Notes Release 4's support of MAPI will solve the problem for Release 4 users, but it won't help the installed base of non-Microsoft mail products. Increasingly, he notes, groupware products are being constructed to plug into a mail engine based on one or the other. In addition to thinking through infrastructure and standards issues, CIOs must be prepared to support mobile users because, as Held points out, it isn't just office-based workers who need groupware connections. The people who really take advantage of groupware are the mobile users, so they need to have dial-in capability to the network. Equipping individual workers with groupware is relatively inexpensive, especially in the context of time and travel expenses saved.
Applications range in cost from the low hundreds to the low thousands of dollars per seat.
Marshak cautions CIOs to budget education and training costs for users at two to three times the cost of software. As global pressures build, large corporations scale down and organizational structures flatten, the requirement for rapid communication among people collaborating on business tasks will only increase, observers agree. CIOs can expect to field requests for tools to enable work by both permanent and transitory workgroups. The best way to position the IT organization to meet these demands is to assemble a collection of groupware products to suit a variety of needs-from asynchronous threaded discussions to virtual meetings with or without the ability to share documents in real time. Once again, the twin imperatives of flexibility and responsiveness are testing the CIO's mettle.