Collaboration: Rules of the Road

By David Coleman (@dcoleman100) Jun 16, 2011

How do you know you are using the right collaboration tool? With 2000 + tools in the market place today, how do you know you have the best solution to your collaborative challenge? The goal of this article is to give you some general rules of the road for collaboration. What technology to use and the best time to use it.

1. Email

This has been around for a long time and everyone uses it. But it is often used inappropriately. People copy everyone on a message (cc), and a recent Skype study found that 35% felt that e-mail was contributing to their information overload. E-mail will not go away because it is an easy messaging tool. It is asynchronous so an important question for you to ask yourself is "does your e-mail need a quick response?" if it does, then it is probably better to see if you can detect that person's presence on IM/Chat and resolve it quickly in real time. If it does not require rapid response is it to be sent to one or many people?

If it is sent to one person, than e-mail is probably fine, if you are going to send it to many, and expect many responses, then e-mail is not the right tool. It is a lot better to post in a forum, or have a document posted in a shared space. E-mailing a document around is not a good idea, nor is putting it into Google Docs (can't always control who can append what to the document), but posting it into a secure team space is probably best. Tools like Huddle, PBWorks, CentralDesktop and many others offer a space to post documents, a way to do check-in, check-out and deal with version control.

Email vs. Social Network Communications

However, most notifications either from people or from applications are still through e-mail. Last year for the first time there were more messages in social networks than in e-mail. A recent Nielsen study shows that Indians now spend more time per day on social networks than e-mail.

We expect this trend to continue. One reason is that Gen Y tends to favor real-time tools rather than e-mail. My nephew recently told me that “e-mail is for old people!” We are also starting to see tools that will combine all of your inboxes from both e-mail and social networks (Outlook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). Some examples of these tools are: unifiedinbox.com, Twezr is basically a smart, social, unified inbox that lets you read and respond to messages from both e-mail and social media services in one place (for iPhone). Microsoft offers Outlook Social Connector to bring these two data sources together, and another tool I use is Gist (which was recently bought by RIM) which unifies your contacts in one place. Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) is also a tool that will help you unify your e-mail and contacts as well as your social networks.

2. Web Conferencing

This second rule of the road is about "Web or data conferencing vs. screen sharing. I interact with lots of people at a distance all day long. About 70% of the time I am on a phone call and want to show someone something or share something on my desktop. Now I know most Web conferencing tools do offer a screen sharing function, certainly WebEx, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect, and Microsoft Live Meeting do, but they also come with some "overhead."