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As agencies grow more comfortable with collaboration technologiesand practices, the companies that serve them areresponding. Vendors are developing products to facilitatecollaboration and taking stock of tools already on handthat fit the collaboration market.Companies also are shaping their marketing messages to capitalizeon the burgeoning area of interest.But the market is still hard to gauge, so many companies are movingcautiously.Most of the time, collaboration requirements are buried inside largerprocurements, said Andre Etherly, vice president of federal solutions at Keane Inc. Rarely does a contractor searching for explicitcollaboration solicitations strike pay dirt. But that situation may bechanging, he said."Agencies are going to have to take a break from some of those big,hard-to-do long-term initiatives and take a look at these shorter-termapproaches to facilitate information sharing," he said.Collaboration is a general term that encompasses a variety of activities.It can describe any case where information is shared among peopleand groups, whether by forwarding e-mail or using an applicationthat lets multiple users access and edit the same set of documents andfiles. Collaboration technology includes desktop products, such asMicrosoft SharePoint, and Web-based tools, such as wikis and portals.The term can refer to technology that connects contractors and theircustomers and also information-sharing efforts within and amongagencies.But most agency customers don't think about what they do as collaboration.They just see the need to share information as a component of larger programs."Collaboration is never somebody's primary job," said Mark Levitt,program vice president of collaborative computing and the enterpriseworkplace at research firm IDC. "Their job is to send invoices or designairplanes. The collaboration piece is a way of doing those things."E-mail is still the primary collaboration tool, Levitt said. It has theadvantage of being already available and familiar to most people.However, organizations are facing a growing list of needs that makee-mail inadequate in some cases."What organizations are looking to do is add the tools ? includingreal-time collaboration and coordination ? to the mix," he said.Autodesk Inc., a software company based in San Rafael, Calif.,acquired Emerging Solutions and its product ConstructWare in 2006to round out its collaboration portfolio. Autodesk had its own collaborationproduct, Buzzsaw, and now is integrating the two products."We see an increased interest around government customers andtheir contractors to collaborate," said Rebecca Chisolm-Walker, directorof business development for Autodesk's government business. "Wesaw scenarios where contractors would manage their budgets andconstruction timetables themselves, but government couldn't join in.There needed to be a way for contractor personnel to allow somesharing of information."Like many emerging ideas, though, collaboration has its share ofskeptics in agencies. Chisolm-Walker said the holdouts are usuallypeople who are not convinced that making significant changes to theway they operate will have much payoff."There is hesitancy, but once people begin tosee their real return on investment in terms ofreduced numbers of errors and in the efficiencythat comes with it, that tends to win peopleover," she said.Many also come to see soft benefits, saidTracy Murphy, marketing manager for governmentarchitecture, engineering and constructionsolutions at Autodesk. Managers discoverthey have better control over the scope of aproject and don't have to wait for someone elseto provide information before they can make adecision. Those benefits are harder to measurethan cost savings and error rates, but theymake a big difference to some, she said.The technology needed to facilitate collaborationis largely available, but each project raisesquestions about the best approach to take.Companies are finding that in many cases thetraditional approaches are not the best.Etherly noted that for many people, thephrase information sharing implies storingdata in a centralized data warehouse. But thedata in many cases doesn't have to reside anywherebut in the system that created it. What'sneeded is a way for other agencies to querythose systems and extract the data.One option is to modernize older systems totake advantage of built-in data-sharing capabilitiesin newer systems. But that usuallytakes too long to meet immediate needs, hesaid.Keane uses wrappers, or open-source Webservices code added to the data, to let other systemsretrieve and use it.Policy and data governance are bigger challengesthan technology. "In the legacy world,there were system owners," Etherly said. "Thatstarts to break down in an information-sharingworld. One of the questions agencies have towrestle with is who has the authority to sharethe data."One challenge for companies providing collaborationtools is to find situations that demandthem, said Michael Donovan, enterprise architectof U.S. government solutions at EDS Corp.Some are obvious, such as EDS' Navy MarineCorps Intranet (NMCI) contract, but there areother cases that might seem like collaborationbut really don't require sophisticated tools."Where people are sitting in an office andworking together day-to-day, there's not a highdemand for these tools," he said. "Where there isthe real need is when people are in widely dispersedlocations and they need to be able towork together as if they're in the same room."EDS is planning a deployment of IBM LotusSametime, Adobe Connect and Jabber ? anopen-source instant messaging application ?for NMCI."Defense customers are asking for a way toconnect processes and people that have informationwith processes and people that need to consume it," said Dennis Hayes, chief technologyofficer of EDS' NMCI account.The available collaboration tools aresteadily improving, Donovan said. The governmenthas sometimes balked at implementingcollaboration products because ofthe difficulty of authenticating the identity ofpeople using the connections. But increasingly,collaboration tools have authenticationcapabilities built in.Digital rights management is becoming abigger issue. "We're moving away from protectingthe space where the data sits to protectingthe data itself," Donovan said.Another improvement is the ability to seewhat hardware participants have available, hesaid. If someone is connected via a smartphone rather than a desktop computer, anotheruser will know it's not a good idea to sendthat person a large file.Keeping the technology current is a key componentof success, Donovan said. "The averageage of somebody coming into the military is18 or 19. The way they're used to working ison wikis or Facebook. They look at an e-mail-basednetwork and say, 'How quaint.' It's likewhat I would say seeing someone write with aquill pen."But the very young are not the only users ofcollaboration technology, Donovan said. Olderworkers might be nervous about relying onsomething other than an e-mail network, nomatter how outdated it might seem to theyounger set."The key, I think, is getting folks to realizethe value of collaboration," Hayes said. "In thetactical space, in the battle space, the value ispretty well demonstrated. But in the moreordinary work environment, it's got to beshown."Collaboration comes with some risks tobusiness processes, said Raj Sharma, presidentand founder of Censeo ConsultingGroup. It's easy to oversaturate users withunneeded information. When people mustsort through data to pick out the pieces theyneed, efficiency suffers.The solution is to approach collaborationfrom a policy perspective, he said. An organizationshould set standards for when and howto share information so the right people haveit when they need it. In some cases, makingdata available to everyone via a Web portalmight be the right course of action, and atanother time, it might be better to share thedata in an e-mail to a select few people whoneed it."Collaboration as a theory sounds goodand dandy, but we have to specify what wemean," Sharma said. "You have to think aboutthe negative part of this. As quickly as youcan gain efficiency, you can lose it at somepoint."