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Over the last eight years SiteScape has been building a discussion-centric collaboration environment scablable to tens of thousands of users. Now, after launching version 7.0 of SiteScape Enterprise Forum in late 2002 and adding its eMeeting module in January of this year, about the only form collaboration SiteScape doesn't handle is flying you to satellite offices.

SiteScape traces its origins to Digital Equipment Corp., when the product was known as AltaVista Forum. About the only obvious remnant of that relationship is that SiteScape continues to use AltaVista as its search tool.

The flagship product is now called Enterprise Forum, and version 7.0 made its debut in November of 2002. According to Jim Shelhamer, Director of Consulting Services for SiteScape, the strength of his company's Web-based collaboration environment is its scalability and flexibility. Not only is Enterprise Forum flexible in its features, which include chat, calendars and a Web file system (more on those later), but it will run on Linux, NT, and Unix.

Forum can scale to support 20 to more than 20,000 users, and in many of SiteScape's biggest customers, which include Shell, Siemens, Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Census Bureau, those users are dispersed among several business units and geographic locations. Because Forum is browser-based it can be accessed from anywhere, including wireless devices, and it supports all the popular enterprise portals, such as Plumtree and Oracle's 9i Application Server.

Features

There is a summary page for Forum users that provides an overview of discussions and calendar tasks, but the online discussions are the meat of the system. Other features include:

• Calendars
• HTML chat
• Quick messages
• Reminders
• Web file system
• Instant polls
• Team workgroups
• Bookmarks
• Track and notifications

This summary page in SiteScape's Enterprise Forum 7.0 lists calendar evnts, discussions, and tasks, providing a top-down view of all the collaboration efforts of one user. (Click for high-resolution image.)

SiteScape's Shelhamer calls the system "discussion-centric" because the document management is imbedded in the collaboration. Documents can be attached to discussion entries, there is the check-in/check-out (known as "lock-down" here) required of all solid document management applications, and previous versions of documents can be saved. Everything in Forum, from documents to chats can be archived, as well as immediately indexed by the search engine. Forum supports some 200 document types from Word to CAD files, and will automatically launch the necessary application to edit documents. Tasks, personal information, and calendar events can be exported to personal information managers such as Outlook.