Clearspace Could Bring Office 2.0 to BPM 2.0

Tuesday, March 27th 2007 | Ismael Ghalimi

As indicated last week, the Under The Radar event brought its fair share of discoveries, and I am still trying to find some time to play with some of the applications I saw there. One got me seriously thinking beyond the realm of Office 2.0 though — Clearspace, which is developed by Jive Software.

Clearspace is a new kind of online collaboration platform that brings together discussions, blogs, files, instant messaging, and wiki documents under one unified umbrella. But unlike similar offerings that are built in PHP or Ruby, Clearspace is a J2EE application that could be deployed on the same application server used for Intalio|BPMS, alongside the Hyperic system management platform, the Liferay portal, the Mule ESB, and the OpenLexicon rule engine that we are already embedding.

There are many scenarios for which I could see the use of an Office 2.0 platform such as Clearspace in combination with a BPM 2.0 product like Intalio’s, and some were pioneered by WebEx with Connect, which I covered in this previous article.

At design time, blogs, discussions, documents, tags and wiki documents could be used for supporting the collaborative development of processes. All it would take to make it happen is the ability to create links from process artifacts managed by Intalio|BPMS to collaboration resources handled by Clearspace.

At run time, real-time collaboration could be used to facilitate debugging and exception handling, while notifications could be used to track a variety of events generated by running processes. Intalio|Server already provides an API for subscribing to such events, therefore integration with Clearspace should not be that difficult.

And for both design time and run time, Clearspace’s advanced user management features could be leveraged in order to manage users, groups, and permissions. This is where some more work might be required in order to enforce the right security policies, but it does not seem to be more complex than the kind of things we have done in the past for building our workflow framework for example.

All in all, I really like this idea. If you like it too, let’s build it with D3!

Entry filed under: BPM 2.0, Office 2.0

4 Comments - Add a comment

1. Ryan Armasu | March 31st, 2007 at 9:31 am

Ismael,

I checked Clearspace out and it is — at least for me — pretty impressive. It was and still is my hope that Google does something similar with JotSpot, which I use currently, and really like.

I do have to say though that the feature set for Clearspace is much richer, and Google would have some catching up to do. Pricing is also very reasonable, and it should provide the impetus for wider adoption.

In that regard, I think some wider and more cross-functional marketing is needed. What I mean is that somehow, the good news should be presented to corporate user groups, more so than just IT departments. Most of the corporate world still uses either Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, with collaboration reduced to e-mail and a shared drive.

There is a huge demand and need out there for things like conversation based messaging, wiki style knowledge management, easy and quick transfer of large files, the ability for teams to view and edit documents and images concurrently, etc. in a global collaboration — but most users have no idea of what’s available, and how that would immensely transform the way we work.

Maybe, for example, a conference like Office 2.0 should target engineering and/or R&D groups — who are typically most interested in collaboration tools - at companies in diverse industries, like GM, Lockheed, DuPont, P&G, Exxon, Jacobs, just to name just a few, and invite them to explore the new world of collaboration applications. This way it would be possible to match applications with needs, and set in motion the powerful driving force of end user demand.

Just my 2 cents.

2. Steinar Carlsen&hellip | March 31st, 2007 at 1:18 pm