Your Collaboration Suite Or Mine?

I posted recently about Central Desktop, my favorite collaboration suite, and about the potential of these products to really change the way attorneys can deliver services to clients. To my delight, someone actually commented on that post, referring me to ConXPoint, which is another collaboration suite, one which includes an e-signing capability (thus bringing us one step closer to a "transaction engine"). One beef that I have with ConXPoint right off the bat is the absence of screen shots & pricing information on their website. I find that those who don't include this information are more expensive and less refined of interface, as a general rule.

As I was contemplating these collaboration suites, a problem occurred to me. What if your client is using a different one?

In my review of these services, I investigated dozens of web-based, project management applications. I then test drove over a dozen products, including Central Desktop, Zoho Projects (incidentally, my second favorite and a very economical option), Same-Page (also very good, although the user interface could be improved), Joint Contact (which, although less appropriate for my needs, deserves an extra-special, honorable mention, since Wayne Bishop, its creator, is one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet; he bent over backwards to be of assistance to me during my trial), Project Lounge (which looks wonderful, but which is rather expensive; biglaw giant Jones Day is using it for their collaboration work), and @Task, just to name a few. Recently, Liquid Planner made my list of suites to investigate.

So now imagine it's next year and you've just spent all of your political capital, and then some, convincing your law firm to adopt a collaboration suite, such as one of the above. A short time later, by logging in to a single site, you are managing shared calendars, clicking through your to-do lists with great efficiency, planning projects and managing knowledge. You're really getting things done.

Then your biggest client calls to say, "We have just found a wonderful solution for getting things done." But it's one of the other suites. The corner office partner calls to berate you because his biggest client is using a third suite. Everyone is jumping on the collaboration bandwagon, but the problem is that there are too many bandwagons, and each is traveling in a slightly different direction. Your shared calendars don't inter-operate between suites. Your to-do lists are scattered across multiple sites. You consider going back to paper. I believe this could be a significant detriment to the collaboration suite industry, however, I believe there is hope.

One hope is common data standards, like RTF, vCard, iCal. This goes beyond my ability to really comment upon, as I am at best an amateur technologist, but it strikes me that it's possible. Consider the iCal format: if all calendar programs supported this, it would not matter whether you used Outlook, a collaboration suite calendar or Palm. Any project that you're a part of should have its own calendar, and because you can subscribe using the iCal format, your calendar should remain correct and up-to-date. Most contact managers can import and export contacts in the vCard format. My favorite, Plaxo, deserves an honorable mention here. Using Plaxo, you can sync contacts between several common applications. That's the type of thing that these collaboration suites have to consider in order for them to inter-operate. As far as I know, there is no common data standard for "tasks" (however, as I have posted before, "tasks" could be considered "events" of a different sort). I don't have all the answers, but I believe it's a good question.

I don't believe that collaboration suite purveyors have much incentive to use common standards anyway. Inter-operation may be a bad business model (at least in the short term). I'm no expert on the market, but if you get a customer to commit to your collaboration suite, you want them to stay, and making their data accessible to another application lowers the barriers to switching. That's how Microsoft Office became the de-facto industry standard. So what do you think? Your collaboration suite, or mine?