IT C515 CSCW - Assignment 1 Summery

The mid-sized health care firm has most of its employees in the headquarter but for direct marketing there are 500 employees all over the country. The current infrastructures of the company only allow them to make communication via email. But if an employee want to access any file from the company there is no facility for that.

Therefor for such kind of collaborative work there are different kind of groupware softwares available on the market. From those we will compare two products and select one which fits for the company.

Microsoft Sharepoint
SharePoint refers to a combination of three Microsoft products and technologies that facilitate collaboration within an organization and with partners and customers. Sharepoint Services offers basic web portal and intranet functionality, team, document or project sub-sites, version-controlled document storage, and a basic search functionality. It works in conjunction with Microsoft Office’s SharePoint Portal Server and Project Server so that users can easily create, manage, and build collaborative Web sites and make them available throughout an organization, or with trading partners.

If we try to see the price of Microsoft Sharepoint it is very pricey. To get detail information about the cost of Microsoft share point use the following links.

• http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-6350_11-5975781.html
• http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX102176831033.aspx

BSCW
The Basic Support for Collaborative Work (BSCW) system supports collaboration by providing shared workspaces over the Web. A shared workspace allows storage and retrieval of documents and sharing information within a group. This functionality is integrated with an event mechanism to provide each user with an awareness of the activities of others within the workspace. BSCW comprises numerous features, for example, support for threaded discussions, version management of documents, group management and search features. The system is designed primarily to support self-organizing groups, it is fully platform independent application. In addition to that if we try to see the cost for BSCW is a fair price. For detail price information:

• http://www.bscw.de/english/bscw_hosting.html
• http://www.bscw.de/english/bscw_server.html

Conclusion
Both the above mentioned softwares are very well developed and has a lot of features to facilitate collaborative works in groups or organizations. Regardless of this fact, for the company mentioned above with 500 marketing employees in the country, I believe BSCW will solve the current problem of

• Sharing and searching office documents
• Document status information (e.g. update of documents)
• Easy access for external users (i.e. sales people)
• Easy administration and moderate costs

Even if Microsoft share point is a very good software it is very expensive, complicated to handle, very vast for mid-size firm and also it has a lot of administrative cost. In addition to that to run sharepoint at least the company has to have Microsoft windows server 2003 to get MS Sharepoint services, which offers medium functionally by itself. It needs MS Sharepoint Portal Server to get the full functionally which cost a lot of money. Therefore in my opinion sharepoint will be applicable for big-size companies which has at least more than a thousand or two thousand employees all over the world.

Just to give a little comparison between
Microsoft Sharepoint Vs. BSCW

	Sharepoint	BSCW
User Management	Restrictive	Flexible
End user customization	Flexible but complicated	Limited front end customization
Extensibility	Web services (SOAP)API (web parts)	Web services (xml)API (packages)
Workspace structure	Extensions have to be built / bought for advanced structures	Clear hierarchical, intuitive
Content structure	Predefined content types, extensible	File based