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More about Project Team Collaboration

In Hydra Collaborator you gain:

Better Collaboration

• Allow groups of people to work more effectively through problems and issues, by using collaboration technologies: video, audio, shared whiteboard and application-sharing tools.
• Ensure more effective project management by using collaboration technologies such as calendars, document management, event-based notification and Q&As.
• Interact with your partners more effectively by sharing this infrastructure in a secure environment.
• Allow geographically dispersed and/or co-located team members to work in unison.
• Improve employee retention by providing a flexible operating environment that encourages interest groups and helps to foster a collaborative culture.

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Better Knowledge Management

• Ensure that people holding the knowledge are easily identifiable and accessible.
• Create, manage and search validated knowledge assets based on existing company information or outcomes of team projects.
• Integrate your knowledge memory with third party applications and other information sources.

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Better Resource Management

• Reduce operating costs through eliminating unnecessary travelling and meeting costs.
• Make best use of available resources by finding the right people to do the job, based on skills, expertise, experience, availability, location, team working styles, and past project experience.

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Summary of Hydra Collaborator Features:

Hydra provides an environment for intra- and extra- organisational collaboration through the provision of:

Team formation and expertise management: In Hydra Collaborator, both people and their activity are fully classified and searchable, facilitating searching for skills, expertise or interest from all information held with the organisational memory. Team administrators can then use the expertise matcher to identify appropriate experts to become part of the appropriate team.

Intra- and extra-organisational collaboration: Hydra Collaborator provides an environment for intra- and extra-organisational collaboration through the provision of:

• Personal / team workspaces
• Document management
• Q&As
• Integration of synchronous communication using conferencing applications
• Email client with IMAP and POP3 links
• Instant messaging
• Calendar
• Event-based alerting

Knowledge management: During a typical project, the knowledge resources within the project team and organisation evolve. There are changes to the explicit knowledge - the implementation and outcomes of the project may lead to useful knowledge - for example best (and worst) practice, research and product development. Tacit knowledge changes may take the form of exposure to new contacts and experiences that enhance a 'knowledge network' and identification of training needs. Capturing these outcomes is key to better use of the company's knowledge assets.

Hydra Collaborator's knowledge discovery tools enable the best use of knowledge assets, ensuring that expertise profiles are always up to date and that project resources can always be identified.

When new projects are initiated, the archived knowledge can be searched in order to determine whether similar activities have been undertaken before, allowing the project to have a head-start in its thinking and planning.

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Product Operation

Hydra Collaborator consists of ten key elements:

1. Personal Workspace: Provides access to an area for each user of the system. It allows the creation and management of document, contact, discussion and email resources and access to the expertise matcher. All resources are, by default, accessible to the user, but can be shared at the user's discretion with others. Access to the team workspaces that the user is a member of is also provided through the workspace. A number of functions are accessible to the user through a toolbar, such as meetings, alerts and administration functions.

2. Team Workspace: Provides a project-based view of documents, discussions, expertise and contacts. Access controls are based on team group membership.

3. Expertise Matcher: Provides a search interface enabling identification of experts by name, expertise, experience, skills, previous employment (organisations), availability, language skills, geographic location and business sectors in which they may have worked. Expertise searches can be saved for future use. A 'CV' summary can be displayed for all people identified using the search interface.

4. General Search: Enables a user to locate information accessible to them throughout the system. They may use Boolean search criteria to find one or more types of information, including documents, contacts, experts, discussions and email.

5. Email Client: Allows a user to access their email stored on an email server, from their personal workspace. Multiple servers can be specified allowing you to view, compose and manage your email from multiple accounts.

6. Q&As: Support online 'conversations' using the concepts of groups, topics and messages. Teams can have discussion groups that are by default accessible to team members and all users can add discussion groups to their personal workspace for private discussions.

7. Conferencing: Supports synchronous point-to-point and multi-way communication, such as video/audio conferencing, text chat and application sharing. Conferences can be scheduled or created instantaneously with two or more users.

8. Contacts Books : Provide address book facilities made more powerful through integration with other components. For example, the basic contact book can be used to create and manage contact details. Integration with expertise tools allows display of the contact's expertise profile.

9. Document Management: Supports the management of a repository into which electronic files can be placed. Folders and sub folders can then be populated with electronic files (of any type). Files may have meta information associated with them as well as multiple versions. Seamless integration between the web environment and a user's desktop is enabled through both the Hydra Collaborator Assistant and WebDAV (Web folders) support. The access control available to the user is highly flexible, allowing per user and/or per group level access to documents.

10. Notifications: Allows users to register interest in resources and be notified (for instance by email, instant message or the playing of a sound) of updates to them. Examples include the addition of a document to a folder, the addition of a version to a document etc. The Hydra Collaborator Assistant supports the instant and audio messages and will notify the user even if they are not logged in through the web interface.

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