Open Text Touchpoint Update (#1 of 3), May 24

In November 2004, Open Text announced that it was working on a new team collaboration product called "Touchpoint". Touchpoint grew out of a research project with MIT, and is an integration of three real-time interaction technologies along with a ongoing repository for shared items. The purpose of this article is to give you an insight into the current status of Touchpoint, which actually is still under development at Open Text, although Version 1 is due to ship in July 2005.

An Integration of Four Things
Touchpoint integrates four capabilities into a single offering: presence, instant messaging, web conferencing, and team workspaces. In terms of the 7 Pillars model, Touchpoint addresses to varying degrees Pillar 1 (Shared Access to Team Data), Pillar 3 (Real-Time Co-Editing and Review), and Pillar 5 (Build Social Engagement through Blogs, IM and Presence).

Touchpoint users have three main screens that they interact with:

1. Launchpad. The Livelink Touchpoint launchpad includes three tabs: a list of places, a presence-enabled list of Touchpoint people, and a schedule of upcoming meetings across all Touchpoint places.


2. Conversation. An standard IM chat style window, with two out-of-this-world extensions.


3. Place. A shared place for doing work with other people. Includes a listing of people in the place, shared content ("things"), and a chat window. All users have their own private "Office" place (to which they can invite others), and can belong to multiple other team places.

The Touchpoint system relies on a software download and installation, currently measuring about 13 MB. Once installed, it expands to a disk footprint of 24 MB. There is no Web interface to Touchpoint at this time, but Open Text indicated they were working on it for debut before the end of 2005.

The Launchpad Interface
The launchpad interface is the first screen that users see when they start Touchpoint. It provides access to places, people and meetings.

Places
By default, the Places tab lists recently visited and favorite places of which the person is a member. However, the user can create their own grouping structure for Places, and drag-and-drop places between group names. Users can Create a New place from the launchpad, search for existing places of which they are a member, or open an existing place on their list. Nothing new or revolutionary there; just normal and essential stuff.
In terms of searching for new places, the user must have a pre-existing membership in the place in order for it to be displayed. The search is carried out on the server to which the user is connected, and it is not possible at this time to search across multiple Touchpoint servers in a given organization, nor across multiple Touchpoint servers across multiple organizations. I think that Open Text will definitely address the first one in a future release, and I think that they should address the second one to enable people to have active places on multiple Touchpoint servers.

People
The People tab provides a presence-enabled list of Touchpoint contacts that have been added to the Touchpoint launchpad client.

Users can send an instant message to anyone on the list, even if they are offline. If the other person is offline, they will be notified of all new messages when they next log in to Touchpoint. This is a great feature, and has been lacking from mainstream IM clients for too long. When the user clicks to send an IM, the last conversation that they had with the other person is displayed, thereby giving some context to the last conversations. Users can click the "Chat History" button to view a complete set of archived transcripts. Finally, users can right-click to send an email message to the person (using their default email client), or if the person is online, they can be invited into a Touchpoint place.

Open Text could do some cool things with its People tab, such as:

• Auto-provision of Contacts. Users currently have to search for and add specific contacts to their People list. However, given that Touchpoint is focused on the enterprise market, there should be a deployment option of auto-provisioning all contacts within the user's division or department, for example. This means that when a new user starts up Touchpoint, they immediately have a sense of community rather than isolation.


• Integration with Microsoft Office Live Communications Server. A proliferation of presence-enabled systems is a bad thing within a single organization, because it means that users require multiple log ins to disparate systems. There should be an implementation option for IT to connect Touchpoint to an Office Live Communications Server implementation if available, and thereby turn off the native presence capabilities within Touchpoint. For organizations without Office LCS, the Touchpoint presence engine would be fine.


• Integration with Voice over IP. If the person has a VoIP phone or number, it would be helpful to be able to launch a call directly from here.


• Integration with Calendared Events. If the other person maintains an electronic calendar, some level of details could be included here in terms of what that person is currently doing.

Meetings
The Meetings tab provides a list of all meetings to which the person is attending or moderating, across all Places in the system, even if the user doesn't have the place on their launchpad. Whilst free-and-busy searches don't work across all of the places, as Pillar 4 strongly advocates, the fact the user has a single consolidated listing of meetings across all places is an excellent first step. Meetings are displayed in a categorized list; it would be good to give the user an option of displaying meetings in a traditional calendar view.

As a meeting is being created, it is possible to push a copy of it to the user's Outlook calendar, although this is a one-time integration. If the time of the meeting is updated in the place, that change is not synchronized with Outlook. Similarly, if the user updates it in Outlook, it is not synchronized with the original place.

It is conceivable that Open Text could add (a) free-and-busy searches across meeting places, and (b) that users could put all of their personal appointments into their personal Touchpoint place. This would negate the need for using a separate calendar such as Outlook, and solve the ongoing synchronization challenges.

What's Next
The next time I write about Touchpoint, I'll discuss its second main screen, the Conversation. There's some good things in the Conversation screen, including the most excellent example of graceful-escalation between IM and document sharing that I've seen to date.