This article takes an in-depth look at five very different companies who have successfully implemented Oracle Collaboration Suite, which brings together Web conferencing, content management, email, voicemail, and an integrated calendar. The article also includes links to Oracle Collaboration Suite partners, from anti-spam to wireless and voice access providers. Success stories include: Phone Directories Company, LP EPL, Inc. John I. Haas, Inc. Infopia, Inc. Clifford Chance LLP

As Published In May 2004

Making the Right Connection
By Minda Zetlin

Collaboration tools help people work together more effectively.

Imagine you live in Alaska, a place full of breathtaking wildlife but short on such conveniences as high-speed access. Your job is to run the local office of a company that publishes phone directories and is headquartered thousands of miles away. You supervise a crew of salespeople who crisscross the wilderness, selling ad space to local businesses, armed with little more than cell phones and rate sheets. Every week, envelopes arrive from the home office full of printed material for you and your employees—new policies, promotional material, announcements, and so on. You try to see that the salespeople pick them up whenever they come into the office, but it's hard to make sure. Sometimes important information goes unread. Mostly, you feel you're pretty much on your own.

Then one day everything changes. The home company announces it's installed new software designed to ease communications among its employees. Information will no longer arrive in packages but in e-mails delivered directly to the salespeople's cell phones, a system you can also use to reach them when they're on the road.

You also have a portal allowing you remote access to the company's shared files. One of the many ways you can use it is to look at materials the home office marketing staff has created for other regions—and tell them exactly how you'd like the same items changed to build business in your local market. Suddenly you have resources, contacts, colleagues, and support. You no longer feel alone in the wilderness.

"It was like Christmas," recalls Tammy Sweat-Chipman, director of information technology for the Phone Directories Company, L.P., in Orem, Utah, about bringing Oracle Collaboration Suite software to the company's Alaska outposts. "The people in those offices said, 'We're not on our own anymore.' For the first time, they felt they were part of a corporation. It was 30 below—moisture from our breath froze the moment we stepped outside—but it was an exciting trip."

This is the power of collaboration software. "When you look at where companies invested heavily in technology over the last decade, it was in things like ERP, CRM, and supply chain management," notes French Caldwell, vice president and research director at Gartner Inc. "All those things are focused on working with structured information and making business processes more efficient from an administrative standpoint. What collaboration software does is focus on the individual knowledge worker, letting that person be more productive. That's one reason a lot of companies are looking at it today."

"There's an economic interest within companies in sharing knowledge," adds Chris Langdon, professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. "It works the same way as the initiative in the automotive industry to use the same parts in many different car models. You avoid reinventing the wheel and thus both cut cost and increase quality."

More than that, Langdon says, in the modern world, companies need collaboration to survive. "Today's products and services are so complex that it takes several people to design them," he notes. "You need crews of people to produce them, with different perspectives and different sets of skills. But how do you turn a discussion among several team members into a tangible output? Collaboration software is the tool for doing that."

At companies across different industries and geographic regions, Oracle Collaboration Suite software helps users and business partners communicate more effectively and work together more smoothly. Here's a look at how five companies of varying shapes and sizes are changing the way they do business with the help of Oracle Collaboration Suite.

Phone Directories Company: No More Weekly Mailings

For Orem, Utah-based Phone Directories Company, L.P., communicating with its employees poses some special problems. The company publishes 151 local phone directories each year, and its 500 employees are spread among 22 offices throughout the western United States and Canada.

Until a few months ago, the company had no unified e-mail system. In the commission-only, high-turnover world of directory ad sales, keeping an employee e-mail list up to date without one proved impossible. The only solution was for company administrators in Orem to send out weekly packages containing printed copies of important memos and policies to all 300 sales reps.

