Below are five important trends in collaboration solutions. Think carefully about how the solution you are using (or considering) reflects this rapidly changing dynamic.

1. Collaboration equals integration

Collaboration means many things to many people. For some, it’s document management and sharing. For others, it’s social networking (within a business context). And for others still, it’s project or task management for teams. However it is defined, effective collaboration solutions will increasingly combine the elements of project and work planning, file sharing and social task management into one unified whole.

The pendulum is swinging from point tools to integrated collaboration solutions. We all know that breaking down silos in organizations is key to ensuring effective collaboration. Similarly, the tools that those teams use must also break through artificial barriers between domains of collaboration. Approaches to breaking these barriers range from the numerous, external integrations of Tibco Tibbr to our all-in-one system, Mindjet Connect. Either approach is equally valid and worthy of consideration.

2. Integration does not equal complication

The trend towards integration may seem to imply increased complexity, but the most successful solutions will prevent that from happening. The war in this space is not being won by complex features; it is being won by usability. Because a satisfying user experience is paramount to driving user adoption — and a collaboration tool is worth nothing if the team members won’t actually use it on a daily basis — people will move towards collaboration solutions that are simple to use and immediately gratifying. Do.com is a good example of a simple-to-use collaboration tool that combines usability with capability.

3. Public and private co-exist

While the dramatic push to cloud-based collaboration continues, on-premise collaboration products still maintain an important role for enterprises not yet ready to make the transition. Even organizations that require some of their content to be stored — and for collaboration to take place — behind the firewall still require the ability to collaborate seamlessly with external parties in the form of the three ‘C’s: contractors, consultants and clients. As a result, many organizations that have not fully embraced public cloud-based collaboration solutions will still require a combination of on-premise and public cloud solutions to meet their needs.

This is often seen in the case of organizations that are using Microsoft SharePoint, which includes the majority of large enterprises today. Although SharePoint has been a strong tool for document storage, sharing and basic task management behind the firewall, external collaboration has never been its strong point. Now many organizations are beginning to supplement SharePoint with other tools to break through that barrier and generally improve the usability of SharePoint. Solutions that play particularly well with SharePoint include Box and my own company. Box’s SharePoint integration provides users with access to files in SharePoint. And Mindjet has a version of Connect that runs entirely on-premise on top of SharePoint.

4. Collaboration mobilization

Like everything else in the world of technology, collaboration is going mobile. Recently, the daily time spent in mobile apps surpassed desktop and mobile web consumption. Driven primarily by the remarkable popularity of iOS and Android platforms, it took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage.

The majority of web-based collaboration platforms today have a mobile component. Huddle, Asana and Mindjet  all have natively-written mobile applications for various platforms that largely function as add-ons to their core platforms. As mobile technologies continue to mature, the focus of these applications will shift from being second-tier clients of cloud-based applications to being the main point of interaction between users and the collaboration services. For many knowledge workers, mobile will soon shift from being the exception to being the rule, and successful collaboration solutions will reflect this.

5. From vision to action

The purpose of collaboration tools is not just better communication — it is to get real work done. Software will continue to make huge strides in terms of helping teams of people turn vision into action more effectively and more efficiently than ever before. Executives must encourage the use of these solutions by being avid users themselves. Those that are successful in leveraging these capabilities will have a significant competitive advantage.

Blaine Mathieu is the chief products officer at Mindjet, a provider of collaborative work management solutions.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ernst Vikne.

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It’s a simple test, Young said, but it was also one that all employees could easily participate in. The resulting data points could be used to not only rate an individual employee’s satisfaction with his or her job, but also to help promote cohesion between team members and identify if certain groups or employees, such as graphic designers or salespeople, were becoming disenfranchised.

VMWare recently acquired Socialcast, making Young VP of Social Enterprise. Despite the sophistication of its virtualization software implementations, Young said it has kept Socialcast true to its principles of providing simple business solutions can cut through the normally high level of complexity at an enterprise.

“We’re not really building software here,” Young said. “We’re helping people to unleash their power internally, become heroes and become more affective at their jobs. If we can provide really simple tools — not complex tools inside the workplace that they have to spend a lot of time training on and learning, trying to figure out how they drive value for their own jobs — if we give them really simple tools, they can use them to flourish.”

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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In a press release, Teambox said that private elements “allows users to conduct private conversations within a project that can be restricted to certain individuals. This new functionality is ideal for internal teams that want to bring outside vendors into Teambox for project and task management, but also need the flexibility of private internal conversations.”

This is an eye opening combination of a collaboration tool supporting modern organizational practice – creating circles of communication. Transparency design choices are explicitly in the project management mix with the addition of private elements. Information can be transparent across all members of project — or not — as deemed appropriate by the project administrators and the task at hand. Karl Goldfield, Teambox vice president of sales and marketing, explained it to me with an example:

Wedding planners, like an Internet marketing lead, or any other general contractor, have lots of clients and subcontractors.  When it comes to certain things, you want open collaboration. A wedding planner doesn’t always want to filter [limit] information to clients and the florists or the caterers they work with. They invite the client to a project where they understand the different subcontractors they  can work with (for example, seeing all the information for all four possible caterers) — they all get to see things and discuss. Everyone is in this open place focused on working on what the client wants.

