EXTRANET NEWS * Week of
Editors: Joel Orr and N'omi Orr
http://www.extranetnews.com
0. HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
1. SITESCAPE: A WELL-KEPT SECRET
2. COME TO COFES2003
3. THE LIST
4. TIDBITS
5. QUOTE OF THE WEEK
1. SITESCAPE: A WELL-KEPT SECRET
A couple of weeks ago, a press release from SiteScape crossed my desk. It was an announcement of the latest release of their product, SiteScape Enterprise Forum 7.0. A phrase in it struck me; the company said their business was “thriving.” That drew a comment from me (http://www.cadwire.net/commentary/?22228).
In a time when the entire collaboration industry has battened down its hatches, and is just trying to weather the present economic storm, how can SiteScape be thriving? “For one thing, we are the ‘value play’ in the collaborative software industry,” said Alan Blume, SiteScape’s senior vp of sales and marketing. “A company can get started with our ASP solution, WebWorkZone, for only $250 per month for up to ten users. So we cost less than others, and save our customers money.”
“But we also support larger users. The Society of Automotive Engineers uses Enterprise Forum as both an intranet and an extranet, with as many as 79,000 users at a time,” said Blume.
The company’s 400+
customers have more than one million users. They span a broad range of
enterprise types, from manufacturers to construction companies, from
professional societies to universities, from 3Com to the US Coast Guard, from
the Canadian Treasury to the
SiteScape
employs both direct sales and resellers in the
SiteScape was founded by a reseller of DEC’s AltaVista search-engine technology; the product incorporates a version of it. It was purchased as “AltaVista Forum” from Compaq in 1999 by Tim Butler, a former reseller, who is now CEO of SiteScape.
SiteScape Enterprise Forum incorporates a full-featured document management system; a ‘wizard’-driven workflow-design and –management system; a wide range of asynchronous tools, such as forms and lists; a wide range of synchronous tools, such as “whiteboard,” “chat,” and voice-and-video-over-IP; support for wireless devices; interfaces to key middleware platforms; specialized applications, such as Help Desk, Resume Tracker, Sales Account Manager, Contact Manager; an open API, supporting bidirectional SOAP and XML; and quite a bit more. It runs on Windows and several flavors of UNIX. It integrates with popular portal software, such as Plumtree, Citrix, Oracle, and Viador. And it has been translated into 11 languages.
For CAD viewing and markup, SiteScape supports both RealityWave’s VizStream® and Tailor Made Software’s CadViewer.
The product has far too many features for me to survey here. The best way to learn about SiteScape is to sign up for a 30-day free trial, either of the WebWorkZone ASP or of the software for installation on your own server. “Many of our sales come in through the 30-day trial,” said Blume.
In contrast to other collaboration software companies, SiteScape and its resellers have difficulty selling much training. “We are finding out that we have made the system so easy to learn, to use, and to customize, that we aren’t selling as many training classes to our customers as we had hoped,” Blume reports. The company has recently established a consulting division, to help customers create their own complete solutions to business challenges, as well as fine-tuning Forum performance.
SiteScape has entered into a close relationship with consulting firm SAIC, which has invested in the company and resells the product.
Incidentally, http://www.sitescape.com hosts a number of well-written white papers on collaboration.
Our take: Somehow, SiteScape has often missed the “short list” for many
extranet and collaborative system procurements, especially in construction and manufacturing.
Yet its list of references in these and other fields is nothing short of
stellar. And it has one of the highest overall seat counts of any collaborative
system vendor. My very brief experience of the ASP version of the product and
review of the software documentation lead me to wonder why I haven’t known more
about this powerful and robust offering. Whatever your extranet application,
take a close look at SiteScape.
2. COME TO COFES2003
The fourth Congress on the Future of Engineering Software
will be held
Go to http://www.cofes.com/ to learn more.
3. THE LIST
Total companies: 253 (see who's on The List at http://www.extranetnews.com/)
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4. TIDBITS
* Please fill out a graduate student's survey. Luke, H-J Chien, is a PhD student exploring the following hypotheses:
"The
Go to http://www.glam.ac.uk/hjuchien/ to learn more and respond.
* Nielsen Norman Group Report: "Intranet Usability: Design Guidelines from Studies with Intranet Users"--222 pages PDF format. Download report: $248 for a single report, $468 for the report and the right to make copies within your organization and place on your intranet.
From the site: "While website designers can look to the Web for good examples, intranet designers are limited to their own imaginations, or maybe out-of-the-box intranet development tools, for inspiration. The gloomy fact is intranet designers have no role models. It is amazing, however, the similarities in design and content between the intranets we have studied. What's equally amazing are the great differences that occur when there are no public intranet examples to influence the design, and how an organization's culture influences the intranet design."
EXTRANET NEWS holds the Nielsen Norman Group in high regard. We are sure this report is well worth the price. How applicable is it to extranets? Our guess: 80%. More info: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/guidelines/
* IW: Motorola Gets a Boost from Extranet. Motorola Inc.'s rollout of an employee portal built on technology from Epicentric Inc. has proved so successful--generating $5.2 million in cost savings during 2001 alone--that the maker of wireless phones is rolling out global extranets for its network of carriers. See the full INFORMATION WEEK article at:
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eIkM0BhvYn0V20BhkJ0Aw
* EXTRANETS III -
* Creating the Real-Time
* Project World 2002, December 10-13
5. QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The ultimate consequence of protecting men from the results of their own folly is to fill the world with fools.”
- Herbert Spencer
Entire newsletter copyright (c) Cyon
Research Corporation 2002