Group collaboration software provides tools for groups of people or organizations to share information and coordinate activities. IBM Lotus Notes, developed originally by Lotus Corporation, is considered one of the first commercially successful group collaboration

Collaboration

Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals, — for example, an intriguing endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing...

 tools. Many other applications and services have been developed and offered to the marketplace as well. The field is also sometimes referred to as collaborative software

Collaborative software

Collaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...

.

These tools typically include member and email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 list management, a shared address book, shared calendar, project/task management, a shared file system, and tools for online collaborative document creation such as wikis, blogs, discussions boards, etc. Some services offer a suite of integrated tools while others focus on delivering a single solution like shared file storage.

The UK Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies describes group collaboration tools as related to but different from social networking tools and content management systems.

Jon Udell

Jon udell

Jon Udell is an "Evangelist" at Microsoft. Previously he was lead analyst for the Infoworld Test Center.Udell is author of Practical Internet Groupware, published in 1999 by O'Reilly Media, and is an advisor to O'Reilly's Safari Tech Books Online. He wrote the column "Tangled in the Threads" for...

's influential Practical Internet Groupware is a standard design guide for networked collaboration tools. Udell recommended they be built on top of existing standards, like email servers, news servers, and web servers.

A number of free online group collaborations solutions exist. In 2000 Yahoo purchased eGroups and renamed the service Yahoo! Groups

Yahoo! Groups

Yahoo! Groups is one of the world’s largest collections of online discussion boards. The term Groups refers to Internet communication which is a hybrid between an electronic mailing list and a threaded Internet forum, in other words, Group messages can be read and posted by e-mail or on the Group's...

. This is probably the most widely used service although other companies such as AOL

AOL

AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...

 and Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 also offer online group solutions. More recently a number of startups like Wiggio

Wiggio

Wiggio is a privately held Web application company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The firm was co-founded in 2008 by CEO Dana Lampert, Rob Doyle Jr., and Derek Doyle as a company with a self-described focus on group collaboration, initially focusing on the college market.Lampert...

, GroupTable and AirSet

AirSet

AirSet is a privately held consumer cloud storage company based in Berkeley, California, United States, their main product works via a web browser and various mobile platforms - History :...

, have emerged to take advantage of newer browser technologies like Ajax

Ajax (programming)

Ajax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...

 to deliver more sophisticated applications in their collaboration suites.

Wiki

Wiki

A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

s work well for group collaboration and they appear to be one of the major innovations in group collaboration. Now being incorporated into college courses to help familiarize students with the process of group collaboration.Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

 seems to be the most representative example in the public domain, while several success stories (such as PBwiki

PBwiki

PBworks is a commercial real-time collaborative editing system created by David Weekly, with Ramit Sethi and Nathan Schmidt joining shortly thereafter as co-founders. Based in San Mateo, California, the company's original name stems from their belief that "making a wiki is as easy as making a...

) can be found in the corporate field. Google Groups

Google Groups

Google Groups is a service from Google Inc. that supports discussion groups, including many Usenet newsgroups, based on common interests. The service was started in 1995 as Deja News, and was transitioned to Google Groups after a February 2001 buyout....

combines email, web-forum, and a group wiki.

External links

• Directory of Team, Group, Collaboration & Sharing Tools