Whatever technology you use, your main challenge in getting collaboration started is going to be social. So you may as well start using simple technology and work on the social factors. Building Collaboration is a Social Problem not a Technical One Collaboration one of the holy grails of organisations. Everything will go so much better if we collaborate. But in practice, collaboration is hard. It is hard to do and hard to get others to do. It is not hard because of poor technology. There is plenty of great collaboration technology. It is hard because of people and the environments that we work in. Collaboration involves helping other people, often before they help you. If you help other people enough, they might start helping you. Or they might not. Most people in organisations are busy. Busy achieving their individual goals. That's what doing our jobs usually requires. So to collaborate I have to stop doing my job and start doing yours for a while. If you ever come to help me, I have to take the time to explain the problem to you. For me to take the risk of helping you, or of making myself vulnerable by asking a question takes trust. Pretty much the only way to build that trust is repeated examples of helpfulness in a group. So building a culture of collaboration is a chicken and egg process. There is no easy formula to this. Pressures of competitive culture, or of cultural difference mitigate against it.