Hosted Web-based groupware can meet the needs of agencies with light infrastructure. For a monthly per-user fee, it provides calendaring, contact management, document management including varied access privileges and an online document viewer. It has a bulletin board that is accessible only to your organization, and online conference rooms. Here s something that is free. When a meeting is established, all participants can view the same document in their browser windows.
Users can mark up the document and type comments.
For many organizations, their intranet is their collaborative tool. By letting users make changes to their address book entries, post and delete job opportunities, and publish documents, an intranet can provide many of the basic advantages of groupware products. If your department or agency hasn t gotten around to putting up an intranet, you can consider one of the intranet in a box products. Mindbridge Software Inc. s IntraSmart, which requires only a Web browser, Web server and database, provides a large number of modules that allow for group collaboration, including document sharing, group and calendar scheduling, an employee directory, a threaded discussion board and bulletin board, and company bookmarks. All of the groupware products discussed so far, other than the hosted Web services, have many features that affect virtually all areas of collaboration.