From passive to active use Rules and regs

You don't have to sell Sean O'Connor on the benefits of real-time collaboration tools. Although extremely busy as manager of network operations at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a Massachusetts university with three campuses, this fall he worked from home - because his wife, nine months pregnant, could have required a ride to the hospital at any minute.

No problem. WPI was wrapping up a pilot release of Nortel's Multimedia Communication Server 5100. "I set up my IP phone at home, tunneled in [to the corporate network] through a VPN, established my presence - I brought my office to my house," he says. Sure, O'Connor could have done this five years ago. But he couldn't have held instant-messaging chats with colleagues or shared control of Microsoft Draw and other applications.

Real-time collaboration tools such as IM and Web conferencing are making serious inroads in corporations even though few businesses can point to quantified results. Rather, what's selling them on collaboration tools are "soft" benefits such as the increased flexibility O'Connor experienced and greater productivity.

Analysts say that as real-time technologies mature, metrics will quantify their value. And in any case, it might be too late to turn back. "A lot of managers ask if they should allow instant messaging in their company," says Lou Latham, a Gartner analyst. "I answer, 'You are already - IM has come in under the radar. So we suggest you put it to work.' "

From passive to active use

That statement can just as easily apply to Web conferencing services. "We were what I'd call passive WebEx users," says Terry Grogan, director of operations and technical services at Lancaster General Hospital in Pennsylvania. That's because software vendor representatives, when called upon with support questions, frequently tried to fix problems through WebEx sessions.

This troubled Grogan for two reasons. First, the support reps sometimes made unauthorized changes to user systems, including changes that affected the hospital's back-end databases. More significantly to a healthcare company, Grogan lacked any audit and archiving control over the online conferences. This put Lancaster General at risk of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. WebEx's services offer Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption, but Grogan worried that vendors might not use it by default.