The following information is drawn from May 9 and December 28, 1999; January 29 and March 26. 2000 postings on the NPTalk discussion list. Nonprofit work often involves collaboration among staff and partners, sometimes spread across large distances. Sometimes the nature of that work entails the markup or comment on documents, or brainstorming ideas, which is not always easily done via a conference call or e-mail, or for which an in-person meeting is not cost-effective. There are, however, different flavors of office-level collaborative technology for nonprofits to consider. Digital Whiteboards || Functional Portals || Webconferencing Digital Whiteboards The first is the digital whiteboard. Why use a digital whiteboard? When you use a traditional whiteboard, you have only the paper copy original, which is prone to any number of mishaps. To be fair, the older generation of digital whiteboards was indeed represented by actual boards upon which one wrote great ideas or mindless doodles, which could then be printed out at the touch of a button. These tools run in the thousands of dollars, are not portable, and cost a great deal to maintain. The current generation of digital whiteboards are portable products that track the movements of special dry-erase markers and erasers. These boards can transfer content to a computer, which allows you to save the content and e-mail it, add it to a web site, or print it. And they do it for around $500. The two main tools in this area are the eBeam by Electronics for Imaging and the Mimio by Virtual Inks. The two products use an image-capturing device that attaches to the traditional whiteboard found in many a meeting room. The eBeam 's device has two pod-like elements connected by a cable that attach to the top corners of a whiteboard (allowing up to 8 feet of workspace), while Mimio's has a bar that attaches to the side of the board.  Both incorporate a special set of battery-operated, color-coded dry erase markers and an eraser that use both infrared and ultrasonic technology to monitor anything being written or erased. While Mimio lets you reassign the identity of each colored pen as you choose; the eBeam uses color-coded pen holders that cannot be reprogrammed. More importantly, both allow participants to view notes in real time (as they are being written) over a network, and to subsequently print out the whiteboard notes. Any user with access to a Java-enabled Web browser can also access either of the whiteboard tools by connecting to the host machine running the presentation.  The eBeam and Mimio can also run over a local-area network using the Microsoft NetMeeting product, available for free or bundled with Windows 98. For those of you not familiar with NetMeeting, it features electronic whiteboard tools, in addition audio and video conferencing, chat, file and program transfer, remote desktop sharing tools. If your viewers are running the eBeam’s client software, they can make annotations, but those notes are considered permanent. Moreover, there is limited ability to zoom in on specific details of a whiteboard presentation window. The Mimio, however, lets you make annontations (which can be edited), zoom in and out of a presentation, and more significantly, allows you to incorporate other applications running from a participant’s desktop (like a calculator or graphics programs), within the whiteboard presentation window. Functional Portals Another type of resource, available online and usually free, are "functional portals."  While they appear similar in structure and design to a regular portal, rather than attempting to attract users and build an audience around a particular niche of content or a general purpose set of tools, these "worker" or "functional" or "occupational" portals seek to build a dedicated user community around the needs of individual users, particualrly those who have to coordinate activitiy with other users. The idea is that in seeking to do tasks more efficiently, quickly, and flexible from any location, you will come to rely on the online service to handle your routine chores and eventually to facilitate your interactions with others. For example, there is AllBusiness for entrepreneurs, Buzzsaw for building planners and architects, Healtheon for doctors, MediaMap for public relations folks, and Niku and Portera both designed for management consultants.  The range of features and services offered is pretty daunting. Buzzaw, for example, lets a project's staff monitor their construction site in real time using an automated onsite-photography service that periodically takes high-resolution digital photographs at the construction site and publishes them to the Internet, and use an online whiteboard and design tools to share blueprints and other documents. MediaMap has a service that tracks the editorial calendars of some 120,000 editorial calendars for both print and web media, and will notify registered users whenever there are major changes in upcoming stories of interest. One of the more generic functional portals that a broad range of nonprofits can utilize is OfficeClick and although geared towards corporate office environments, seems to offer quite a few functions that might help lend order to nonprofit coillaboration  needs. After registering for the site, users can set up and access an account featuring:  

• a bulletin board for sharing important information with a workgroup, posting announcements, messages, events, contact information, or to-do lists, and to even conduct online polls among fellow workers;
 
• a calendar to schedule events, post  to a bulletin board, and generate automatic reminders;
 
• a to-do list to develop categories and assigments for work or project items, prioritize daily tasks, track their status, and set automatic reminders for the most important tasks;
 
• a travel planner, to  research and book travel plans and iteneraries, find business and leisure flights and fares. or to store travel preference profiles for workers or travel plans;
 
• online ordering and e-commerce channels to major office supply chains, corporate services vendors, links to most major airline carriers, major larger business and leisure travel agencies and travel suppliers,
 
• a search engine that gathers background information on a particular destination, including reference information (lodging, customs, sites of interest, etc.), weather, and maps,
 
