Imagine a workforce unified by technology. Imagine a workforce scattered over space, working together on a platform that centralizes institutional knowledge, expedites interactions, clarifies next steps, speeds approvals and signoffs, and cuts paperwork.

If you're a workgroup or team member, imagine speedy filing of documents, electronic artifacts, and correspondence. Visualize access to all kinds of databases from a single workstation and reminders that trigger you to respond. Picture all the time you'll save by having information at your fingertips, tasks automated, and correspondence organized.

If you're a manager, imagine all your resources headed in the same direction. Picture a heightened level of accountability; visualize opening a window into your work processes and discovering a great new view of progress.

Whether you're a workgroup member, a project team member, or a manager, think about your organization's institutional memory. Wouldn't you like it to be systematically organized, both for your current colleagues and for those who will work there in the future?

Finally, imagine shifting your thinking from business processes to business objects. What if a particular object were no longer caught in a net of processes, but was the focus of those processes? What if a single object--like a hazardous waste site or a contaminant, or a ship, or an insurance policy--was the focus, and processes swirled around it? Wouldn't that make the processes more replicable, and the whole affair more efficient?

The Enterprise Collaboration Portal (ECP) from B2 TeCS makes all these dreams a reality.

The ECP centralizes all your business artifacts-emails, discussion forums, correspondence, faxes, documents, even instant messaging-in one place. Imagine the ability to sustain focused correspondence on specific topics. You can store this information in workspaces that relate to various projects, so that when you tap your projects, you have full access to all related communications right at your fingertips. No more searching through disparate locations for that one fact that might have been in an email? A letter? A fax? And ECP captures IM conversations, too. You are not limited to just project workspaces. Workspaces can be organized geographically, by division, team, or function, or any other organizational framework you choose. In addition, information can be focused and organized around business objects…the opportunities for getting organized are almost limitless.

You and your colleagues can really collaborate with ECP. You can share tasks and correspondence, work on documents together, pool information for publication, and array data for audit and compliance. The days of sending out a report for review and comment--and then wrestling with the feedback--are over. An individual can simply check an electronic document out, make comments, and check it back in to the central repository. Approvals and signoffs are expedited via finely tuned business rules automated using workflows.

ECP can also put a range of databases under your control. Through its portlet capability, you can tap several databases on your screen at the same time. And, ECP can use that data to inform your audiences, swiftly and easily. Information can be organized in workspaces and published to websites, substantially reducing the amount of time between product completion and dissemination.

At B2 TeCS, we recognize that each organization is unique. ECP is not an out-of-the-box solution. It consists of a suite of foundational capabilities that our professionals configure and fine tune to the unique needs of your organization. There are plenty of packaged solutions on the market. If you buy one, you may soon find yourself making compromises pushing your organization out of its natural shape to fit the software you choose. B2 TeCS shapes ECP to you, for an effortless fit. That's our promise.