English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Benefits vs Drawbacks of SharePoint, GoogleApps, EMC Documentum

This information could easily be integrated into a graphic to illustrate the benefits vs drawbacks of similar features among these technologies.

Increased collaboration:
All three of the technologies allow for increased collaboration, but each has its own “defining feature” that should be discussed.

SharePoint eases collaboration by integrating with the Microsoft Office suite. It allow for document version management and sharing. It will also allow for collaboration directly within the current office suite software, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint,etc...

GoogleApps allows for online based collaboration from anywhere in the world and from any type of computer that has an internet connection. The GoogleDocs aspect of GoogleApps can be utilized for document editing and collaborative document creation. GoogleApps has the benefit of rapid advancement in regards to web technologies, and more features are sure to come in the near future. It is also benificial because no actual “software” is required on the users computer to utilize its services. GoogleApps website also says: “Enterprise-class service – Google Apps includes a 99.9% uptime SLA.* Phone support is available for critical issues.” (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/collaboration.html)

EMC Documentum is a lesser known collaborative technology, bu my research has informed me that they have been around for many years and are continuing to improve their software. One important feature of Documentum is that it is cross compatible with most platforms and allow for collaboration via many different features, including Discussions, Notes, Calenders, and other services. Documentum doesn't seem to have any outstanding features that set it apart from the other collaboration software on the market, but it does have a healthy feature set.

Thanks!

Jason Flittner