The highly useful workgroup applications are not shrink-wrapped applications but rather require programming. Whether you rely on systems integrators or develop the experience in-house, customization is expensive. Your business-line applications must justify the development costs. But for workflow to be useful, it has to be deployed across a corporation - it has to be as accessible to the receptionist as it is to the traders. Lotus Notes is clearly the most successful workgroup software environment, and its base of third-party applications is expanding rapidly.
Notes does require customization, but it is an extremely powerful tool.
Shrink-wrapped applications are a must. The first applications to be bundled will be the application suites owned by one manufacturer, such as Microsoft, Lotus, or WordPerfect, since including workflow in the package is considerably easier when one company owns all the applications. Next will come applications that adhere to industry-standard APIs , so users can mix and match. The end game of workgroup software is that information sharing will become part of a company's workflow. Information will come from users' personal productivity applications as well as from corporate message servers, database servers, and information servers.