December 2006 Archives

A Penny to Share Your Thoughts

This is the time of year that bloggers try to explain how the predictions they made last year really did come true, and then make new ones for the upcoming year. As The Obsessive Collaborator is much less than one year old, I can forgo the former formality and jump right into predictions for 2007. I really have just one - that online collaboration will become ubiquitously available. Some call this commoditization, collaborative software will become so standard that people can pick and choose from a number of interchangeable providers for the services that they need. This in turn drives prices down considerably, making this tool accessible to everyone. It is the latter part of this process that I am interested in, and hence like to think of it more as the democratization of collaborative software. The fact that it is cheap and accessible to individuals, non-profits, academics and small-businesses alike is what matters.

A couple of years ago Tim O'Reilly published a piece on the Open Source Paradigm Shift in which he described some of the market, engineering and design factors that lead to the commoditization of software in general, with open source software both hastening the process and growing as a result.

There are a number of factors aligning right now that set up 2007 to be the year in which collaborative software goes through such a paradigm shift, taking it from the enterprise, where it has been relegated for years and unleashing it upon consumers and small organizations everywhere.

Before I get to those factors, I think it is important to differentiate among the two kinds of people that there are in this world - those with servers and those without servers. This process will serve both of those kinds of people - through cheap and free "host your own" solutions and through similarly priced hosted services. There are costs and benefits of both approaches, weighing bandwidth, server capacity and maintenance against ownership and control of data. This line may be blurred as more places offer to inexpensively host sites with many of these tools already installed, and more people perhaps choose to control their data for fear of giants gobbling it up. But for now it is a distinction that is useful.

With that in mind, here is why 2007 will be the year collaboration comes to the people.

Standards, Standards, Standards
As my father always told me the three most important things in making something a commodity are standards, standards, standards. Well, perhaps those were not his exact words, but in order for commoditization to occur, there need to be standards so that services really can be interchangeable. Standards are what brought email to the mass market (I don't think everyone would be willing to type in 100 character properly formatted addresses like IN%"g824nn321"@domain.subdomain.server.net/BITNET" like I remember doing in the early days of email). And there are many standards that will enable this to occur in the collaborative software market.

CalDAV and GroupDAV, are two related standards that extend the WebDAV protocol already used for limited sharing of calendars (e.g in Apple's iCal). With the likes of Novell, Oracle, MIT, Mozilla and the OSAF on board, CalDAV can enable a fundamental change in the sharing of schedules, at the core of many groupware applications. Cosmo, OpenGroupware, and Apple are among the many incorporating this standard into their servers, and many others are following suit. This will permit the people-who-have-servers to choose among many free, cheap and open solutions. I believe that this will also make Apple's .Mac a relatively inexpensive hosted service, particularly for families (and what family can't benefit from greater collaboration?). CalDAV clients are also proliferating, including Mozilla's Sunbird/Lightning, and iCal in Apple's upcoming Leopard, again among others.

Even Microsoft is getting into the standards game. Integrating an XML standard (even if it is not THE standard) into the default file format for Office 2007 documents allows for many other tools to be able to handle these formats correctly. Specifically systems that support versioning and differencing of collaborative documents can now work correctly with these files. That is a big win for the document management portion of the market.

That Syncing Feeling
This is related to the standards argument, but with the proliferation of mobile devices, having the ability to sync multiple devices with your data is becoming increasingly valued. Blackberries are no longer solely the tools of CEOs on the move, but rather the devices of the masses. Everyone wants their data on their phone, PDA, and iPod, because coordination and collaboration can happen anywhere at anytime. While RIM has cornered this market, it is becoming easier to sync devices with multiple sources. SyncML and companies like Funambol/Sync4j are at the center of this movement, but credit is also do the manufacturers of mobile devices who are increasingly making compatible protocols available via bluetooth. Just look at the options of mobile devices and clients that ScheduleWorld allows you to sync with.

