(2004-03-01) Coffee Collaboration Inside

Peter Coffee on including Collaboration Ware functions inside Enterprise apps. Since it's not an integral part of any application, an EMail client fails to use task-specific knowledge of Work-Flow-s or other information (Meta Data) that would aid our management of knowledge, people and time... Instead of marking up a drawing and sending it to someone else as either a paper document or a flat image file, an Auto C A D 2005 user will be able to annotate the drawing electronically and transmit those Annotation-s to whoever needs to act on them. The person receiving that input will be able to call up the original drawing, see how those comments relate to it and check to see if they're still relevant to the current version of that drawing. Here's the breakthrough, a word that I don't use lightly: Each separate annotation can become a Threaded Discussion, potentially involving several people or disciplines and providing the full support of a world-class CAD environment instead of layering half-baked tools on top of Lotus Notes or MsOffice. One challenge with this approach is being able to track threads across drawings and other completely separate applications. Maybe RSS provides this Universal Inbox functionality. (Oct'2006 update - maybe every object in the drawing needs a URI for ReST access.)