Collaboration Solutions

Overview
People and information are the key assets of today's organizations; and enabling teams to work together more effectively and manage information better is emerging as a central challenge. Aditi's collaboration practice enables businesses to address four key collaboration areas that are becoming critical to businesses:

• Unified communications: E-mail, instant messaging (IM), presence awareness, chat, mobile devices, telephones, and Web conferencing merged into a single unified experience that is available to users regardless of location or type of network connection.
• Collaborative workspaces: Solutions that allow teams to easily create and manage their own collaboration spaces for managing shared information, meetings, projects, and document authoring.
• Access to information and people: Portal and content management solutions that offer timely, centralized access to knowledge through a variety of content aggregation and content surfacing capabilities.
• Connecting LOB applications to end users: Business applications that enable users to view and manage information from Line-of-Business applications through the familiar Microsoft Office interface.

• Office Communications Sever (OCS 2007) and Live Communications Server (LCS 2005): Leveraging instant messaging, presence awareness, federated communications, and remote call control to deliver streamlined communication to users, a software-powered VoIP foundation for organizations, and operational control for IT.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS 2007): Using MOSS 2007 as a platform to build applications that harness portals, enterprise search, enterprise content management, business process and forms, and business intelligence.
• Microsoft Office 2007: Using Office 2007 as familiar front-end to build Office Business Applications (OBA) that connect traditional Line-of-Business applications with information workers.
  
  

Aditi Collaboration Experience
The following are a few short case studies to illustrate the different types of collaboration applications Aditi has built:

Collaboration strategy and applications for financial services firms
Aditi is currently working with leading financial services organizations to develop their unified communication and collaboration strategy around the OCS 2007 platform. While OCS 2007 is still under trial release, these Aditi customers are early adopters who are creating implementation strategies in anticipation of the new platform. These engagements include architecture design sessions that analyze their existing collaboration solutions, map areas where the new platform would have an impact, and translate them into specific features and functionality that improve user effectiveness.

MOSS 2007 as a document repository
Aditi built a HTTP based Web service adaptor to enable SPS/MOSS to be used as a fully functional alternative to SAP's Knowledge Pro Adabas-based ArchiveLink. SPS offers SAP/R3 customers a more capable and economical document management system with an enterprise capable enterprise portal solution and extensible to support a variety of eBusiness and cross-enterprise application uses.

This application was developed using: .NET 2.0, MOSS 2007, IIS 6.0, C#, C++, Visual Basic, and SAP R/3 release v4.6.

Portal platform for an enterprise application
Aditi developed an application to integrate MOSS as a portal platform for a SCM product for a major ISV. The solution allowed the ISV to use the out-of-the-box features of MOSS to provide the following complimentary features to the existing product:

• Dashboard view for tracking KPIs
• Report manager functionality
• Real time document sharing and collaboration
• Integration with presence information systems like MSN and Office

This application was developed using: MOSS, SQL Server, .NET, SQL Reporting Services, MSN Messenger, and Office 2007.

SharePoint based knowledge management portal
Aditi developed a knowledge management and collaboration portal for the field services division of a leading product and platform provider. The portal allows field, professional, and consulting services to share a common repository of documents and solution objects. The solution provides metrics on contribution and usage of the knowledge base amongst the community.

This application was developed using: SharePoint Portal 2003, SQL Server, .NET COM+ Application, ISAPI DLL using VC++, Enterprise Instrumentation Framework (EIF), nUnit, MSOLAP, SQL Reporting Services, and Office Web Components (OWC).

SharePoint based dashboard portal
Aditi is currently developing a dashboard portal site that provides the end-users of the client with the following core features:

• Key business information through KPIs and reports to the end-customer's field staff that allows them to better operate, plan, manage, and grow their businesses.
• Drill-through capabilities that allow users to drill to a micro view of the business.
• Role-based user interfaces with the option to customize one's own space to depict custom metrics.
• Metrics and KPIs based on the location ID of the person using the dashboard.
• Use of MOSS 2007 security model (line item security) on the portal sites.

This application was developed using: MOSS 2007, Business Scorecard Manager, .NET 3.0, SQL Server 2005, and SQL Server Analysis Services.

Enterprise Collaboration Product
Aditi developed the document workflow management functionality for an online Enterprise Collaboration Product, which included the following key features:

• Document workflow definition using Visual Workflow Designer.
• Easy tracking of workflow instances using simple and intuitive user interface.
• User friendly and intuitive design of the dashboard portal portlet
  • Independent function
  • Allows customization
  • Drag and drop functionality

This application was developed using: SharePoint Portal Server 2003, SQL Server 2000, .NET framework/ASP.NET, and Windows Server 2003.

Excel-based real-time stock trading system for a Paris-based ISV
Aditi developed a real-time stock-trading application that combined real-time information flow with the Excel interface and a flexible (algorithm based) trading system. The application gives traders the advantage of working in multi-markets, with multi-instruments on a simple and powerful excel interface, while allowing definition of customized trading strategies that are sufficiently flexible to adapt to sophisticated trading strategies (Pair trading, Vwap, Basket Trading, Risk Arb, Spread Trading, Program Trading).

This Excel add-in was built using: C++, Excel, and a proprietary scripting language.

Additional Resources

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Understand what implications the new collaboration platforms have for your organization: potential user benefits, new features, licensing implications, development effort and the like.

This subsidized two-day session is designed to give clarity on "what is possible", "how to proceed" and "a destination architecture".