One Word - Google
For people-without-servers, Google has enabled and championed collaborative work. Keeping all of your data online with vast amounts of storage on Gmail was a start. But Google Documents and Google Calendar, are what really started to shake things up and open people's eyes to the idea of easy collaboration online. While these tools are still a bit of a mashup in and of themselves, and people are left wanting for offline availability, Google has radically changed this landscape providing a workable set of tools for free. While the mashup problem may take some time to solve, owing to the fact that many of the tools were inherited from various buyouts, the offline problem will be solved this year with the proliferation of clients that sync, and advances in offline browser capabilities. Google advanced the notion of blogs, and will likely do the same for Wikis in the coming year.

Other companies (Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) are not standing still. They are trying to grow their offerings as well. And in some cases these offerings (e.g. Zoho) may be even better than what Google has. I wouldn't count on Google to falter too much though, as I believe that the culture of Google will keep it moving forward, and while their software is not open many of their APIs are, which keeps them from becoming too isolated.

Talk is Cheap
It could easily be argued that VOIP communication is already a commodity market (and IM has been for a while). There are so many players in this market that I won't even attempt to list them. Skype is a dominant force and may in fact be the company that made VOIP a commodity. Two-way and multi-way videoconferencing are also commodities or nearly so at this point in time, again with Skype behind them as well as Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Apple. We have finally realized the videophone that EPCOT promised me would be here "tomorrow" 25 or more years ago.

And now webconferencing is on the verge of making a similar transition. WebEx has done well popularizing webconferencing, along with Microsoft's Live Meeting and IBM/Lotus Sametime. But these are enterprise (i.e. expensive) solutions. But times are changing. Webhuddle, DimDim, and others are offering free or cheap solutions. Even services like Vyew or the multitude of screen sharing sites are leveling the playing field. Webconferencing will be accessible to all in 2007.

Mixed Marketing
There are a lot of free (as in beer or speech) and open source options out there in the collaborative software market. Some of these are pure open source, or purely free (as in beer) while others are a mixed offering. Zimbra, Scalix and OpenExchange have both free/open source offerings and more expanded paid offerings. Hosted services do the same, offering the basics for free, as Basecamp and others do. This gives everyone a taste of what collaborative software has to offer, both helping them decide what they need and driving the market towards tools that people can try without an investment.

Because We Want To
While the collaborative software market may be commoditized partially by chance, there are in fact companies explicitly pushing it in that direction. In a recent exchange with Steven Tedjamulia of Collanos, Steven said, "We are trying to commoditize collaboration and allow everyone in the world to be able to have Collaboration for free as they have VOIP with Skype." Companies like Collanos, who are bootstrapping off of open source and standards will indeed shake up the market.

I will add that Collanos' approach to commoditization breaks down my global dichotomy of those with/without servers, as their product enables peer-to-peer collaboration. While peer-to-peer is an interesting part of the market to explore, more importantly their product emphasizes the "invisible hand" of collaborative software. To make collaborative software accessible to the masses it needs to be so easy to use that it becomes invisible. While no one is there yet, companies like this are coming close

Email is Broken
There are many things broken about email. SPAM is a major culprit, as are the multitude of messages that I get from friends and family taken straight from the pages of Snopes. But even the volume of legitimate messages is becoming unmanageable for many information workers. There are many great features of email (allowing asynchronous and nearly synchronous exchanges, archival, etc.) but for work that centers on electronic artifacts (designs, documents, spreadsheets, code, movies, etc.) it is simply not sufficient. Documents are getting too big, conversations are involving too many people, and it becomes difficult to effectively collaborate. While proprietary systems enable more effective work within enterprises, even this breaks down in cross-organizational collaboration where license "seats" are counted.

This collaborative software paradigm shift is enabling email to be put back in its place (if I could only say the same for the SPAM and Snopes sightings), and collaboration to happen when and where it is needed. And that when is clearly going to be in 2007.

Let's see how I'm doing on my predictions next year at this time.

