Collaboration tools - my car or yours?

Aidan Hughes and Paul Sheperia of Applaud Web Solutions, a client company, came to see me yesterday to show me their Vestri product.  You can see from the web site, that Vestri is primarily a collaboration tool - but it has a very extensive set of features and can also be used for an Intranet or as the content management system for an Extranet or public web site.  Of course it is browser-based, as that is the way of things these days, and they will host the system for the customer, if required.

Aidan and Paul have a great product that has many, many man-hours of development time invested in it.  They wanted to talk about how Vestri might be used by professional firms, such as accountants, and how it might need to be priced.  Clearly they appreciate that the marginal cost for them of each new deployment is virtually nil, so they are looking to move away from making a small number of "big ticket" sales, to a large number of "pay as you go" sales into vertical markets.  A very sound strategy I feel.

Vestri is a real "Rolls Royce" offering and I immediately thought "we have to have this in our business".  But then I started thinking more practically, less like a software junkie, and wondered exactly how we would use it.  We do have a requirement to move large files between us and our customers and attaching them to emails is just plain daft.  Email is a messaging technology not a file transfer one.  But do we need to collaborate with our clients online?

In the past we have used BT Workspace for our practice and now use iDocs, which was also developed by a client company.  We only really use it to transfer files though.  I was reading Kevin Salter's post on AccountingWeb today.  Kevin's firm seem to use Google Docs but he is wavering a little and looking at alternatives.  For my practice, I am actively checking out Office Live Workspace, which is Microsoft's late entry into this arena.  I have to say that, so far, I am impressed.  Accountants will be comfortable with the fact that you can open files directly into Excel, Word and PowerPoint and save from these office applications directly back to the online workspace.

The benefit of adopting a Microsoft or Google collaboration environment is that the people you want to collaborate with, your customers for instance, will probably use the same systems themselves, so will be familiar with them and happy to play ball.  A point I made to Aidan and Paul is; what happens if we all have our own favourite collaboration tool and then start falling out over who has to learn to use the other's software?  If all our customers use Microsoft and we adopt Vestri, will I be able to persuade them to ride in our Rolls Royce or will they want to stick with their familiar Toyota?

Comments

[Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson]

I have seen your post on Accountingweb and trawed back to your blog. I am not sure sure what 'exactly' you are after but if you have a moment check my company www.huddle.net, we do document sharing, online collboration and project management. It's secure and super easy. Good luck with your search for the perfect app!