Before we dive into
collaboration, it is first important to understand what exactly is
collaboration and why it is required. In the simplest of words, collaboration
is working with multiple people to complete a task. Essentially it is a process
where a team or organization as a whole work together to realize shared goals
by sharing knowledge, experience, learning and continuous communication.
Collaborative software is a
category of application software to achieve the goal of collaboration in work
environment via use of information technology. A typical collaboration software offers a set
of tools that enable team members to implement various tasks, quickly &
efficiently find the information they need and above all be able to communicate
and work together to achieve the desired business targets. The core elements of
collaboration software are email, document sharing, group calendar, team
collaboration (Calendar, Meetings) and real-time collaboration (Stream, Chat,
Forums). The important aspect here is that all these elements are integrated
and not stand alone, so they provide maximum synergy across different
communication media. Apart from that
collaboration software also provide ability to integrate various planning,
scheduling, and tracking capabilities into a single package.
Moreover, globalization in the majority of the businesses has introduced
new challenges in efficient working of the various business activities. Many
project teams today are spread across different geographical locations and in
many cases this is true even for small firms. Effectiveness of the team work is
a major challenge for such firms and collaborative software mainly targets
these pain points of the business to provide profit maximization and cost
reduction.
At the heart of collaboration software is “Knowledge Management”. Knowledge management is a concept in which
an enterprise consciously and comprehensively gathers, organizes, shares, and
analyzes its knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills. The
goal of a knowledge management system is to provide managers with the ability
to organize and locate relevant content and the expertise required to address
specific business tasks and projects. Some knowledge management systems can
analyze the relationships between content, people, topics and activity and
produce a knowledge map report or knowledge management dashboard. This concept
has evolved from traditional content management and document management systems.
From those simpler systems, current collaboration platforms provide intranet
portals, document & file management, social networks, extranets, websites,
enterprise search, and even business intelligence capabilities. Taking one step
further, today many ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer
Relationship Management) solutions provide integration capabilities to such
collaborative platforms. Boundaries between such knowledge management and
enterprise solutions is diluting more and more. In near future we might even
see them as one.
Market Look:
The market for collaborative software is quite
fragmented. There are many proprietary software applications available, like Microsoft’s
SharePoint & Lync Server and IBM Lotus, while the main open source options
are Zimbra, Kolab, Drupal Frameworks.
See this Wikipedia link for
exhaustive details of market players:
Stay tuned for more updates on real world application
of the collaborative tools!!!
