Collaboration Environments

One of the challenges of facilitating Open IT projects was the selection of proper collaboration software. There has been an explosion of Web 2.0-style collaboration systems and selecting the appropriate tools for Open IT Works took a focused set of requirements and a lot of experimentation. We got some invaluable help from Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio, and one of the advisors to Open IT Works.

We had a number of unique requirements to deal with. Our users include enterprise CIOs, people who are unlikely to spend a lot of time at a web-based user interface themselves, but also developers and managers who needed a rich set of project management features for developing new intellectual property on a collaborative basis. For the CIOs, our requirements were that the interfaces had to be easy to use and they had to have rich connections through e-mail; we knew the CIOs would prefer to see project status and announcements, and to deal with action items and milestones, as part of their daily e-mail stream. For everyone else, we wanted an intuitive, powerful interface that included document management, collaborative editing of simple documents in the Wiki style, discussion forums, customization for our company look and feel, and project management features such as tasks, milestones, and calendars. It had to be economical for a startup company with a growing number of users. And since we are big advocates of the Software as a Service (SaaS) trend, we wanted to engage a fully hosted service, not build or operate it ourselves. 

We found that the tools in this space are divided into broad categories: online replacements for Microsoft Office features (Desktop 2.0); Wikis; IM-based; more traditional (and quite powerful) project management packages. We investigated about 30 different products or services. Some of the more interesting hosted services included: Atlassian, Celoxis, Foldera, Intensil Wikiflow, Zimbra, and Zoho Virtual Office. But we finally selected Central Desktop, which includes all of the features we wanted at a reasonable price. It has the strength of intuitive integration with e-mail, Wiki-style document collaboration (although they use HTML instead of one of the more traditional styles of Wiki source code underneath the GUI), document management, and simple project management features. We are using the system only for private-access member collaboration at the moment, but it has the capability of fully public Wiki interaction, which we may take advantage of in the future. I have been impressed with the responsiveness of Central Desktop support and their rapid implementation of new features. 

There are many other factors to consider in providing useful facilitation of collaborative projects, beyond the selection of an online service. I will be exploring some of those factors in future postings. If you have any comments about these online services, however, I'd love to start a dialogue with you, using the comments at the bottom of the blog.

Comments

[Maban]

I use www.celoxis.com web based project management tool.To start with, I found it a bit overwhelming but I am glad I chose it. Our productivity has improved significantly and we are able to do a lot of things in time and budget. Their client collaboration is free and our clients love that! It’s a one stop shop for project management, time sheets and collaboration. It has a small learning curve but once you get used to it, it is really good. Checkout their workflow module… you can do pretty amazing things with it. The best thing is it is pretty economical. I would recommend it.

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