Collaboration tool

A collaboration tool helps people to collaborate. The purpose of a collaboration tool is to support a group of two or more individuals to accomplish a common goal or objective. Collaboration tools can be either of a non-technological nature such as paper, flipcharts, post-it notes or whiteboards. They can also include software tools and applications such as collaborative software. A collaboration tool helps people to collaborate. The purpose of a collaboration tool is to support a group of two or more individuals to accomplish a common goal or objective. Collaboration tools can be either of a non-technological nature such as paper, flipcharts, post-it notes or whiteboards. They can also include software tools and applications such as collaborative software. The first idea to use computers in order to work with each other was formed in 1945 when Vannevar Bush shared his thoughts on a system he named 'memex' in his article 'As We May Think'. A system that stores books, records and communications of an individual and makes them available at any time. At this stage he called it 'an enlarged supplement to his memory'. In 1968 computer systems were brought in connection with communication and the potential way of working together when not at the same place by Dr. J. C. R. Licklider, head of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In his article “The Computer as a Communication Device” he envisioned the idea that there should be a way of “facilitating communication among people without bringing them together in one place” , which eventually led to ARPANET, commercial time-sharing systems and finally the Internet. When the Microcomputer was invented in 1970, everyone learned about office automation, which led to the first collaborative software called Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) that allowed to do surveys, threaded replies and group-structured approaches. In 1980 educator C. A. Ellis came up with the definition of the term 'groupware' as “computer-based systems that support groups of people engaged in a common task (or goal) and that provide an interface to a shared environment” . After six years Brian Wilson then shaped the term “Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in 1986. He described it as “a generic term which combines the understanding of the way people work in groups with the enabling technologies of computer networking, and associated hardware, software, services, and techniques”. This laid the foundation to develop further on the ideas of groupware and in the 1990s Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook were invented. In 2002 at the Social Software Summit Clay Shirky introduced the phrase “social software” as a 'software that supports group interaction'. Three aspects of collaboration: communication, coordination and cooperation can be used to categorize collaboration tools. Communication tools provide exchange of information between individuals: The invention of email as a collaboration tool changed the way we used to communicate in the workplace. It is the easiest method to make contact within an organization and is well established. Especially for organizing daily correspondence, email can reach various people with just one click. Although email is still the most common used tool in communication collaboration it is not very efficient on a big scale and other forms of communication seem to take over. Besides its flexibility it is not very well for group conversations as they grow too fast. There is no way to be sure that you have the latest version of a document that has been sent to you and it is impossible to always track via your email what tasks need to be done and by which deadline. As Cisco states in their Cisco Blog about the 'Future of Email', emails 'will improve productivity by organizing your data for you' and try to bring more transparency in your work with email.