The latest edition of the Collaboration Newswire crossed the wire just over an hour ago. The focus in this one is on Extending Single User Applications for Collaboration, and I wrote about eXpresso Corp, which starts:

“The core applications that most information workers use on a daily basis are designed for individual use, not group use. Individuals would work in Word, Excel or PowerPoint until they were contented with the state of their work. Then collaboration was undertaken in one of two ways: hollering for an in-the-office colleague to come and look over the shoulder, or emailing the document or spreadsheet to an out-of-the-office colleague for review at an opportune moment. One provided synchronous interaction (“Sally, how about we word that paragraph a slightly different way?” or “John, let’s change the forecasted market growth to 20 percent and see what happens”), the other asynchronous (“Sally, I have looked at your document and made some changes; please see the new version attached” or “John, thanks for the market forecast. I have made some changes and attach a new edition for your review”). When just one other person was involved, the ping-pong effect by email worked fine, but when multiple people were asked to review and comment, the original author faced a tremendously difficult job of incorporating all the suggestions into a new master document or spreadsheet. For such group situations with Excel, eXpresso is trying to change the paradigm for collaboration by going back to the underlying application and adding capabilities to make it more group-friendly.“

The entire issue will be available soon on the Collaboration Newswire Recent Issues page.

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