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Collaborative Tools and Work Environments
Collaborative tools and work environments for online collaboration
September 22, 2005
By: Alice Osborn
Online collaboration that is facilitated with the right
collaborative tools and work environments will promote
common knowledge among work teams and will lead them to
accomplish common goals. Through this virtual collaboration,
far-flung work teams can share files, text chat about a
current problem, and use polling features over their
intranet or the public Internet. In this special environment
called a workspace, teams within the collaborative
environment build community and unity among their teams.
Today's collaborative tools are software applications that
enable work teams to collectively author and archive their
work, to be notified for events on a group calendar, and to
collaborate with vendors and partners on a secure web
server.
These collaborative tools can be hosted or non-hosted,
and they can focus on real-time (conferencing and instant
messaging) or asynchronous time (calendars, schedules, and
forums). Many small to medium companies opt to have
collaborative software vendors host their workspaces, while
larger companies may want to install the collaborative
intranet onto their own server. When these collaboration
solutions are hosted, companies can dive right into a
collaboration environment to improve their project and
knowledge management processes immediately. Examples of
collaborative software tools that offer both hosted and
licensed solutions include
eRoom.net
and
Facilitate.com.
eRoom offers collaborative solutions for any sized
business
eRoom markets its collaboration tools to fit both small
businesses and large enterprises. Small businesses would use
its hosted solution and enterprises would use its enterprise
content management (ECM) platform, Documentation 5, which
integrates into a company's IT structure.
- Small business features -- eRoom has
collaborative tools like the ApplicationXtender that
manages, stores and organizes critical project information
while the eRoom workspace offers multi-layered threaded
discussions, drop and drag file sharing, plus real time
and scheduled change information.
- Large enterprise features -- eRoom helps
enterprises in the banking, pharmaceutical, medical and
architecture fields with their project management and
client resources. Some of the Documentation 5 features
include authoring information, so teams can create and
maintain websites and content integration that
disseminates information to team members and connects team
members with queries with those who have the answers.
The Facilitate 8.5 tool can improve your company's
online meetings
Facilitate 8.5 is an online meeting and survey tool
offered by Facilitate.com that a small to medium sized
company can host or a larger enterprise can deploy onto
their own server to enable quick decision-making. This tool
can rapidly build consensus among members of an online team
with collaborative tools that include online chat rooms,
voting and prioritizing, action plans to keep track of a
team's progress, brainstorm templates, surveying tools, and
shared work agendas. Facilitate 8.5 is flexible enough to
manage a small regional meeting to a large international
conference. This online software solution also offers
consulting services and additional training resources.
Find the right web collaboration tool to meet your
businesses' needs
When team members collaborate on a major project over an
online workspace, they need a reliable web collaboration
tool that will help them meet their deadlines, allow all of
their voices to be heard, and permit quick access to stored
information. When selecting a collaboration tool,
decision-makers need to locate a software application that
would best fit that company's industry, size, and
communication standards, so that up-front integration costs
will result in long-term savings.
About the Author
Alice Osborn is a successful freelance writer and
contributor to Web-Conferencing-Zone.com. Your
definitive guide to
web conferencing services,
online collaboration software and
web meetings for business.
Also See: [ Interactive
presentations delivered using PowerPoint on the web ]
[ Flash presentation
creation via PowerPoint to Flash conversion tools ]
[ Finding the
right PowerPoint presentation tool to fit your online
presentation ]
Home Page:
[ Web-Conferencing-Zone.com ]
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