Real Time Collaboration and Web 2.0 tools, tips, and reviews

I believe another feature is that it needs to be fast. Lots of teams need to share thousands of files and downloading them all can be a pain. Large files are especially troublesome. It can be frustrating to collaborate on a 100 MB file.

Also, it needs to be easy to use. It is great to have lots of features as long as everyone knows how to use them.

Hi,

For collaboration these would certainly not be on my a-list. They would be on my b-list and checklist, but most of the points you mention don't nescessarily enhance collaboration and that is what we're aiming for. Most of the points you mention seem to be aimed at document management systems and microsoft should integrate them into Office. I love the automated Source Tracking. That would be implementable with a beefed up clipboard.

What I want is:

1. an easy to use, easy to understand user interface.
2. wiki style sharing of knowledge across the organisation. I would however try to separate knowledge sharing and active document writing.
3. excellent revision checking, where you can see both who changed a page and looking at somebodies profile, what changes they made.
4. possibilities to add information to the general pool by mailing and uploading to pages and workspaces.
5. Tagging, not mandatory, but every user can add tags
6. integrated project management tools that are weaved into workspaces and into peoples personal pages. Including something Google has; a weekly e-mail going to people asking how they fared with their to do list and what they plan to do for the week to come, to which people can reply, which will be their todo list for the week to come.

Agreed with all of the above, revision and versioning are the keys - perhaps with some kind of "comment your changes" in order to show collaborateurs not only the changes, but the reasons for the changes.
And this knd of versioning across all the common filetypes (text, spreadsheets, etc.)
Plus all this wrapped into a joomla add on
In other words, the moon on a stick!

I like wikis, and understand how they work, but they are really difficult to explain and implement with non-technical users. They 'understand' wikis that are already going, but find it difficult to add to and use other than just reading what is there.

David - That would be my dream as well!

Collaboration is all about group processing of 'data'.
Basic collaboration is getting together a team to deal with an issue (basically work). Issue comes from somewhere, gets chewed on by a team (even a team of one), and eventually spits out a collaborative result (document, action, etc).
Keys to efficient collaboration are:
1 - Dealing with the biggest source of events/work - Email.
Side note on Email…Email is a communication tool, not a repository. The lifespan of email should be less than 1 week, 2 of you are on vacation. Email comes to me (much like physical mail). It should not stay in the MB, but needs to be acted on. I don’t go to my mailbox at night, open my daily mail, and stick it BACK into the mailbox. I deal with it. Email is no different.
Email can easily be grouped into short term knowledge (directions to the Christmas party); Tag it with a auto delete timer (1,2,3 weeks) - done. 2) Personal items should be redirected to your personal GMail account - done, 3) Business issues which is by its definition a group data element. It should be meta-tagged and moved to a group teamroom for doc storage and generates a trigger/alert sent to the team. In all cases movement in and out of inboxes should be seamless and context driven. If it doesn’t fit one of these categories, it’s just junk.

2 – Handling events efficiently. Action items (often from emails), need to launch a team, schedule tasks, and create results. This is a looping process, but the collaborative space should take care of all the normal stuff here (ver control, web meetings, doc mgt, whiteboards, event calendars, etc etc etc). Automated communication (such as RSS feeds) should be integrated to keep team members up to date. Emails should only be used to send notifications. If documents need to be distributed, links to stored documents should be sent, not the full documents unless you are sending to someone outside of the team AND outside of the collaboration system. The ‘system’ should be smart enough to know this and send links or docs (or some combination).

3 - Deal with results. The outcome of a collaborative effort must result in some 'product'. If not, everyone just wasted their time. It could be a document (to be stored, printed, published, etc), but it may be in itself an action that spawns another collaborative event. This would transfer to another team, and all the 'stuff' should naturally flow with it.

4 - In the mean time, the collaborative environment should have some nice utilities like time tracking and project mgt tools so tasks can be managed. Some good backup and archive tools, keeping stubs and summaries for historical purposes.

In summary work is a collaborative environment. Unfortunately our 'toolkit' was developed using a single user mindset. Trying to integrate collaborative workflows into single user products is like turning an oil tanker. Slow and painful. But progress is being made. Hope is enternal.

Groupware, or workgroup collaboration software, was defined as a new software category by the introduction of Lotus Notes in 1989. Lotus Notes evolved out of PLATO Notes, so in a sense this category is an offshoot of centralized forum software. But whereas forum software is focused primarily on group discussion, groupware products support a wide variety of other activities, such as scheduling and document sharing. Some groupware products are suites of ready-made applications; others are toolboxes for creating collaborative applications, with customizable templates included.

Those with customized tables included are the best since they can enable you a lot of any other duties that you can use. I myself use it a lot together with my online office and, combined, they give me a very smooth working day.