Room to share

COLLABORATION IMPLIES sharing, whether it’s a data file or just an opinion. That’s what makes it so valuable: Everyone gets something in return. Today’s collaborative processes pull data from a variety of sources, and the difficult part remains that of presentation. The promise behind the technologies — including SOAP and XML, which are often implied when people speak of Web services — is easier exchange and presentation of data.

While new players in the collaboration space such as Groove Networks turn up the heat, established vendors of collaboration wares are quickly adding Web services to their products, or at least the hooks required for survival in the world of Web services. One such vendor is eRoom Technologies. Its eponymous suite is used by more than 600 major enterprises around the world, by eRoom’s count.

One would hope that Version 6 of any product is mature and stable, and eRoom 6 lives up to that expectation. The addition of SOAP and XML support to the developer’s kit makes it possible to expose eRooms without relying on the product’s own APIs. Yoke this flexibility to relatively simple requirements and a quick setup time, and it’s easy to see why we found eRoom 6 to be worth consideration as part of your collaboration strategy.

One strong point of eRoom is the abstract approach to collaboration. Items, representing externally generated files, notes, ongoing discussions, polls, and e-mail generated through eRoom, become the content of each eRoom. The storage for these is in a native or external SQL database.

Another strength is eRoom’s support for Office 2000, including the ability to present eRooms as Web Folders and use Outlook as the touch point for workflow inside eRoom, as well as Office and Exchange.

As the name suggests, eRoom uses a paradigm from physical office space; “facilities” and conference “rooms” are managed through eRoom, which can use the Windows NT domain, the Windows 2000 Active Directory, or LDAP Version 2 directories for authenticating users. A host-based service is available, but most companies will probably choose to implement one of the two eRoom 6.0 packages — the only major difference between the two is the data store.

This can be in eRoom’s own SQL database, or for greater scalability in a Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 or SQL Server 2000 database that’s running on a separate server, of course. Our review focused on eRoom for SQL Server, which we tested with a server running SQL Server 2000. Both eRoom versions require reasonable hardware to run on — a 500MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM are the basic recommendation — with Windows NT or Windows 2000 Server and Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Server).

It took less than an hour to get our server up and running, not counting the pre-installation chores of configuring hardware and adding an account to our SQL server. As usual, we found places where the installation could be made easier, usually through more attention to the supporting materials.

Although the available documentation treats security issues with appropriate gravity and offers useful information for hardening an eRoom server, that treatment belongs as an integral part of the installation guide, and should at least mention Microsoft’s IIS lockdown tool. Also, a paragraph or two should be added to the pre-installation document to describe more fully the setup of the eRoom server’s SQL client, so that the person prepping the system doesn’t have to grope blindly through the SQL Server distribution CD, or bother an already-busy database administrator with trivia.

Managing eRoom is done through a Microsoft Management Console snap-in for basic server functions, and a Web browser pointing at a page on the eRoom server for group and user management. Perhaps the one thing we had expected to see, but didn’t, was some sort of “first room” that the eRoom administrator could use as a template.

Nevertheless, in no time at all we had synchronized eRoom with our Active Directory users and created a working collaborative environment.

How one deploys the eRoom server depends largely on whether it will be an internal resource only or part of an enterprise’s extranet. Because making eRoom externally available is the best way to benefit from collaborative processes, we’re gratified that the documentation addresses at length the issues that surround placing an admittedly vulnerable Windows server in one’s DMZ (demilitarized zone), and that eRoom itself doesn’t require elaborate manipulation of DNS (Domain Name Service) or other critical services.

Although the developer tools were outside the scope of our review, it’s worth noting that in addition to the existing COM-based APIs, developers can now use Web services technologies such as SOAP and XML to create richer eRoom environments that incorporate data from CRM, ERP, and other legacy systems.

There are a few things we’d like to see in future incarnations of eRoom. For one, we’d like to see the database support broadened to include IBM’s DB2 and Oracle’s product line. Though it’s probably not the end of the world to have more than one flavor of database in the server room, we prefer the option to choose. Also, as we noted, the documentation is copious, but useful details are too often assumed, or left to an appendix.

All nitpicking aside, we found eRoom 6 to be a solid product, and any organization with a need for improved collaboration efforts that incorporate data from disparate sources should consider using it to enhance the processes of working together.

Although a price of $250 per seat may seem step at first glance, consider the cost of failed collaboration.