Personal Information Management vs groupware/collaboration
Personal Information Management vs groupware/collaboration softwares
I see lot of softwares calling themselves as ‘Collaboration Suites’ or ‘Groupware Suite’ while they are actually not. Most of these softwares provide features like Email, calendar, contacts etc and they call them selves as groupware software.
Well, these are just Personal Information Management softwares. Even softwares like MS Outlook come under personal information management category. When Outlook is mated with Exchange, it does have a bit of groupware functionalities, but still lacks some core groupware functionalities like presence.
For software to be called as a collaboration suite, it has to provide a workspace where a group of people can collaborate/share on a project/task etc. When a software just provides features like Email, Tasks, Calendering, favorites etc it is just personal information management software. But when the same features are shared with a group of people - like group calendaring, sharing favorites, group tagging of favorites, sharing contacts etc, it becomes a groupware/collaboration software.
I hope to see some right terminology being used.
Raju
Zoho Team
www.zohovo.com