 | Management Information Systems 4/e - James A. O'Brien | |||||
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Chapter 9: Intranets, Extranets, and Enterprise Collaboration
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1. Microsoft Newsgroups: Collaboration for Technical Support Microsoft has found a way to provide technical support to its customers through an assortment of free semi-public usenet newsgroups available only on Microsoft's own server (msnews.microsoft.com). Anyone on the Internet can ask technical questions about a multitude of Microsoft products and programming languages. There are over 200 newsgroups most with dozens of posts. They cover Microsoft's Internet-related products including Office Front page ActiveX and Internet Explorer. Unlike so many other newsgroups there is no spam or ads for 900 numbers. The newsgroups are monitored by Microsoft employees for accuracy although the bulk of the tech-support questions will be answered by MVPs (most valuable professionals)-volunteers who have proven their value as support personnel on other online services.
2. Ichat Inc.: Intranet Chat in Business The man perhaps most responsible for the current vogue of electronic communities is a soft-spoken bespectacled veteran of the Internet era. Meet Andrew Busey 26. "I remember back when Mosaic took off. Suddenly 20 different companies announced they were building browsers he reminisces. There's an interesting deja vu going on now with ichat." ichat Inc. Busey's creation is the leading provider of software that enables Web surfers to converse by typing messages that can instantly read on computer screens around the globe. While chat is infamous as a way for the sex-starved to play our fantasies it has also become a key part of doing business on the Web. Sites that add chat to their offerings have found that traffic rises and visitors stick around longer. That's important to corporate advertisers looking to make an impression on the Web. Even more valuable is chat's ability to give users a sense of community. A bicycling Web site that offers nothing but products and articles about tours is little more than a catalogue; add chat and it becomes a meeting place the digital equivalent of the neighborhood bike shop. That's a site worth sponsoring. Anyone with a Web browser can download ichat's software free from the company Web site at www.ichat.com. According to ichat three million people have done so. ichat makes its money when other sites buy the server software to host and organize chats. Customers include Yahoo! Time Warner Universal Studios and the Sporting News. Unfortunately for Busey ichat's success has not gone unnoticed. The competitors that keep him up at night are America Online and Microsoft. AOL recently released free software that allows its eight million subscribers to chat with anyone on the Net who downloads the same program. Microsoft has integrated chat capability in new server software for corporate intranets. To stave off these rivals Busey has enlisted high-end business talent in the person of Mark Saul 35 who has helped take public three start-ups in the past several years. "Right now everyone has a browser and E-mail on their computer says Saul. We think chat is going to be the third major part of the desktop." He is pushing ichat into the financial marketplace selling to brokerages like Merrill Lynch which will use the products to communicate with customers and alert them to news affecting their portfolios. He has also engineered a deal with IBM in which the Big Blue's Lotus division will bundle ichat's software with its Internet-ready version of Notes. When you're up against Microsoft it helps to have allies like that.
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