• package tracking and pickup scheduling from major carriers

While this does not necessarily give you substantive collaboratiion space, it is a convenient, and cheap, way to accomodate internal administrative needs with occasional discussion space. Webconferencing The high-end range of collaboration tools is represented by webconferencing. Unlike chat technology, which generally requires participants to be online at the same time, webconferencing can either involve real-time conversation or presentation of content and materials, in a manner that allows participants to access that content simultaneously, at a scheduled time, or at different times. Additionally, webconferencing can entail a truly collaborative meeting in which you can have any participant utilize on-screen controls or auditorium-style" presentations. From a practical standpoint, webconferencing usually requires only an Internet connection (albeit in many instances a fast one), and in return offers a convenient secure collaboration space that can expand to accommodate a number of users. You will usually have an online whiteboard where PowerPoint or similar content, documents, pictures, even websites, can be posted and marked-up by participants. Higher-end services provide support for features like streaming media, videoconferencing and Voice over IP (VoIP, which is a type of technology that lets you talk in real-time over the Internet). There are also usually tools to allow for real-time discussions and conducting online polls or surveys. There are a number of companies offering free basic webconferencing/presentation accounts. Keep in mind that most of these services are graphics intensive, utilizing Javascripts and file formats that most likely will not operate as quickly for those on slow Internet connections. At this stage of development, most of the services perform best on Windows systems, as there are unpredictable results (crashes, frozen screens, etc.) for Linux and Macintosh systems. The main players include:

• Astound Conference Center lets groups conduct online collaborative presentations and work sessions, letting users share applications and incorporate streaming media. It will convert PowerPoint presentations to web pages, and will help you plan your presentation by registering potential attendees, allowing you to conduct polls and surveys. Organizers will receive reports on who attended and how long they stayed. Organizers can also see what page of a document each participant is on, can check on a graph of poll/survey results, and can preview each page of a presentation before others see it. Any participant can add notes or comments on screen. In order to share applications, users have to download a small utility, which then allows them to remotely control a program on someone else's desktop. If you want to have the voices of your participants factoring into your online meeting, users can call a toll-free number (though there is a fee) that will digitize any voice. The free account will let you host a conference room of up to three people. More users entail a full account to be set up.
• CentraNow is a free service that limits you to a 30 minute meeting with a megabyte of content and five participants. It does offer a basic, yet stable, environment for sharing PowerPoint slides, "yes/no" polls, and a presenter interface that, while not allowing true collaboration, does let you broadcast or capture content from your desktop. It is probably most useful for audience-style presentations, especially since any participant wishing to "speak" either via online comments or VoIP must have their online "hand" acknowledged by the presenter in the default model. Presenters, can, however, switch control of the presentation itself, discussion screen, or survey window to any participant.
• iMeet works through a small bar on your browser window, and begins each presentation using your organization's homepage. While this is not as strong on streaming media or VoIP support, it has a unique question-and-answer feature that queues questions, letting presenters provide answers to the whole group or to the questioner. Respecting those with slower connections, it will convert PowerPoint slides into one small .GIF file for viewing and a separate one for markups. There is also a polling feature which lets presenters build queries, the results of which can be viewed in different ways.
• MyPlaceWare works as a series of slides that can accommodate PowerPoint content, polls, text, or streaming media. Unlike other services, there are three separate components that must be downloaded, and the free service limits the number of participants to five. The interface for the conference is easy to understand. Anytime someone wants to incorporate new content, they simply add a news slide, or can alternate among multiple sets of slides at any time. Any content slide can be annotated or marked by participants as well. When you invite participants to your conference, they are e-mailed a notice for the meeting and their systems are checked to see if they can handle the system requirements. The service does not support application sharing-it only allows screen shots to be presented. However, if you want to conduct a tour of a website, all participants have the ability to tour that website independent of other participants, until they click to return to the presentation.
• Presentation.Net is a fee-based teleconferencing service with presentation features. There is trial offer for groups that comes out to about four free one-hour meetings, after which you can expect a relatively pricey fee structure for each subsequent meeting, since you are in essence being sold a telephone conference-call plan. A useful feature of this service is the ability to maintain all the effects contained within a normal PowerPoint presentation. There are still functions that are being developed, including polling and chat, although the basic whiteboard functions with notations are available.
• WebEx gives you a free account that can support up to four users for thirty-minute sessions. In addition to the basic features, presenters can convert numerous file formats in addition to PowerPoint slides for viewing. Users can also access a tool suite of an address book, calendar, and file archive. It also allows a great degree of control in determining how much or how little participants can view, including special views of the presentation or chat transcripts.

Another option to the above services is the National Electronic Clearinghouse Center, which provides webcasting services to nonprofits. NECC both hosts and helps to produce online meetings and events (especially virtual conferences and workshops) via a customized web-based conferencing system. They have a special emphasis on exploring ways to develop and improve technology tools to help promote sustainable community and economic development efforts. Ryan Turner NPT Project OMB Watch Links Cited Digital Whiteboards eBeam by Electronics for Imaging http://www.efi.com Mimio by Virtual Inks http://www.virtual-ink.com Microsoft NetMeeting http://www.microsoft.com/windows/NetMeeting Functional Portals AllBusiness http://www.allbusiness.com Buzzsaw http://www.buzzsaw.com Healtheon http://www.healtheon.com MediaMap http://www.mediamap.com Niku http://www.niku.com Portera http://www.portera.com OfficeClick http://www.officeclick.com Webconferencing Astound Conference Center http://www.astound.com CentraNow http://www.centranow.com iMeet http://www.imeet.com MyPlaceWare http://www.myplaceware.com Presentation.Net http://presentation.net WebEx http://www.webex.com National Electronic Clearinghouse Center http://www.sheps.com/neccenter