Last week Zoho, the online office applications suite, launched its new Wiki service. I have been quite impressed with Zoho's online office offerings, and as others have noted, their suite (including spreadsheet, word processor, presentation software, organizer, and now their wiki) are all conveniently linked together through one account. They are clearly making moves to advance their suite in the face of other giants by providing quickview plugins for Firefox and IE, plugins for MS Office applications (on Windows) and even an API for other would be developers. All of this seems to cause a bit of a load under the popularity of Zoho, as evidenced by the responsiveness of their servers, but it is still a pleasing (and free) experience.

The other offering that Zoho has is their Virtual Office. Zoho Virtual Office provides the basic email, calendaring, document sharing, task management, and group organization set of tools. It comes in two flavors - a hosted on-demand version and a self-hosted on-premise version. The on-demand version is free for a single user (kind of useless for groupware) and $9.95 per user per month after that (not cheap). The on-premise version is free for up to 10 users and $295 per year for 25 users. That isn't too bad, certainly satisfying my definition of "free or cheap" for the up to 10 users version and still reasonably priced for 25 users. The free version does not provide SSH or WAP access, but otherwise appears to be the same.

I tried out the on-premise version since that is the only that satisfied my criteria. This version is available for both Linux and Windows (it is a java application behind the scenes running in JBoss I think). I chose the Windows version which offered an easy wizard-based install. It didn't take more than a few minutes to get it up and running on my Windows XP test machine. During the installation it asks what port you'd like it to run on (defaulting to 8080), but it easily lets you use a different port. There are no client connections so that is the only port that appears to be used. Internally it connects to a MySql database that it installs, but there are instructions for how to connect it to an existing database should you choose to do so.

Zoho Virtual Office (ZVO) does not use a mail server of its own, and relies on existing email servers for all members of the site. In some ways this is quite refreshing, as I suspect many groups interested in installing ZVO may have some sort of existing email infrastructure that they are looking to expand into full groupware services. Unlike Zimbra that takes over a whole server, and forces users to migrate mail to their system, Zoho would just run on top of or next to existing services. Of course on the other hand if a group is looking to get started from scratch they must install ZVO and another mail server.

When I went to configure the mail services for my test user I found another idiosyncrasy of ZVO. It supports IMAP and POP over SSL, but if you are using an unsigned certificate on your host mail server (as many small organizations do) then you get an unhelpful Java exception when you try to connect to the mail server. A little hunting around and I found that this is a common problem for Java apps, and you can add certificates with the built-in keytool application to Java's keystore. Since ZVO installs its own version of java, that certificate must be added to the correct keystore.

Beyond that, I found ZVO easy to use and administer. Adding users is done through an easy to use administrative console, and while some of the labels are not particularly helpful, it isn't much of a struggle to run for small groups.

As an end user, ZVO provides much of the necessary functionality for group collaboration, but is lacking a lot of the easy of use, UI enhancements, and client connectivity of competitors. Like most of the other component applications, the email application provides an odd mix of rich AJAX interface with traditional popups and slow page refreshes. While AJAX is clearly an overused buzzword that is unnecessarily added to many web applications, in my opinion it is essential to the workflow of calendaring and email. Dynamic previews of email, drag and drop of multiple emails into a folder, and live sorting all facilitate user experience and make organization easy. ZVO's experience reminds one how important these advances are.



There are inline previews (if you can find the hidden icon that you need to click on), but navigating and sorting (by clicking checkboxes and using menus) large volumes of email is cumbersome. It seems as thought he dynamic features are creeping in though, and may in time make this part of the product more competitive.

Using the calendar is a similar experience. Most of the calendar is navigated by clicking hyperlinks and inputting information in popup dialogs.



However, you can add appointments to the weekly (or daily) calendar by clicking on a particular time and adding the title to an inline pointer that pops up.



The monthly calendar also permits addition of appointments in a similar fashion, but since there is not time specified on the calendar it only can add appointments at 8am. Moving appointments requires opening up the popup associated with the appointment. Again, this may seem trivial, but I find quickly moving around appointments with click and drag essential to organization.

