Recently in About Category

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.