I’ve probably mentioned this before, but Guy and I have been given the task of investigating collaboration strategies for our group. Guy lives and works in Merrie Olde England, while the rest of our department is divided between Baltimore, (Maryland in the US of A), Hartford (Connecticut), and Merritt Island (Florida, right near the Kennedy Space Center. And, yes, we DO employ several rocket scientists!) Like many corporations, quite a few of our project teams consist of people who’ve never met one another face-to-face. Our clients, similarly, are all over the US and Europe.
Collaborating over Instant Messenger, telephone, e-mail and shared project directories is difficult and often adds a layer of extra complexity to time-challenged project schedules. Project Managers and project technical leads spend too much time dealing with the minutiae of file management, versioning, distribution lists, and status meetings. At crunch times, someone always says, “There has to be a better way!” Unfortunately, most of the “better way”s we’ve come across — Groove, for instance — demand that team members learn another application or require them to jump through hoops to integrate new work styles into their daily activities.
One promising product — possibly that “better way” — I’ve recently come across is Kubi Client from Kubi Software. Instead of imposing a new paradigm on users, Kubi works directly inside Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes, adding collaborative functionality inside the program most of us keep open on our desktops all day long.
Kubi creates project spaces, each of which resides in the local folder structure of Notes or Outlook. With one click, the space leader can create shared discussion spaces, document repositories (Word document, Powerpoint presentations, PDFs, etc.), shared contact lists, task lists, and project timelines within each project space. Over the ubiquitous SMTP protocol, Kubi automatically generates public key encryption for all messages sent, decrypting them upon receipt, and replicating all project information on each team member’s hard drive. Because of the replication, team members or clients who may not have access to our company’s Exchange server can still access all the project information. (The soon-to-be-released Kubi Server will even enable web access to the Kubi spaces through Outlook’s Webmail or Notes’ Domino web access.)
The team responsible for creating Kubi has some very impressive credentials. Like many of the others on the management team founder and CEO Julio Estrada worked for Lotus Development for a long time where he was the Lead Architect for Domino Server as well as having been one of the key engineers of the far-ahead-of-its-time Improv product. A couple of the others hail from Trellix, the company founded by near-legendary software pioneer Dan Bricklin.
All in all, it seems like a very interesting application. There is supposed to be a 30-day demo available and I plan on reporting here on my experiences with the product.