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At the core of all successful businesses — regardless of industry — there exists a common necessity that connects everything. It has nothing to do with a new operational methodology; it has nothing to do with ground breaking technology. Actually, it's an essential part of daily corporate life we don't often consciously think about: teamwork.

At one point in our careers, we have all encountered that frustrating moment when months of project planning come to a standstill because everyone on the team seems to be going off in a different direction. You begin to shake your fist at the sky for all your woes and nothing gets done. Brooding in a solitary corner, the lights of the office having gone dim, you realize the lack of an effective interrelationship among your team has doomed a once promising project.

Teamwork is a marriage of the three fundamental C's: communication, coordination, and collaboration. But, as important as these are, why are they so frequently overlooked? If server response time is slow, we add hardware. If software is lacking functionality, we retrofit and recode. So why, when there are weaknesses in the way a company's employees work with one another, do we accept these deficiencies as a matter of fact? It's because we assume there's no better way.

For years, software makers have been trying to solve this problem by developing a suite of tools known collectively as "groupware." In many cases, however, expectations have fallen short. The vision of grouping information and people into a large shareable pool of knowledge has evolved into a radioactive creature that has crawled its way up from the depths of a company's sub-basement — scatterware is born.

Perhaps trying overly hard to lasso the moon, many developers end up snaring a lame duck. The solution either doesn't meet end-user requirements or is so large and all-encompassing that only a fraction of its functionality is used. There has been very little middle ground.

This is where U.K.-based software maker Convea Ltd. has come into the picture. Its recently released Convea 5.0 groupware portal seeks to bridge the gap between what companies have been expecting and what has been delivered so far, and they were able to accomplish this with a relatively small footprint.

"Teamwork is a core value in business and it needs to be a natural part of the workday," said Alal Miah, CEO and co-founder of Convea Ltd. "The problem with products we see on the market today is that there is a mismatch of applications. Every component has a different look and feel, but Convea places core applications into one design."

Convea 5.0's Windows-like graphical user interface (GUI). (Click for high-resolution image.)

A Modular Web Solution

Over the last decade, the IT development world has been trying to migrate traditional n-tiered client-server applications to the Web. As developers, we understand the need to create platform independent systems with little to no deployment overhead, especially in a geographically dispersed workforce.

"From an end-user's point of view, they don't see any reason to move to a Web-based solution," Miah said. "Convea delivers the advantages of Web-based systems in a very familiar Windows-like user interface."

This is the appeal of Convea. It possesses all of the technological advantages of a Web-based system, while still maintaining a desktop application look and feel. It helps maintain a sense of unity rather than disorient users by forcing them to jump from one application to another. In doing so, non-technical users will feel much more at ease, and more inclined to accept a new system, without having to tackle an awkward learning curve.

At first glance, Convea resembles a super-charged Microsoft Outlook client. But that's where the comparison ends. Convea bundles 19 interrelated modules in an intuitive and almost self-explanatory design. In addition to the tools we've come to expect from communication and collaboration suites — E-mail, calendar and scheduling, file and contact managers — Convea also contains modules for online conferencing, knowledge management, user polling, and discussion groups.

Convea's Knowledge Base module. (Click for high-resolution image.)

Convea's modular approach sidesteps an unfortunate trend in the industry where developers have taken the term "software integration" to an inflexible extreme by building a house of cards; removing one piece may cause the whole structure to collapse in on itself. By allowing you to piece your solution together like Lego building blocks, Convea enables you to add and remove modules without adverse effects on the rest of the system. This makes Convea highly integrated yet still flexible enough to customize application and content to corporate standards (it also supports corporate branding by allowing you to implement your own theme or "skin" to the GUI) or narrowed down to employees' specific needs based on user profiles.