The collaboration marketplace has been evolving over the last 10 years, delivering technologies that enable coordination and information sharing, virtual meetings, and more recently virtual collocation. With these technologies, we have an opportunity to better support the mobile workforce and leverage personnel assets, wherever they may be. Examples include e-mail, discussion groups, information sharing tools, and group calendaring systems. These tools allow people to work together, regardless of whether team members and work products are physically collocated. Tools such as e-mail enable team members to exchange electronic messages with attached files.
Discussion groups enable teams to conduct threaded discussions, which are available to the team.
Information sharing tools such as Web servers and Lotus Notes enable teams to publish information and can provide an interface to share information in corporate directories and databases. Group calendaring systems enable teams to schedule meetings and the necessary resources for the meeting. This market segment has been maturing over the last 6-10 years and provides a stable technology base, with scalability to support the enterprise. Tools from different vendors are largely interoperable, with most vendors conforming to common standards or exchange formats. It is quite common to find many of these complementary tools bundled together as part of a product suite.