More than Just Email

Over the last few years, the collaboration market space has become increasingly more competitive. Collaboration Suites focus on creating a messaging infrastructure that not only includes email, but focuses on facilitating communication and collaboration through email, calendar sharing, document sharing, and contact sharing. One thing to keep in mind though, is that the idea of a Collaboration Suite is not new. In fact, these suites have been around for almost as long as email hit the mainstream market.

In the late 1980s, a joint effort between Lotus Development Corporation and Iris Associates produced the first mainstream collaboration suite called Lotus Notes. Not only was Notes a vehicle to send and receive emails, it also allowed for group calendaring (not only being able to use your own calendar but also sharing it with co-workers and handle meeting requests), NNTP news support (the ancestor of the well known web-fora), and instant messaging between clients. As Lotus Notes evolved, it became a cleaner and more robust system. However, it also began experiencing some tough competition from other vendors that were seeing the benefits and the marketability of true Collaboration Suites.

In 1997, Microsoft released version 5.0 of its popular Microsoft Exchange suite that, like Notes, was also more than just email. Along with email services, it offered web-based access and included Microsoft Scheduler+ for group calendaring and scheduling. Through the years, both Notes and Exchange have undergone major version upgrades and continue to add additional functionality with every new release.

Collaboration Suites seem to be coming from all directions and offer many of the
same functionalites as the big players. Although many of these Collaboration Suites have hit the market over the last several years, one has taken the Collaboration Suite market by storm and as of this writing, has over 8 million paid mailbox (plus 12 million for ComCast alone) subscribers and continues to grow at an unprecedented pace. This suite is called Zimbra Collaboration Suite or ZCS.