Group collaboration

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 tools. Many other applications and service have been developed and offered to the marketplace as well. The field is also sometimes referred to as Collaborative Software.

These tools typically include member and email 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.

A number of free online group collaborations solutions exist. In 2000 Yahoo purchased eGroups and renamed the service Yahoo! Groups. This is probably the most widely used service although other companies such as AOL and Microsoft also offer online group solutions. More recently a number of startups like AirSet, have emerged to take advantage of newer browser technologies like Ajax to deliver more sophisticated applications in their collaboration suites.

Wikis work well for group collaboration and it appear to be one of the major innovation in group collaboration. Wikipedia seems to be the most representative example in public domain however, several success story can be found in the corporate field, such as PBwiki.