InfoWorld writes that the future of enterprise collaboration is based on expanded reach with less reliance on all-in-one solutions:
Whatever the future of enterprise collaboration may hold, it will never be as dramatic a sea change as in the past. When Lotus Notes debuted in 1989, it was a radical departure from the prevailing norms of electronic collaboration. By combining rich development tools with the well-established concept of e-mail, it unleashed a flurry of competing attempts at developing the ICE (integrated collaboration environment).
Almost 15 years later, both user interfaces and back-end services have morphed to meet the needs of users. Integration seems to have given way to modularity. Its fair to suggest that the most drastic change in the way people work together has been the expansion of IM, which has evolved from a rogue application that small workgroups might adopt on an ad hoc basis, into one of two important load-bearing walls of the collaborative ecosystem.
One thing is clear about the future of collaboration: It will be a richer experience than people are used to having today. By extending the reach of collaborative capabilities and incorporating presence awareness into apps, documents, and the network fabric, enterprise IT architects will make users more productive, while providing a more effective way to retain the elusive organizational memory.
