October has already been an eventful month and one that has seen Google quite busy distributing invitations to test out Wave, its new real-time communication and collaboration platform. The search king is hoping that by testing an early version of the platform, developers, volunteers and select users will reveal just how Wave can help groups of people collaborate in a wide range of environments. Google has gone on the record to state that Wave is far from its full potential and many of the key features have yet to be incorporated. However, that hasn’t stopped companies and their development teams from creating plugins and components to extend the platform’s functionality.

Wave Clarity with Gravity
Alexander Dreiling, program manager of SAP’s research unit, has been testing Wave for SAP. “SAP is using Google Wave in the area of business process management (BPM). One example is the prototype developed by SAP called Gravity. Gravity is a demo that shows how users of Google Wave could be provided with real-time, collaborative business process modeling. Gravity models can be downloaded from Wave and imported into SAP NetWeaver BPM for further refinement and execution. According to Dreiling, Wave can provide several benefits from a collaboration aspect. “Google Wave offers many collaboration features and BPM is a highly collaborative field. For us it was a natural fit and only logical to provide some of our BPM technology within Google Wave. End users could thus profit from the best of both worlds. Their consumer and enterprise IT environments merge within a single integrated solution.

Being that Wave is still in the beta testing stage, many early testers and reviewers are not quite sure of its potential while even more have been critical of its shortcomings. When asked if SAP encountered any notable challenges in using the platform, Dreiling says, “To be clear, this is not an implementation, but a prototype at this point. There are always challenges in technology research, in particular when new technologies are being used and integrated with each other. However, Google has been enormously supportive and SAP has a long track record in BPM and supporting the business processes of our customers. For these reasons, the process has been relatively smooth.”

Voice and Audio Integration
SAP is not alone in its hands-on experimentation with Google Wave. Mountain View, California-based telecommunications company, Ribbit has also put the new platform to the test and garnered very positive results. “Google Wave is a revolutionary new collaboration tool for people to share work and communicate together,” says Alain Mowad, Ribbit director of platform product marketing. “Fully Web-based and programmable, Wave creates a standard and open environment for developers to build extensions that enhance the Wave experience.”

Much more than your typical phone company, Ribbit is well known for its hybrid communications solutions that enable developers to interact with telephone networks. DMB wanted to know how the company is integrating its existing platform with Google Wave. Mowad summed it up by stating, “Ribbit is a fully programmable communications platform that allows Web developers to integrate telephony and messaging capabilities into any workflow or application. The incorporation of Ribbit technology into Wave now enables real-time and asynchronous audio streams to be inserted into any Wave. Participants can now collaborate via voice both in a real-time conference as well as by leaving asynchronous audio messages. Both of these streams become an integral part of the overall Wave collaboration process, providing additional real-time channels of communication and significantly enhancing the overall Wave collaboration experience.

The conferencing gadget allows users in a Wave to escalate a collaboration session to a real-time audio communications session. This session becomes an integral part of the Wave and will allow participants to talk with each other while collaborating.

The conferencing gadget is persistent in the Wave and allows any Wave participant to:

•  Create an audio connection with multiple Wave participants
•  Add non-Wave participants to the session
•  Mute or hold any of the individual participants from the stream
•  Disconnect any participants from the stream
•  End the session

Are You Invited?
According to a late September announcement, Google will be sending out more invitations over the next few months in addition to the initial 100,000 invites. These lucky parties consist of developers who were involved in the June preview of Wave, along with select Google Apps customers and individuals that previously volunteered to use the product and provide feedback. Although Wave is still undergoing major development, you can expect some of the key missing features to be added to the platform within the coming months.