The UI inconsistencies abound in ZVO. The desktop that loads on login provides a nice overview of all of your activities.



At the top of the desktop (as there is on most pages) are quick-add links for notes, appointments, etc. Most of them take you to a popup where you have to enter your information, though the notes link brings up the entry inline. The desktop response without refresh to some, but not all, additions.

Perhaps that is sufficient critique of the UI. It certainly is aesthetically pleasing and definitely seems like a work that is progressing in the right direction. There are indeed many other features to like.

The document support is excellent. You can add documents, keep multiple versions, send alerts when they are posted, and even edit some types of documents right inline.



There is also a wiki, that while not as refined as the one contained in the previously mentioned wiki announcement, is ok for single page entries. I found the UI confusing again for multiple page entries, and don't even know if that is possible. The "new page" icon really just clears the current entry.



Finally, what would groupware be without groups? Group management on ZVO is quite easy. There is a separate groups tab in the administrative console where you can create groups and assign members (forgiving the UI idiosyncrasies of searching for group members). I was able to easily create a group, and add resources for that group. All of that information is accessible through a separate desktop for the group.



In the end, there are other groupware offerings that provide more consistent interfaces and greater ease of use for end users. But ZVO has most of the features that one would want in groupware offerings (minus client connectivity) and it is among the easiest to install and maintain, making it particularly useful when there is no system administrator around. A small group could easily install ZVO on a single PC on a LAN and run a group intranet out of the office with little technical expertise. That is something that most of the other offerings can't provide.

Pros

• Easy to install
• Good support of groups
• Connects to existing infrastructure
• Document maintenance and versioning is excellent
• Offers most of the important group applications

Cons

• Doesn't provide its own mail server (this is a pro and a con)
• Inconsistent UI
• Too many popus
• No client support

You may think I'm a glutton for punishment trying to install more software of release candidate quality, but I've been tinkering with Zimbra for some time and wanted to give this new version a whirl.

For those of you who don't know what Zimbra is, it is a mail, calendaring and groupware solution. It is one of the so called "Exchange Killers" that provides both web based and client based access to mail and calendaring. It is probably most noted for its very slick Ajaxy Web 2.0 interface. It feels like you're using a desktop application even when using Zimbra's web client.

Zimbra operates under an open source license, but only part of the product is open source. There are two primary flavors of Zimbra, the Network Edition (i.e. the commercial version) and the open source edition. The primary differences between the two are that the Network Edition (at least the Professional version) provides client synchronization for Outlook (on Windows) and iCal (on Mac OS X). Allegedly there is work underway to provide synchronization with Evolution on Linux as well. The network edition also provides the option of adding on wireless clients that can sync with the server OTA using an activesync hook (for added cost) along with backup facilities, support and clustering. A full comparison is available on the Zimbra web site. The professional version is borderline (at best) for the "cheap" category that is one of my criteria at $35 per seat with a minimum of 25 seats. So I went ahead and installed the open source version (as a side note, we're also exploring using this in my workgroup, for which Zimbra offered a substantial academic discount).

I've been intrigued by Zimbra for quite some time, in that it offers a great interface for users and claims to have much simpler administration than Exchange. I like the potential for Outlook and ICal clients, even if that is only in the professional version. While there are a number of open source groupware solutions out there, the most directly comparable is likely Scalix. I have also evaluated Scalix, with its primary advantage being full blown client access from Outlook for up to 25 users in their "Community" edition. Scalix also does a slightly better version of playing nicely with existing resources on your server, but still takes over many services and ports. Zimbra is a one stop solution, which means it takes over your web server, MTA, databases, tomcat, etc. That means it is easy to install, but requires its own server (or virtual servers, as I use VMWare's free VMWare server for testing). However, it offers no iCal/iSync pathway.

