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"SAP's newly released beta product 12Sprints \u2014 a free cutting edge collaborative decision-making tool \u2014 adds much needed structure to the idea of real-time collaboration, made popular by Google Wave, and improves upon the functionality of popular web-based team collaboration tools like Basecamp.\nWhile 12Sprints can work for teams of all sizes, the tool is designed to especially serve the needs of its Fortune 500 clients with a cloud-based system that is designed to be a results-driven workspace.\nThe 12Sprints workflow is structured around Activities, which are like project buckets for specific decision-making processes. Participants can add tools to activities to collaborate and discuss files, make decisions, manage time, set action items, assign responsibilities, work together in real-time via word-processing and spreadsheet-like tools, group individual items into collections, and conduct sophisticated business tasks like cost/benefit analysis and SWOT analysis.\nActivities for Business Decision-Making\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIf you're familiar with Google Wave, you can think of starting an Activity as akin to starting a Wave, so you'll want to name it, invite participants and start adding content to it. Unlike Google Wave, 12Sprints is incredibly structured, which makes it less flexible when it comes to supporting free-form conversations, but more conducive to maintaining a clean workspace, collecting feedback and coming to group decisions.\nThere are, however, very little bounds to what can be added to an Activity, but each item is considered its own entity. The individual items/elements \u2014 regardless of type \u2014 all support comments, action items with due dates, the ability to add reference points, export/import options where appropriate and other business appropriate features. Elements and their associated actions remain open until closed or completed by a participant.\nWithin Activities, the product currently supports all of the following elements:\n\n- Text: Adding \"Text\" to an activity inserts a text editor that supports group collaboration on documents. The text editor is SAP's take on a Google Docs document and includes standard style and formatting options.\n- Table: A Table is like a paired down spreadsheet, and when added to an Activity, team members can collaborate in real time. You can either start your table from scratch or import an .xls, .xlsx, or .csv file. Tables can also be exported.\n- Discussion: Discussions are chat-like blocks that participants can add to Activities to chat back and forth with team members. Since multiple Discussions can be added to an Activity, they can be used to centralize discussions around a particular topic.\n- Collections: Collections offer users a way to group content, so any of the tools you've added to your Activity can be grouped in a Collection. Participants can also add files from computer or notes from an Evernote notebook to a Collection.\n- WebEx Meeting: Should a participant want to add a particular WebEx meeting to an Activity, this option supports that.\n- Tools: In addition to the above options, users can optionally add tools from the Tools Catalog to Activities. Choices include tools designed to streamline coordinating team members, analyzing data, and making decision. The collection is quite impressive with tools supporting sophisticated processes as is, but anyone can create an Open Social compatible tool of their own for integration with 12Sprints via their APIs.\n- Files: Users can either upload files from their computer or pull in notes from their Evernote account. If the Scribd extension is activated, files will be uploaded in an iPaper-format so participants can view the document in question in-line (ie. no need to download to view).\n\nA Social Extension for Business Systems\nEven though it's not immediately apparent in the product right now, 12Sprints was designed to extend the purpose and functionality of other commonly used work-related tools and systems like e-mail, IM, Sharepoint and even Google Wave.\nCurrently this can best be seen with the Evernote integration, which creates an extra layer of group collaboration around imported Evernote notes, a functionality that Evernote doesn't support. Eventually you should be able to pull in Activity content from a host of third-party applications and even comment on and engage with 12Sprints Activities and action items from those applications as well. Ultimately the idea of 12Sprints is to add structure around conversation, serve as a social utility to help teams come to a decision and maintain a record of what's happening across different mediums.\nOf course as a beta product, 12Sprints \u2014 just like Google Wave \u2014 has its own shortcomings. Personally I find the communication options to be rather limited. While the Discussions option is great for a structured and open group chat, it's almost too structured to be appropriate for general team member chat and doesn't allow for privacy options. Plus, it's impossible to message an individual participant, except via e-mail. There's also no way to publicly share Activities or any of the elements included, at least for the time being (that feature is said to be in the works).\nAs it stands, 12Sprints pushes the notion of team collaboration in exciting new directions and we're differently interested to see how the product evolves over time.\nAdditional Screenshots\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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