Think about that: The client, and all the bidding florists, caterers, etc. get to see the information from the others, though this level of transparency isn’t fixed. The conversation can go private, tighter circles can be created, perhaps as the bids come in, or perhaps only after particular bids are accepted.

I asked Karl about the response from the subcontractors.  Are they comfortable with this cross-organization, cross-competitor transparency?

Karl responded with a perfect Enterprise 2.0 answer:

People can already contact a [competing] caterer and find their pricing — and if [the competitor] wants to keep it private they can just not answer. But, if I’m a good wedding planner and work with a specific set of caterers and do 100 weddings a year and 25 percent of the projects come to you — I’m the caterer’s best buddy — even if 75 percent of the business goes to others. The caterer knows the final decision (the clients’) will be personal preference. This isn’t a question of the technology system, but one of the relationship.

Makes sense to me. Yes, I’d be giving information to my competitors, but I’m also learning through the process. If this work process brings us into a community, the benefits may outweigh any costs. We all become better caterers or florists.  We learn our own competitive advantages.  We have community members to cross-sell with and or to ask for help.

But not all wedding planners, Internet marketing teams, or other Teambox users may understand these community issues straight away. I asked Karl how Teambox helps people come to understand this. How do you help users learn how to manage all these options and strategic choices?

My goal for 2012 is an education campaign. Online videos, best-case scenarios. Eight to 10 core [types of users with demos on] how to make Teambox the central resource for communication…. We want to find ways of keeping the noise off your plate.

Karl had me think of two different types of project collaborators to clarify the information noise issue. The first is a highlevel manager who doesn’t want details. This manager just wants to follow a dashboard and a timeline — no drill down — as clean and quiet an interface as possible. That manager wouldn’t be part of the private elements until he or she asked for details and then the manager could be invited in. The second type might want a more micro understanding of how the project is going. It would take too much time to play middle-man with this manager so nothing in the project should be private; let him or her see everything as it happens.

Karl also talked about the evolution of how Teambox is used and how this helps people come to understand the value in their particular setting. Initially they might manage Teambox information completely from their email inbox (using Teambox’s notification and response systems). As their use becomes greater they will find value in managing Teambox content from the activity stream. But Karl suggests that you don’t push this approach to happen overnight. Let circle techniques evolve as use grows.

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Collaboration is in full swing on the web, for both social and work-oriented purposes. Most of us can rattle off the well-known applications that are available, but there are many targeted, useful collaboration apps that are more offbeat. Here are 10 of them, many of them free.

Redliner. If you’ve ever tried to collaborate with others on documents over email, you know that version control problems and many other issues can arise. Redliner is becoming one of the more popular online tools to get around these problems. Unlike, say, Google Docs, it offers a complete commenting and revision system. Check it out in the screencast here. Redliner is currently being beta tested and you can use it for free, although it will eventually move to a paid monthly model.

doingText. Also on the document collaboration front, doingText has steadily grown into a robust, hosted platform. It’s available in a version for $5 a month, and you can share documents via randomly generated, unique URL.

Kablink. Kablink is a free and open source collection of collaboration components that lets groups work offline and online. When work is produced offline, it can automatically be synced with other users’ work online. Conferencing and wiki-like features are available.

Collanos Workspace. The motto of the Collanos Workspace free, open source collaboration platform is “Think outside the inbox.” To set up a team work environment, you click Create Space and begin inviting people. You can post files of many formats to collaborate on, instant message while you work and track pending tasks.

PBworks. At November’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, the folks behind PBWiki announced the addition of real-time collaboration tools to their wiki platform. The new PBworks suite of tools includes in-app instant messaging, live notifications of changes to an organization’s workspaces, live editing of documents and voice collaboration. There are also business and legal document templates available in an online store. Businesses, legal firms and schools pay just a few dollars per month per user (pricing varies by package) for PBWorks’ hosted collaboration apps.

Drop.io. The free file-sharing service Drop.io is used by many editors and writers across The GigaOM Network to easily upload files that can be shared with collaborators by simply providing a short URL to visit. Drop.io also now offers real-time collaboration features for tasks such as sharing files during phone conferences.

Socialtext. Based on the concept of combining a wiki with a blog, Socialtext provides an enterprise-level group collaboration platform. Every person who is a member of an organization’s Socialtext account gets their own dashboard –- or personal homepage –- where they can embed and arrange via drag-and-drop both personal and work information, images, and widgets. Email and microblogging are also integrated with the platform in useful ways. Socialtext is free for groups of 50 users or fewer who want basic features, and reasonably priced fee-based packages with all the bells and whistles are available.

e-tipi. e-tipi incorporates elements of Twitter, Digg, wikis and blogs to create a shared workspace through which ideas are fleshed out. Each user page is called a tipi, and it contains various ideas submitted by the tipi’s users. You can export data to HTML for sharing on web pages, too. You can watch a demo here, and free accounts are available.