The other issue for both Zimbra and Scalix is that while their web clients are rather slick, they are bandwidth intensive. This makes it impractical when traveling and using slower connections. Some people have installed Squirrelmail or Roundcube as backup webmail systems, but that seems suboptimal. So I was intrigued when I heard the latest release candidate of Zimbra included an html only web client as a component. I just had to try it out.

Installing Zimbra isn't hard if you have one of the requisite systems for which binaries already exist. Binaries are available for Fedora Core 4 and 5, Redhat Enterprise Linux 4, and several other platforms (including Ubuntu and Mac OS X). I used the Redhat version, on VMWare server running RHEL 4. I see no reason why it should be any different if you were using Cent OS, or probably even Fedora.

Installation is a matter of ungzip/untar the binary and run the install script. You are prompted with some confirmations and ultimately one configuration step (changing the admin password). If all goes well, there is little interaction. It is important for Zimbra (the same goes for Scalix) to have a FQDN that resolves correctly. Since I was running on a virtual server behind a router, I needed to configure the etc/hosts file to pull that off. It is important to follow the instructions on this configuration to the letter. I spent the better part of the evening struggling with some unhelpful messages about the database being unable to connect. But making sure my hosts file looked exactly like the one in the docs, made it work just fine in the end. I also needed to make sure I manually turned off Sendmail as it also says in the documentation.

I did notice that the install script really takes care of everything - certificates, spam settings, everything. That was a bit nicer than my Scalix experience in which you need to do a bit of hacking to get SSL working. It also configures SMTP authentication.

I then tried to connect to the Zimbra administration console. It failed. I realized that I hadn't punched the holes in the firewall for all of the necessary ports. This should be a more explicit part of the installation process, rather than just telling you to turn off the firewall completely.

After that I was into the Administration console. The admin console itself is a quite user friendly Ajax application itself.



It was very easy to create a new user, and configure simple settings on the server. It hiccuped when I tried to configure the Documents portion, with a generic error, but otherwise worked flawlessly.

A quick tour of Zimbra itself, shows some of the great features of the application.

The webmail interface is fast and easy to use. With large volumes of email, I find interfaces where you have to jump in and out of directories and click on check boxes to be quite cumbersome. Zimbra excels in this area.



It even has some useful context sensitive menus that pop up around relevant text in your emails. Such as when someone sends a message concerning a date, you can mouse over it for your schedule or right-click (in the browser) to add an appointment.



This is further enhanced by keyboard shortcuts that help you quickly navigate within and between sections. I'm a UI-clicker myself, but the shortcuts can speed up work flow.



There are also address book, calendar, and documents sections.

Getting back to the reason why I tried this update of Zimbra in the first place, there is also easy access to a "basic" (HTML Only) version of the UI. Upon login you can click on the basic html link and you are taken to a nearly identical login box. Once inside the interface indeed looks like an HTML version of Zimbra.



The webmail and address book sections behaved well. Unfortunately the calendar section is absent. This was disappointing, though it is possible it will appear in future versions.

Of course the open source edition is missing the iSync and Outlook sync components. This makes this edition of Zimbra problematic for road warriors who may be needing access to their calendar offline (email can be synced up through any imap or pop client). Allegedly Zimbra is working on offline sync through the standard web interface in the near future. That could take this version over the top, and make it a complete package without the need for Outlook.

Update (21 Dec): I realized that I hadn't actually tried to get email in to my Zimbra server, assuming this wouldn't be hard. That wasn't true. I had a lot of trouble with mail being rejected or something Zimbra calls "deferred" (which means it is stored in a queue but not sent to mailboxes). I tried reconfiguring my hosts file, but that didn't help. It turned out that the problem had to do with Zimbra running inside my router with an internal IP address that was mapped to an external one. There were good instructions for setting up BIND to handle this situation on the Zimbra wiki.

I saw over one Kolabora that a new real time collaboration "web conferencing" system had a press release. The service is called Yugma (which according to their website means "the state of being in unified collaboration" in Sanskrit, but they could just be making that up). The main service of Yugma is screen sharing in real time via a Java applet. One person is a host and starts the meeting, which generates a session ID.


