The Tools and Technology That Enable Enterprise Collaboration

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Aug 10, 2010

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Everyone understands by now that for organizations who are successful at enterprise collaboration, it's not about the technology. But, the right technology, in the right situation can go a long way towards helping people collaborate. So it's time to talk technology turkey.

How Do I Collaborate? Let Me Count the Ways

A little recap (from It's About the Culture,Stupid):

…most of us have been collaborating within our organizations in some manner for a long time. We've always had teams working on projects, participated in focus groups for HR or other divisions, even started communities of interest and communities of practice.
It's how we collaborate that is changing, with so many new tools and technologies thanks to Web 2.0 and social media to enable enterprise collaboration.

For as long as we've been working, we've been using some type of tool for collaboration. It has not always been real-time — unless it was everyone sitting in a room together hashing out ideas — but we used the tools we had.

The Tools of Yesterday

We'll call these yesterday's tools for collaborating, but let's face it, most, if not all, of us still use them today to one degree or another:

Email: Probably the most used tool for collaborating, whether it's sending notes, documents, scheduling meetings or sharing links. There are many who say email is not a good tool for collaboration and envision its demise. We think it's just bound for a slightly new usage scenario. But that's a story for another day.
Discussion Groups: Google still offers them, and they are still a part of many new collaboration software solutions.
Wikis: Wikis are old and new. They've been around for a very long time, but have definitely improved with age.
Databases: The database I remember most — not so much with found affection — was that found in Lotus Notes. They were used extensively to store technical documents and were a pain to search.
File Share: Yes, the file share is/was a collaboration tool. Store your files in a folder system created to support your project team.
Question and Answers: Q&A's were a popular way to get the answers we needed to our questions. Still are.
Conference calls: Before web conferencing solutions we had the good old conference call. Sometimes it's easier to get your other work done when participating in a conference call, so they aren't all that bad.
Instant Messaging: Not sure this really fits in the tools of yesterday because we still use them a great deal, but this technology, like wikis, has also come a long way.

The Tools We Have Today

Keeping in mind that we still have all those tools listed above, the emergence of Web 2.0 has brought a slew of new technologies that can take us to new levels of collaboration.

As we've said before most people's definition of collaboration is fundamentally social. This is because in our personal lives we have access to these capabilities on the Web, like Facebook, Twitter and other social networks that allow us to both socialize and share with our friends and family. It only makes sense that we have these same capabilities in the organization. Right?

Now we have social software coming out of every corner of the office, and social features being added to our traditional systems. What are some of these capabilities?