Articles

Leading Article and Introduction

The following articles provide an overview of the field, and offer background information and links to information resources.

Communities, Knowledge Management, and More...

The articles in this group cover a wide range of topics, such as new approaches to collaboration and knowledge management, as well as communities, groupware, and personal networks.

 

Collaboration – Working Efficiently in a Complex Network of People and Information

Previous Editions: Edition 5 – published September 12, 2002 • see the disclaimer below

This fifth edition of the SAP Design Guild focuses on collaboration. Intuitively, everyone in the business world knows what it means to collaborate. Nevertheless, this concept is used in so many different ways that its exact meaning still remains somewhat fuzzy: Collaborative business scenarios, co-authorship of documents, communication tools, document management systems, Websites and other corporate shared servers are some of the facets of collaboration. Today's challenge in the software industry is to unify these different technologies, especially ERP and collaboration services, into one consistent solution – a solution that provides significant value for enterprises by supporting business and work processes in a coherent way. This edition touches on many of these issues and technologies. In addition, it presents some of SAP's efforts in the collaboration field and also provides background information for those readers who are new to and interested in this attractive and fast growing field.

decoration imageFour introductory articles set the stage for this "Collaboration" edition: Our leading article looks at the field of collaboration and the current issues. Further articles define what collaboration means – including a collaboration glossary – and offer useful links to various information resources. A second group of articles discusses new approaches to collaborative knowledge management and sharing, as well as different aspects of online communities and cooperative work. An in-depth field study by InContext Enterprises emphasizes the relevance of personal networks in B2B relationships. Finally, there is a group of articles on collaboration software projects from SAP – presenting, among others, a discussion of design issues and a look at the design process from a usability point of view.

As collaboration is such a hot topic, some of our authors were unable to finish their articles in time. Therefore, we have published this edition with about a dozen articles and will add new articles to the edition as they come in. We will inform you of the new additions in the "News" section on our homepage.

Read the leading article Trends in Collaboration from Jörg Beringer

 

Disclaimer: Please note that this edition was written in 2002. Therefore, statements in the articles, particularly those regarding SAP's products, product strategy, and organizational structure, may no longer be valid.

 

Further Editions