Clearly, a more modern solution was needed. Oracle Collaboration Suite emerged as the right one, for many reasons, beginning with Phone Directories' running on Apple desktop systems. The company considered a Microsoft Exchange system, Sweat-Chipman says. "But we would have had to hire people with the technical skills to handle a Microsoft environment and maintain the hardware. And it would have been hard to do the implementation as quickly." Phone Directories' Oracle Collaboration Suite system runs on a Linux platform instead. And, she says, the savings compared to Exchange—not to mention stuffing and mailing 300 envelopes a week—are substantial. A return-on-investment (ROI) study by consultant Mainstay Partners showed that Phone Directories could save US$479,000 in its first year with Oracle Collaboration Suite, a 187 percent ROI.

Another huge advantage is that Oracle Collaboration Suite's e-mail system is both Web-based and wireless-enabled. This is important, Sweat-Chipman notes, because in this high-turnover profession, it's not cost-effective to issue laptops to salespeople. They all already carry cell phones with text messaging and e-mail capabilities. Now they can use them to read—or hear—their e-mail, wherever they may be. "It drives policy as well," she says. "We no longer have sales reps claiming they didn't follow a policy because they never got the memo." (For more on wireless, see "The Wonders of Wireless.")

With the e-mail implementation well in hand, Phone Directories introduced a new portal system that gives users access to Oracle Collaboration Suite features from any location. Once in, they have access via file sharing to company documents and other resources to help them do their jobs.

"Employees can go to an internet café, a library, or a client's office and go to the portal," Sweat-Chipman explains. "They'll find not only the information that that particular client needs but also what they themselves need. There are memos, marketing materials, different versions of shared documents—it's all there."

A further advantage of Oracle Collaboration Suite is the do-it-yourself capabilities of file-sharing processes. "Using the technologies we built and that came with the product, it's very easy to put things into a PDF file and throw it onto the Web," Sweat-Chipman says. In most cases, she notes, it's simply a matter of using the current Macintosh platform to print to a PDF file and then uploading it to the Web-based portal. "We can do revisioning and keep track of revisions as well," she says.

With these features in place, she adds, "Each individual division can oversee its own portion of the site. That helps me, because I have a small IT staff." The division managers like it too. "They're managing it themselves," Sweat-Chipman says. "They know exactly what's there and they don't have to rely on anybody else to do it for them."

EPL: Saving US$391,000 a Year

At the other end of the technology spectrum from Phone Directories is Birmingham, Alabama-based EPL, Inc., a mid-sized company that offers financial-services-sector data processing solutions to credit unions across the country. It offers turnkey software systems either in-house or via a service bureau, and its software product i-POWER was built by use of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition of Oracle9i Application Server.

As at Phone Directories, cost was a primary factor when EPL chose Oracle Collaboration Suite. As part of an overall upgrade last year, EPL decided to switch from its combination of Microsoft Exchange and third-party software for e-mail, voice mail, fax, and Web conferencing to a single solution through Oracle Collaboration Suite, creating an estimated savings of US$391,000 a year. This represents a 75 percent reduction in total cost of ownership, according to Michael Stoeckert, EPL's CIO and CTO. The average per-employee cost over three years would have been US$745 for the Exchange-based solution, he says. With Oracle, that cost is only US$187.

And that's only part of the savings. For instance, Stoeckert notes, users can now log in from a remote computer or workstation directly via a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) thin client, whereas with the earlier system, they had to use a virtual private network (VPN) to access EPL's network. "It was always slow, and it didn't always work right," he says. "So users are much more productive when they work remotely now." In addition, he says, because Oracle Collaboration Suite's e-mail is based on open standards, it's easily accessible by a wide variety of browsers, offering employees many more options when they're working outside the office.

Another key to savings is Oracle Collaboration Suite's file sharing, Stoeckert observes. "Now, when we send e-mails with files attached, it ties up the bandwidth less, because the file isn't physically attached." It comes with a hyperlink, and the recipient can click on the hyperlink to access the shared file as needed.

These bandwidth savings add up, Stoeckert notes. "We send lots of mail to multiple parties. So if I send out five e-mails that would have had files attached, that's five fewer of these attached files going through the bandwidth." Then, too, Exchange would have stored each of these e-mails, along with its attachment, as a separate entity, thus storing the attachment five times, whereas Oracle Collaboration Suite stores multiple-recipient e-mails only once. "So the database grows at a slower rate," Stoeckert says. "It's more efficient." This is no small matter in the highly regulated financial services industry, where, per government regulation, e-mails and other documents must be stored in an accessible form for years at a time. (For more on this subject, see "Getting Compliant with Oracle Collaboration Suite.")

