One of my ongoing interests in the collaboration technology space is how to improve the technology of shared workspaces across vendors so that people have an easier job of adopting and using them. In today’s environment, people are likely to have to use multiple products or services that do similar things, and thus their information is scattered in multiple places, such as appointments and meetings and action / task lists. Earlier this month, Xchange Network announced that its XC Bridge product had been extended so that users on disparate collaboration servers can easily share calendar, contact, and/or task data. The press release proceeded with an analysis of XC Bridge:

XC Bridge functions as a conduit between the separate collaboration platforms. Each user may enable a “connection” to the desired calendar, address book, and/or task folder that they wish to share or participate in. A defined yet flexible permissions model enables users and system administrators to securely regulate access to data. Users may enable as many connections to other servers as they need, such as between collaboration servers, accounting servers, on-line calendar servers, etc., allowing them to manage their data from one desktop interface.

Wow, sounds great … and is worthy of further investigation. Here’s what I’ve discovered.

Technical Capabilities of XC Bridge

I read and digested Xchange Network’s web site, but I have not installed their software. XC Bridge enables the following:

• People using Microsoft Outlook (Windows), Microsoft Entourage or Apple Address Book/iCal (Mac) or Novell Evolution (Linux) can share subsets of calendar, address book and task information. XC Bridge works with multiple end-user clients, and synchronizes data across all users. Permissions can be set on a collection of items so that only authorized people get to see the information. The data is available to a user both online and offline, since it is stored locally.
• The architecture is composed of two things.

1. A server (“XCN Software Server”) which handles the synchronization and stores a copy of the data that each user can access. This is available as a hosted offering or for on-site deployment. Data at rest is encrypted.
2. A client-specific Connector that sits between the user’s client of choice (eg, Outlook or Evolution) and the XCN Software Server. It receives updated data from the server, and sends the same back. Data is encrypted during transit, at 128 bits.

• It is not clear, but it looks like XC Bridge is either a re-branding, a re-positioning, or an extension to the server-side component of XC Connect. A couple of the case studies evidence customers adopting XC Connect instead of another server like Microsoft Exchange, particularly for calendar sharing.
• The Connector architecture enables other products or services that provide calendaring, contact and task information to be added into the mix. This would enable, for example, a Connector to be developed that synchronized with Basecamp (calendar and tasks), Google Calendar (calendar), Remember the Milk (tasks), and many others. It could also be extended to something like Salesforce.com, or an ERP system like SAP that includes such data.

Xchange Network also offers XC Vault, a web-based document and file sharing service. It offers standard document management capabilities (check-in/check-out, search, user permissions, version control, etc.), and can be integrated into file explorers on the desktop or accessed via a WebDAV-enabled browser.

The company claims to have “thousands of users worldwide” (but is unclear whether that’s single thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds thereof), and claimed profitability in March 2003. No further statement has been forthcoming about whether that profitability has continued.

Thoughts and Analysis
I really like the sound of this. Here’s some thoughts I’m thinking:

• The team at Xchange should develop and release Connectors for some of the leading online services that I’ve mentioned above. This would give them some great marketing and PR buzz, and open doors to adoption in new places. People’s digital and online lives are becoming more fragmented across services, and this will only just continue.
• It would be good to see a screencast on the Xchange web site of what XC Bridge looks like for a group of users. There’s a lot of textual information and PDFs files (which are all great), but something a bit more rich media would be an awesome complement.
• It would be good to see support for online services as the key habitat into which data for a user was synchronized. For instance, for those users that have dumped Outlook and embraced Google Gmail and Calendar, how does XC Bridge help them? Today it doesn’t. Connectors between a user’s online life in Google (for example) and the XCN Software Server would be a good move.

Would You Use This?
Can you see a need for something like XC Bridge in your world? Have you explored it already? I’d love to hear your thoughts.