the entire organization.

Temple opted for a messaging platform from Mirapoint Inc. that included all of those components. Among the major benefits is improved reliability, O’Rourke says. “In the past, the biggest complaint was that e-mail was always down or messages were not going through,” he says. The new platform has addressed those problems.

Like Minnesota Life, Temple has realized cost savings from more efficient support, including reallocating three full-time support people. Whenever a problem crops up with e-mail or other components, the university now deals with one vendor rather than several.

But there are drawbacks to the suite approach, O’Rourke acknowledges. Some of the functions, such as collaboration and shared calendaring, aren’t as robust as they might be with products devoted to those functions. But the vast majority of Temple’s 45,000 users need only messaging and simple calendar capabilities, O’Rourke says. The suite “doesn’t meet all the needs

definition of a collaboration platform

a collaboration platform is a unified, integrated electronic platform that supports synchronous and asynchronous communication through a variety of devices and channels. Collaboration platforms deliver a set of software services that enable individuals to find one another and the information they need, and communicate and work together to achieve common business goals.

 

of everyone,” he adds. “It’s an outstanding messaging system but needs [work] on the groupware side.”

Suites provide adequate components, but not the best ones available, agrees Root. “As with any all-encompassing suite, you pay a lot of money upfront for a lot of very good but not best-of-breed services,” he says.

For example, Root says, some of the instant messaging features built into suites don’t match stand-alone IM products in performance, especially for messaging outside the enterprise firewall that involves multiple IM clients. “Big suites tend to be very loyal to their own brand and ignore the fact that other companies have different IM software,” he says.

Eric Goldfarb, former CIO at financial services firm PRG-Schultz International Inc., has used both approaches and sees the advantages of each. At the Atlanta-based financial services firm, which has 3,200 employees, a suite makes more sense because it’s more scalable and cost-effective for large organizations. PRG uses Lotus Notes as its standard for messaging and collaboration.

But the multivendor strategy can make more sense for smaller and midsize companies, Goldfarb says. When he was CIO at Global Knowledge Inc., an IT education and training firm with 1,500 employees, the Cary, N.C.-based company used a combination of Exchange for e-mail and products

from multiple vendors for functions such as calendaring and document sharing.

“We cobbled together a set of packages to achieve this overall collaborative work-space, and it worked well,” Goldfarb says. Because the components were focused on specific tasks, they provided greater functionality than was available from suite products, he says. For example, a document management product from an independent vendor can provide a finer degree of detail for records management than a suite can. However, Goldfarb adds, the multivendor approach would be more costly for a larger organization.

Root agrees that buying individual applications might be the best option for small and midsize companies. “Smaller companies don’t need most of the whiz-bang features of the big platforms,” he says. “Many don’t use online group scheduling and calendaring, and they’re perfectly happy using public instant messaging services and e-mail that’s built into Linux or another open-source platform.”