That session ID can be shared with others who simply go to the website, "Join a session" and type in the session ID. This of course means the session is public, though the ID is likely to be hard to guess. It also provides a conference call number to supplement the text chat. In the free version, up to 10 people can collaborate, with any one sharing their screen at a time. Only the current presenter has access to the mouse and keyboard in the free version. I tried a brief experiment with Yugma, collaborating with myself across two computers (what is the sound of one person collaborating?). Yugma supports both Macs and Windows, so I tried collaboration across these two platforms. Sharing the Windows desktop with the Mac worked just fine. The screen scaled nicely, and speed was adequate. But you can't choose which windows you share, only the whole desktop. Sharing in the other direction didn't go as well. The Mac desktop came out with the negative colors on the Windows machine.


It is convenient to be able to share screens from an applet, but the UI needs work. No native widgets are used, so the Java applet could use some aesthetic improvements. There is an explicable signal meter in the upper right of the applet, and once you go into "annotation mode" it is not apparent how to get back out of that mode. Overall this seemed like an application that could work in a pinch from time to time, though I've been more enamored with Vyew, which I actually have tried with more collaborators than just myself.

This week I came across Epiware, an open source document and project management solution.  As far as I can tell, Epiware was a closed source project that was released under the GPL in Setember of this year.  Epiware uses a desktop metaphor, and when the user logs in they see a display of summarizing the different resources available to them on the projects that they are on.  Resources include Forums, Document Libraries, Tasks and Calendars.  I'll get into these resources after the install later.

The Epiware website itself is a bit sparse, and there isn't even a comprehensive description of their product on the site (all too common I'm afraid).  But they do have a screenshot tour and a live demo that you can use.  There also are active forums and reasonable documentation.

As for the install, it was pretty straightforward with a few quirks.

Epiware is primarily a LAMP (or AMP I suppose) application, though it does require some additional binaries to be installed.  To accomplish this, you download and untar Epiware on your server and then run an install script.  According to the docs the install script does the following:

1. Create a dir called /storage/document_area
2. Copies binaries to /storage/binaries
3. Copies share/antiword to /usr/share/antiword

You then need to create your mysql database and move the Epiware php/html documents to somewhere Apache can see them.  As a side note, I originally tried this with the v 4.5 release, but then saw the 4.6 release candidate posted, so that is what I'm reporting on here.  For the most part the installation was the same on both versions.

After installation you just point your browser at the html directory that you moved, and you get a complaint that the storage/document_area isn't writable by the web server process.  Easily changed by changing the owner of document_area, but you also need to change the permissions of the outer storage directory to allow apache to get in there as well.  Now reload and move on. 

Setting up a project is easy.  One thing to note already in this stage is that you should go ahead and turn off the adblock Firefox extension if you are using it.  In testing it seemed to interfere with many of the AJAX calls that Epiware uses. 

Before going any further I realized that the nice mysql install presumably created a new database and gave permissions to a new user with a default password.  That is bad for security, so I had to track down the place where that username and password is referenced and change the password.  The database is named (not very helpfully) project_db.  The mysql login info is stored in config.inc.php and it turns out that the password was temp_password, which I changed.  That change should probably be part of the install process.

I played around with Epiware a bit and noticed things weren't behaving properly (e.g. selecting to "replace" a document didn't) so I looked at the apache logs.  There were a ton of warnings in there generated by Epiware (deprecations, undefined variables, undefined index, etc.).  Nothing major, but may be indicate of some sloppy coding.  This went for both 4.5 and the 4.6 rc.  I also noticed some permission errors on the Epiware binaries which I also had to correct.  4.6rc also seemed to have problems with the calendar and with document versioning in my install, though these features both seemed to work in the demo version posted on the Epiware server.  Tracking down the errors became too difficult give all of the other warnings that were being generated (thousands of them).

