Groups both provide free web-based email groups but they are supported by advertising and do not provide a dedicated site for your groups. Social Adoption Hacks Whatever technology you use for online collaboration, it's never quite going to meet all your needs. This means that you are going to have to adopt particular approaches to using it. For example, I usually use an "Availability" topic in team online groups. Everyone in the team uses that topic to let others know when they are going to be away. That way there is only one place to look to find out who is unavailable when. It is not as sophisticated as a calendar but it works and is trivial to set up. If you are going to have to adapt to your software using social hacks anyway, you may as well start with simple versatile software. This will give you a chance to focus on growing participation.If participation does grow, over time you will learn about specific tasks that the group has. This will give you the detailed information necessary to choose a more specialised tool. A Lean Collaboration Tool Adoption Process This approach is similar to the lean startup approach to business development. The lean startup approach starts with a hypothesis about how customers will interact with a new product. It uses the most lightweight implementation of the product that is possible (a " Minimum Viable Product ") to test the hypothesis. Making iterative tweaks to both the hypothesis and the