EPL's users also appreciate the Web conferencing feature of Oracle Collaboration Suite. EPL was using WebEx for real-time collaboration but switched to Oracle Web Conferencing with the move to Oracle Collaboration Suite. Because of Oracle Web Conferencing's added features, Stoeckert remarks, the switch should save about 20 percent in total cost of ownership (TCO) for this function. "We will use it for all demos of products," he says, "and for phone calls with vendors to review presentations." EPL's support staff will also use Web conferencing for both training and resolving customer issues. "We can have a Web conference and see exactly what defects customers are talking about," Stoeckert says. "We can also take control of their desktops remotely and help them out."

Especially key, he notes, is that the software can record everything, including Web conferencing sessions. That's important not only so EPL can keep a record of its work but also as a training tool. "Afterward, we can go through the recorded Web conference and use that to improve our demonstrations or training," he says. It's just one more way Oracle Collaboration Suite lets users share information to do their jobs better.

John I. Haas: Beyond E-mail and Calendaring

John I. Haas, headquartered in Washington, D.C., first implemented Oracle Collaboration Suite as a replacement for an earlier Microsoft Exchange system it used primarily for e-mail and calendaring functions. "We found we could run Collaboration Suite, hosted by Oracle, for essentially the same cost as running Exchange internally," says Kyle Lambert, vice president of information solutions. "But in the hosted mode, the hardware, the database, and the network are maintained for us 24/7, as opposed to having it done by my staff members, who work five days a week and are generalists."

Thus, he says, switching to Oracle Collaboration Suite meant getting better coverage and more expertise for the same cost. But that by itself might not have been enough of a reason to make the transition. Instead, Haas was drawn to Oracle Collaboration Suite's wider range of functions and features, giving users choices they didn't have before.

John I. Haas went live with Oracle Collaboration Suite in September 2003 and is already seeing benefits that go way beyond e-mail and calendaring. "The areas where it really adds value are the collaborative features," Lambert says. "We can upload and create workspaces, and they're available to people anywhere in the world." Because Haas does much of its business in places such as Australia and China, this is no small benefit.

Another powerful tool for Haas is Oracle Collaboration Suite's search capability. "We're starting to really enjoy that," he says. "Very often, our users forget where they put a file, what was in it—or even whether it is, in fact, a file or an e-mail message. I can type in a keyword, and the system will search every item I have access to—all e-mail messages and files—for the keyword in both subject and text. Traditionally, we'd have had to go to each server to do the search and know what type of file we were searching for." The search returns a hyperlink that, when clicked, opens the item in question.

Another key benefit, notes Lambert, is that Haas uses Oracle Collaboration Suite's file-sharing features to give its business partners access to the data they need to work together. "We purchased a license for certain key partners and allow them to access relevant files," he says. "We're finding that this works very nicely for joint presentations and also contract revisions. Instead of e-mailing things back and forth, we tell them, 'Here's the latest file. Go take a look at it, and save it if you make changes.'"

In addition to all this, Lambert figures that Oracle Collaboration Suite's wireless capabilities and Web conferencing features have created big savings over systems the company would otherwise have had to pay for. "We were looking at WebEx for Web conferencing, which would have cost about US$4,000 a year," he says. Also, Oracle Collaboration Suite's wireless features made it unnecessary for the company to create its own wireless infrastructure. "That adds up to ongoing cost avoidance of about US$150,000 a year," he says.

But, Lambert believes, Oracle Collaboration Suite's biggest benefits lie in the future. "We know that Oracle will integrate more applications into Collaboration Suite and Collaboration Suite into more applications," he says. "That full integration over the next several years will increase productivity tremendously. I can envision a day when a customer will send an order by fax, it'll be scanned into the system and included in files, and the files will be associated with each order. So someone who wants to find the original documentation can click on a link and open the original fax."