MemberHub. Group management and communication service MemberHub equips users with dashboards, discussion forums, shared calendars and many other tools for sharing ideas and collaborating. You can see how it works in this video, and pricing is found here, including a free version. 10 cents per person per month, purchased in blocks of 100.

Colaab. If you want a very feature-rich collaboration platform with a slick user interface, check out Colaab. Once you sign up for an account, you begin by creating a workspace. As Pamela over on WebWorkerDaily notes, “the workspace includes an integrated IM feature, and discussions are displayed in the upper part of the right-hand panel, while the lower part shows which users are participating.” Colaab is available in a starter version for $24 a month, which includes 1GB of storage and 10 workspaces.

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Nike’s Shambhala initiative

Traditionally, employees had two methods of communicating with one another: email and the company intranet. The former, while dynamic enough to support actual work, lacked transparency, longevity and opportunities for collaboration. The intranet, on the other hand, was great for sharing static information across teams and individuals. Neither, however, reflected how people actually worked together. So in 2004, Yuen left his position in Nike’s corporate social responsibility team, and set out on his own to develop a product that could do better. The result was fmyi — as in, “for my information” — and it’s a rare success story in the web 2.0 landscape: a social-media-infused enterprise collaboration tool that’s been profitable since two years after its founding.

Fmyi, which is billed as an “online social workspace,” blends elements of Basecamp, Highrise Facebook and Friendfeed to create a remarkably flexible, natural system for enterprise collaboration. Unlike Basecamp, for example, which creates rigid buckets for projects and teams, fmyi recognizes that users belong to multiple groups, and not only need different access to different individual projects, but may also need to share discussions across parallel projects. The site’s organization and architecture support this (see screenshot below), with filters for how information is shared, profile pages, featured content items controlled by the site admin, and different ways of sorting and organizing the same pieces of content. The system also indexes documents uploaded to the site so the content — not just file names and associated messages — are easily searchable.

As a long-time Facebook user and Basecamp advocate, I was impressed with fmyi’s toolset, which seems to reflect the way many of my friends and colleagues have become used to collaborating — in an ad hoc, dynamic way, with an emphasis on transparency. At the same time, it’s devoid of some of the weaknesses other systems I’ve tried often share, such as a lack of security or robust permissions and a constant tug-of-war between information overload from a firehose-like stream of content and overly segmented pockets that restrict sharing. The question of social context for content is one that Facebook has been trying to answer with new privacy filters — perhaps the team should ask Yuen for some pointers. (The two sites speak a similar design language already, and fmyi users can expect a new UI even more reminiscent of Facebook later this summer.)

In some ways, it’s this relationship to consumer social networking tools that’s driving growth for fmyi. Yuen says he’s seen an uptick of interest in the social media-like aspects of fmyi’s solution, and the company is tweaking its marketing and development priorities in response. The $275 million enterprise social media space (GigaOM Pro subscription required) is growing rapidly, as the success of consumer social networking sites has begun to filter into the business world, with heavyweights like Microsoft SharePoint and smaller companies like Jive all angling for a piece of the pie. But Yuen says he’s not feeling pressure from the influx of new competitors: the company’s revenues for the first half of 2009 have already exceed all of those from 2008, despite the economic downturn.

While the market’s growth has helped make potential customers more aware of the ways such solutions can improve productivity and solve workflow problems, Yuen’s quick to point out that it’s not just overall market growth driving fmyi’s success. There are many solutions on the market, but “no one has really done it well and cracked the code,” says Yuen. From his perspective, fmyi’s main selling point is that its social tools are all organized within workflow, allowing companies to reap significant productivity benefits. (For example, MTV show “Room Raiders,” which uses the system for casting and production schedule management, was reportedly able to cut the length of an average workday to 9 hours from 14 hours after adopting the tool.)

Yuen is also experimenting with using social media as a way to launch and monitor sustainability projects. Through a partnership with the Northwest Earth Institute, fmyi will offer an online discussion course around workplace sustainability within its platform and offer tools for tracking sustainability projects that emerge from the course. Yuen says the company will begin a pilot with two companies “soon” and launch the template for more widespread use later this summer.

The Portland, Ore.-based company, which has been profitable since 2006 without any external investment, currently hosts 6,000 sites. Clients include HBO, Sony, Nike (although it’s using fmyi for product groups, not sustainability efforts these days) and AFLAC (field agents use it for tracking customer relationships). Hyatt is one large company leveraging the company’s sustainability expertise; the hotel chain uses fmyi to coordinate its Global Sustainability Initiative. As far as Yuen is concerned, fmyi’s roots in the sustainability movement may help it work with clients more successfully than its competitors: “Social media and sustainability are both about culture change,” he says.

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One such startup is San Francisco-based DocVerse, a company started by Alex DeNeui and Shan Sinha, both former Microsoft employees who worked on the Redmond giant’s SharePoint and SQL Server. DocVerse, which emerged from stealth mode today, has received over $1 million in a first round of financing from Baseline Ventures, Michael Dearing and a few other angels.

DocVerse has also developed a Microsoft Office add-on that connects to the software’s back end to enable simple collaboration. