Letter From the CEO

Collaboration and Video-Conferencing

by Robert Pritchett

Let’s start out this year on the right foot and with the right focus.

I was asked what was meant by “Collaboration” and it didn’t dawn on me that what was really being asked was which Groupware app I used. It is much more than Groupware. My understanding of the word is colored by how French collaborators were treated during World War II and how “getting along” with getting along can at times be the same as taking your life into your own hands.

There is an excellent treatise on the topic of collaboration at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software and a list of other collaborative efforts can be found at http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/www/collaboration.html.Think about it for a moment. Where else does virtual teaming become seamless? For example, Open Source projects are listed here - http://www.svpal.org/~grantbow/groupware.html. Categories can also be found here in an older website of links - http://web.mala.bc.ca/lizhk/IDesign/collaborate.htm.This one is a little more up-to-date - http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid19_gci1046320,00.html and this one appears to keep current too - http://www.kolabora.com/.

Microsoft’s “free” Collaborative answer requires buying their Windows Server 2003 Software first - SharePoint Services.

There are a number of apps in the non-Mac environment that address collaboration, but I’ve found that Apple tends to pull it all together with iApps as currently used under Mac OS X. We can call it “enabling” software.

So what is available on the Mac besides the iApps?

A good place to start is here - http://www.pure-mac.com/bbs.html

Then there is iLife…

http://www.apple.com/education/whyapple/communication.html

And other testimonials -

http://www.apple.com/education/profiles/vatech/ 

http://www.apple.com/education/profiles/laguna/

http://www.apple.com/education/hed/learning/collaboration.html

http://www.apple.com/education/macosx/

Another productivity tool is iStorm.

Element Software - Copper 2005 Web-based Project Management…which we review in this issue of macCompanion

http://www.thesoftwarenetwork.com/News/2673963/Default.htm

And Green Array: http://www.greenarray.com/ that we also look at. We also reviewed AEC's FastTrack Schedule 9 in this issue and you might want to take a look at ProjectWizard’s Merlin designed just for Mac OS X also reviewed here this month.

Now let’s take a look at video-conferencing.

I was asked how I could get everyone at a local company to use Video Conferencing, assuming I had all the budget issues resolved. My answer? Buy everyone an iMac G5 with the iSight camera built-in and use iChat AV 3.0 under Mac OS X Tiger. Their first question was, “What’s an iMac G5?” Really! The next question was, “How do I teach folks how to use it?” I said that they could be up and running in 5 minutes and that there were online tutorials if they needed to go there. Where?

And I didn’t even say Skype, since the makers of Skype currently still do not have a video solution for the Mac.

http://www.pure-mac.com/voip.html

Begin with Mac OS X Tiger and iChat AV:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/ichat/

http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/work/11/

http://www.mvldesign.com/video_conference_tutorial.html

And for older systems there are other options:

http://www.pure-mac.com/vidconf.html

http://www.mvldesign.com/video_conference_tutorial.html

For conferencing between Macs and non-Mac systems there also are other options:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/2003/07/06/pctomac_audio_and_video_conferencing_comes_of_age.htm

The next question revolved around security issues and videoconferencing. With Mac OS X Tiger, security is built-in. But no doubt, you want to read more on this subject, so here goes:

http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=649

Now is that so hard?

Make life easy on yourself by using a Mac to do business around the world.