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: Part 2
By Minda Zetlin

Infopia: A True Partner

"We provide the glue that holds e-commerce together," says Eric Maas, cofounder and CTO of Infopia, Inc. The 15-person company, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, provides applications that help sellers use online marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon efficiently. A lot of Infopia's customers, he says, come to Infopia after starting out as eBay power sellers. They have been listing items for sale without a system for doing it efficiently. "They've been cutting and pasting from spreadsheets," he explains. "These companies are so busy just filling current orders that they can't comprehend the idea of growing and selling more. We come in and show them how to streamline the process so they can spend less time administering their businesses. We also expose them to more places to sell, which can increase revenues."

Profiles Phone Directories Company, L.P. Phone Directories publishes 151 local phone directories a year in locations across the Western United States, Alaska, and Canada. Employees: 500 Software: Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server Portal, Oracle E-Business Suite Financials EPL, Inc. EPL offers complete data-processing solutions to more than 150 credit unions nationwide. Year Founded: 1977 Employees: Under 250 Software: Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Application Server (used in the EPL product i-POWER) John I. Haas, Inc. John I. Haas supplies hops and hop products for beer manufacturers around the world. Year Founded: 1914 Employees: About 120 Software: Oracle Collaboration Suite; Oracle Database; Oracle Financial Analyzer; Oracle E-Business Suite 11i, including Oracle Financials Infopia, Inc. The company acts as a middleman for large-scale sellers on eBay, Amazon, and other online marketplaces. Year Founded: 1999 Employees: 15 Software: Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server Clifford Chance LLP Clifford Chance is the world's largest fully integrated law firm, operating in 28 countries around the world. The firm's 3,700 lawyers specialize in a wide range of business and financial law. Year Founded: 1987 Employees: About 7,500 Software: Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Database, Oracle Wireless, Oracle Application Server Portal

Infopia uses the on-demand version of Oracle Collaboration Suite to serve its complex e-mail needs. "Before we moved to a hosted system, we had our own equipment hosted in a local data center," Maas says. "It maintained the network and storage and power, but we had to maintain the hardware and everything else. When there was a problem, our team had to solve it, and we didn't have a dedicated systems administrator or database person. We learned as we went along, but it wasn't what we wanted to focus on."

With the hosted version of Oracle Collaboration Suite, he says, "There's always someone there who can fix things. And I'm a lot more comfortable with e-mail on the server at Oracle." He adds that the company has seen productivity gains, because its staff is no longer focused on solving server problems.

Using Oracle's on-demand model has also turned out to be a boon when internet security issues arise. Because of its exposure to large quantities of e-mail from the public, Infopia has occasionally been hit with denial-of-service attacks. "It would happen a few times a year, and it was always a big headache that would take up an entire day of our time," Maas notes. Now that Infopia's e-mail is going through Oracle's servers, he and his staff no longer have to deal with this issue.

All in all, using Oracle Collaboration Suite On Demand has resulted in a 30 percent savings over Infopia's internal solution. It has also cut downtime by 50 percent and lowered e-mail management costs by 25 percent. Infopia will soon start taking advantage of other features. "We're about to release Web Conferencing," he says. "Our sales team can begin using it to do online sales demos, which we do a lot of."

Another, even more important use of Oracle Collaboration Suite is training. Infopia's interface is frequently upgraded and expanded to keep up with the ever changing world of e-commerce, so keeping customers up to speed is a continuing challenge. "We're going to set up training modules, so we can say, 'We're doing a presentation about inventory on Tuesday—come and watch.'" This is a sea change from how Infopia has traditionally worked with customers, who would simply call up to ask for help whenever they needed it. That meant Infopia's staff found itself giving ad hoc training on a catch-as-catch-can basis. "We want to drive our interactions with clients," Maas says. "Instead of having them call up and our being a slave to what they need, we'd like to be more of a business partner."

Clifford Chance: A Project-Centric View

"The collaboration we do centers on legal matters—projects—mainly via e-mail with domain experts from around the firm and with our clients. We didn't have any method to create context between the documents being produced and the related e-mails," says Mark Boggis, international technology solutions manager at Clifford Chance LLP, based in London, England. To bring context to its e-mail flow, the law firm is working with Sun Microsystems and using Oracle Collaboration Suite to create a prototype lawyer's desktop that will soon be rolled out to as many as 100 of its lawyers in a pilot program.

"Let's say I'm one of our lawyers, typically working on 10 projects at one time," Boggis says. "When I arrive in the morning, I want to see in one view the e-mails I have received and activity on, say, projects 1, 2, and 3. I know that I have a colleague in Hong Kong working on project 3 who will have been dealing with local issues, added some of the e-mail dialogue with the client, and updated the documents." The prototype desktop will allow lawyers to get a centralized view of documents, files, scheduled events, and e-mails relating to each project. When new e-mails arrive that address that matter, lawyers can drag and drop them straight onto the relevant project. Once one lawyer associated with the project has done this, others who receive the same e-mail will find it already sorted to the correct context—as will later e-mail following the same thread. "Faxes and voice mail messages also could be sorted this way," Boggis notes. "Any data element is automatically tagged with its appropriate context. That's one of the beauties of Oracle Collaboration Suite."

Once an e-mail or other data is tagged, he continues, "When we do similar work, we can link to previous work or indicate lawyers with relevant experience in content." As a result, lawyers can quickly get help where needed. "We wanted to create a project-centric view, so we could leverage the other elements of collaboration," Boggis says. "The benefits of anything that saves valuable lawyer time are obvious," Boggis adds. "All law firms have a limited pool of people with this training. We want to make sure they're doing work that's effective rather than administrative drudgery." For the same reason, it was important to create a tool that lawyers could use without a lengthy learning process. "We have to make sure we capture knowledge without difficulty or complexity," he says. With that in mind, Boggis reflects, switching to the lawyer's desktop will mean little change in the way Clifford Chance attorneys do their jobs. Instead, he says, "It gives them the thing they always want access to—an inbox that tells them who wants them to do what on which matter."

The lawyers who've tried out the prototype have only one question, he reports: "Why didn't we do this years ago?"

Oracle Collaboration Suite Partners
E-mail and Calendar Antivirus and antispam capabilities Entelagent Software Mailshell Symantec ToJava Inc. Trilog Group Wingra Technologies Voice Mail and Fax Computer telephony servers Alliance Systems Anikti Avnet, Inc. Captaris Lucent Technologies Paracon Premier Design Systems, Inc.	Files and Ultrasearch Document retention and preservation 170 Systems Feith Systems & Software Inc. Scansoft Wireless and Voice Wireless and voice access Consilient Extended Technologies Loquendo Mobileway palmOne Phonetic Systems Verascape VoiceGenie	Platform Servers, storage, networking, and Linux capabilities Cisco, Inc. Dell Inc. EMC Fujitsu Siemens HP IBM Business Consulting Services Intel Lucent Technologies Network Appliance Red Hat Sun Microsystems Unisys	Compliance Corporate governance solutions 170 Systems Electronic Evidence Discovery Entelagent Feith Systems & Software Inc.
Implementation Oracle works with systems integrators around the world to help customers implement Oracle Collaboration Suite.