technology that enhances teamwork

by Jim Yarrow

when most people think of email and teamwork, they view it in a linear fashion. that is to say, they view it as "I send a message to another team member, or group of team members (copy list) and receive responses."

while you certainly can use FCIS in this way, it includes many other functions which can allow you to leverage the experience and abilities of your team. FCIS allows you to set up conferences, which in effect are online discussion areas. the benefit of using these discussion areas is that the information shared in one of these conferences becomes in essence a knowledge warehouse. long after the discussion takes place, you can leverage the information. let's look at an example.

let's say that acme widgets has a sales discussion area. a new team member has a question about key benefits of the widget 9000 line. her first stop can be the sales/widget 9000 discussion area. she can search the term "benefits" to see if there have been any discussions there. if there have been, she will see which messages, and can read them, getting the answers she needs.

if the answer she needs is not in this area, she can post the question. other staff members, seeing the question can then answer it, providing additional information for future staff members. while we restricted our discussion to sales, areas could be set up for company policies, technical aspects of your product or service, marketing plans, administrative issues, financial issues, or a plethora of other aspects. the only limitation is your companies creativity.

some customers have built technical support databases for internal staff. one major news organization built an online support area for macintosh and pc users so that when they had questions, they could look in the online support area before contacting support personnel. this area was also used to store all pertinent software updates and patches. this resulted in significant savings in support costs.

FCIS doesn't just limit you to internal collaboration, however. you can create conferences which are for use with customers, both on a short- or long-term basis. you can use "remote" sessions which ship with the server to allow you customers into their special collaboration area. FCIS has powerful security features which ensure that the customer sees only what you want them to see.

the security features of FCIS allow you to have multiple collaboration areas on a single server. this means you can have collaboration areas for senior management, work staff, customers, all isolated and secure. if you are highly concerned about security, you can restrict certain users, perhaps users who need to transmit highly-confidential data, like financials, to dial-up usage. in this manner, there is no way that the data can be hacked without the passwords. packet sniffers don't work over telephone lines.

you can also share information with other FirstClass systems. this means that you can literally link to users around the world and share information on various topics.

as you can see, FCIS provides tools for collaboration that are literally limited by only one thing -- your ability to think of different ways to use them.

next we will review FCIS web and internet services.

Next: Features of Internet Services

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