Integrated Collaborative Environments (30 products)

[edit] Brief Description

Integrated Collaborative Environments facilitate communication among geographically dispersed coworkers

Synonyms: Collaborative Environments

Tags: collaborative environments, communication

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Contents
Description Top Collaborative Integrated Software and how to choose Communities See also

Description

What is collaboration software? It can be any tool, web based usually or on a local server that lets people in a team or in a company communicate and work together on a certain project, share information and documents, talk in real time over local or remote networks. The term "groupware" is also used to describe a software collaborative environment that includes tools for facilitating communication and team project management : email, videoconferencing, instant messaging, chat, file storage, wiki, conference applications.

We no longer use collaboration as a luxury but as a necessity as the world of communication has changed dramatically in the last years. There's an obvious need for facilitating remote working environments and real-time interaction no matter where and when

Remember the times when the proprietary and stand-alone tools were used in companies to bring people together. Phones, faxes helped remote user communicate but in today modern business environment more and more solutions rosed and it's even harder to choose the right solution. Collaboration tools, and more specifically a collaboration environment, can lead to dramatic increases in business value. Using collaboration as a means facilitates more effective business processes and decreases information technology support requirements and costs.

There is now a better way for online collaboration to increase cost savings and productivity while improving customer acquisition and retention rates. Old barriers to online collaboration, such as unpredictable pricing, low security and minimal user adoption, are a thing of the past

Top Collaborative Integrated Software and how to choose

An enterprise-capable collaboration infrastructure or just a team workplaces can integrates the collaboration tools into common interfaces accessible from any process

Integrated collaborative applications can be implemented locally for each line of business, but managed centrally from the data center. And all communications - text, voice, fax, calendar, discussions and conference, are provided through a common interface available online or at the desktop

It's very important that from the start you want to know what you want to achieve, what you need from the application, the technical aspects of setting the collaborative application and what are the costs you are willing to pay

Commercial Collaborative Software

Lotus Notes

	The father of all integrated collaborative software is considered to be Lotus Notes from IBM, the leader in collaboration. Mainly used as an email client, but also an instant messaging client (for Lotus Sametime), browser, notebook, and calendar/resource reservation client, as well as a platform for interacting with collaborative applications , Lotus Notes is actually a desktop integrating option that lets you access all the applications on Lotus Domino server. It's considered to be secure but not very user friendly and to get tasks done you have to experience an excessive number of mouse clicks. Even with that, Lotus Notes is a strong contextual collaboration application that helps business professionals around the world

Microsoft SameTime

Oracle Collaboration Suite

Of the various collaboration tools available on the market, only Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g delivers an integrated platform of leading tools that meet these requirements and power the Collaboration-Enabled Enterprise

Free /Open Source Collaborative Enviroments

Google

There's always Google that has it's own powerful apps for organizations & groups, but the tools are not integrated. For communication you can have an unlimited storage account with Gmail, instant messaging with Google Talk and collaborative calendars with Google Calendar

more.groupware is a popular free web based software collaboration tool written in PHP that can handle project management, calendars, address and contact management, messages, news has skins and much more. Its worth taking a look

If you want to do everything semantic , then you do have some options here too:you can use POWL which is a web based platform for collaborative semantic web development written for PHP. A framework for semantic web applications, Powl allows parsing, storing, querying, manipulating, versioning, serving and serializing RDF-S and OWL knowledge bases in a collaborative web enabled environment