Sarah Kittmer, Senior Analyst, Ovum You Asked What do collaboration suites offer and what should a company consider before implementing them?

As organisations recognise the limitations of email for collaborative working, they turn to other collaboration software, either standalone communications technologies such as instant messaging, or collaboration software suites. The goal is to facilitate team working and knowledge share, improving their competitive edge within the increasingly distributed structures of the modern organisation.

Collaboration software suites combine a number of management and communications functions within a single platform to help organisations meet this goal. But organisations selecting and implementing such suites need to be careful that their compliance requirements are taken into account.

Unmanaged email has given many organisations a compliance headache, both in terms of checking that work was being carried out in an appropriate way, and in terms of managing email information. Other collaboration tools threaten to add to these headaches in a similar way.

The good news is that leading collaboration software suite vendors are increasingly embedding content management, and by extension records management, functionality within their suites to at least take care of compliant information management. This functionality is able to provide secure retention and destruction of information, controlled access to information, on-demand information discovery, and auditing.

As long as organisations are prepared to invest time in understanding their compliance obligations as they relate to collaboration, in embedding their compliance driven requirements in their product selection process and in configuring the selected suite in support of their compliance needs, future headaches can be avoided.

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Sarah Kittmer is a senior analyst within Ovum's Technology Group, and is responsible for the company's research into enterprise content management technologies. Ovum