Collaboration Solutions For The Enterprise

"Can't we make both collaboration and contributing to the corporate knowledge base easy? Because of overcomplicated metadata requirements and document management tools still in their infancy, some enterprises are making it more difficult for people to contribute knowledge.

The business process gets defined by the limitations of the software and over-ambitious categorization goals.

...For teams that are global or even national in nature, it's very expensive and time consuming to meet face-to-face. Sometimes it borders on impossible. Though many experts recommend at least a quarterly face-to-face meeting (as possible) for distributed project teams, this still means that the bulk of the meetings will be done via telephone or videoconferencing. These meetings are usually intended to review progress and discuss next steps - the bulk of the work is done outside of these working groups. (In fact, the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review supports a suspicion I've had about remote teams: that they can actually be much more productive than groups that meet daily face-to-face.)

For those critical between-meeting times, teams rely frequently on e-mail and instant messaging, but these "discussions" are not usually archived in a meaningful way, cannot typically be threaded or organized properly for later group use, and -- at least in the case of e-mail -- can present severe version-control problems for the ubiquitous attached documents.

To streamline this process, business teams have been clamoring for a way to share files, comments, messages (with or without attachments) and discussions effectively, and then interact -- both with each other and that content. This presents a chance for technology to solve an actual business problem and perhaps even make some improvements to the current business process.

Enter collaboration solutions."

Read more in this valuable article identifying the best strategic approach to approach a new collboration system for your organization.

Much good advice along with interesting feedback about a good number of popular enterprise document collaboration systems. Among them Groove, which gets its fair share of praise and criticism.

Excellent reading. Recommended.