Collaboration Software.

Collaboration software, also called groupware, helps integrate work on a single project performed by several concurrent users at separate computers. Even though there are many collaboration and document-sharing applications on the market, it is still true that for the most part, the way people share files is to e-mail them back and forth as attachments. While this has been surprisingly productive for many people, it is a long way from collaboration. Even though networked computers allow high-speed communications and the fast and easy exchange of data and documents, it is still remarkably difficult for a group of users to work together on a project from separate computers. In 1989, executive Ray Ozzie at Lotus Development Corp. brought forth Notes, the first program that attempted to integrate a number of communication, scheduling and database-driven activities into a single software package that was designed from the start to live on a network. Collaboration can be done formally, from the top down, through established procedures and processes, or it can be done informally, from the bottom up, as communities and project teams collaborate in an ad hoc way. Some large organizations may be concerned about the proliferation of project-based collaboration software and they are likely to want a cohesive plan for supporting collaboration across the enterprise.