It Is 2009. Why Is "Groupware" Still So Hard?

I haven’t actually heard anyone pitch what they do as “groupware,” as the name apparently got such a bad reputation historically to have been banned.  But it still makes a convenient shorthand for describing tools to help groups with coordination and communication (I am open to better suggestions).  What is surprising though is how hard it is to find a groupware solution that actually does all the things that one needs for most groups.  I am seeing this close up right now as I am watching Susan piece together the support for a new group she has put together in publishing and Andrew and Eric are trying to figure out which tools to use to support the Union Square Ventures portfolio.

For meeting in person, there is Meetup.  For online community, there is Ning.  For group email, there are Google Groups.  For documents there are Google Docs and Zoho.  There are a ton of different wikis to choose from.  Most groups actually need a smattering of the above and that’s a huge problem.  Getting everyone signed up for even one of these is a challenge, but who wants to ask their members to register for three different services and then not be able to integrate the information?   But even within the “point solutions” there are glaring issues, as yesterday’s “Google Groups is Dead” post by John Resig shows.

Now one reason this is still hard is that groups come in all forms and as a result have very different requirements.  But the response of the service providers has compounded this problem.  Instead of opening their services up via APIs and making it “point and click” easy to use one from within the other, they all seem to want to own the group and lock it in.  There are some services both new and old, such as Wiggio (low end, new) and SocialText (enterprise, old) that are trying to deliver a fully integrated solution directly.  But there is definitely also an opportunity for just aggregating the point solutions more intelligently.