IMARK Lesson 5: Group Productivity and Collaboration Tools

Groupware allows for fostering collaboration in the group and make processes more efficient and productive. There is a wide variety of tools available on the internet to support different interaction levels: communication, conferencing and collaboration.

Email continues to be the basic and most popular way to communicate over the internet. It is a good idea to use email and email based tools when requirements are one-to-one, or users have low connectivity communications.

Blogs allow sharing, accessing and easily updating information while Wikis can be an extremely versatile collaboration tool for creating and editing documents, documenting, translating and other tasks. There are some other useful tools such as video and image sharing and podcasting. Instant messaging allows the communication with others in real time. All IM applications allow text messaging, but some of them have incorporated video and voice conversations. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications and services allow users to make high quality, low cost calls over the internet.

Contact databases and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) help to keep contact information organized and up to date, manage events, donations and follow up on campaigns and newsletters. On the other hand, project management tools include software for scheduling, managing budget and resources, following up on tasks and workflows, graphics and charts of the progress of the project and some communications and document sharing features. These tools can help support all distributed projects.