Ok.  As for the product itself, I think it has one of the best feature sets I've encountered.  Not too much and not too little.  The desktop on the front page keeps things organized.




Uploading files to the library is done via some nifty AJAX upload dialogs.  In fact the whole organization of the library is done using AJAX popups, menus and drag and drop.  It makes the focus on document management really easy.  Though this does take some getting used to since most people aren't expecting a plain text link to change to a popup menu when the click on it. 



The focus here may be on document management, but what turns it into a viable project management tool are the quite capable calendar, tasks and notifications.  Tasks can be assigned to individuals, events can be scheduled on the calendar and notifications can be sent out via email to team members in a variety of ways -- tracking changes to files, upon forum postings (so they can be used for team emailing), and via tasks or calendar events. 

Here is an updated desktop with some of those changes in place.

To set the stage for some of the tools that I will be discussing here I figured I'd outline some of the collaborative tools that I currently use, and mention ones that I've recently (within the last few months) have evaluated.  I'll likely be revisiting some of these tools in the near future. The software is shown in categories (as I evaluated them) below.

The Obsessive Collaborator is a site dedicated to collaborative software of many kinds.  It was inspired by the fact that I have been in pursuit of useful collaborative tools over the last several years and thought that I should document the things that I learn when I evaluate and use new tools, and share those with a broader community.

What differentiates The Obsessive Collaborator from a number of other sites and blogs discussing collaborative technologies, is that this site is focused on the use of such tools in academics, workgroups and small businesses.  It does not take an enterprise perspective.  The enterprise market has sufficient tools and attention.  Large organizations can run expensive software on expensive hardware and create reasonably effective collaborative environments.  I've tried some of these tools (e.g. Exchange, Sharepoint, Novell) and they work quite well, albeit with high complexity and corresponding workload to install and maintain.

Smaller organizations are missing out on the collaborative revolution, due to the costs and complexities (and sometimes lack of knowledge) of enterprise solutions.  I (like many others) see this collaborative space as the next (or current) phase of the Internet.  Blogs, wikis, and social networking spaces are all the rage, and businesses are starting to take notice.  But the more traditional shared workspaces and calendaring, project management, and even email are also components of this space. In the face of email overload, many people and places are in need of solutions to facilitate communication and collaboration more effectively.  Smaller, leaner groups and organizations should be able to take advantage of these tools as well. 

I've explored dozens (or perhaps hundreds by now) of collaborative solutions to use for relatively small teams to coordinate and collaborate.  The common themes for these tools are:

• They foster collaboration and communication in some way.  This can be something very task specific like shared calendaring, or much more general like document sharing.
• They are free (as in beer) or cheap.  The tools need to be inexpensive to acquire, install (if necessary) and maintain.  While many of the solutions are open source (which sometimes provides value added), it is not a requirement.  This opens the door to many free online hosted tools, as well as ones that are locally hosted.
• They can be run easily for small groups.  The tools can't require complex configuration and maintenance that makes them intractable for small groups.  Small means 25 or less, though in most cases 100 or less fits the bill as well.  This doesn't exclude tools that scale really well to hundreds or thousands.
• They are cross platform.  Servers need to run at least on different flavors of Linux, and preferably Windows and Mac OS as well.  If clients are required they must exist on Windows and Mac OS and preferably Linux too.  

There are many criteria that are applied in evaluating the tools including cost of acquisition and maintenance, licensing and data ownership implications, scalability (within the "small" range), platform flexibility (desktop and handheld), simplicity in use and administration, quality of software (both ease of use and lack of bugs), and future prospects (some community or group advancing the software). 

I am not an "IT Guy", but use a lot of technology in my work (and free time) and frequently or constantly have the need to work with other people.  And I like to share, as I'll be doing here.

I also reserve the right to muse about other things related to collaborative IT - including new flavors of Linux to run servers on, and Mac news that is one of my other personal obsessions

Next up - tools I'm using and tools I've evaluated.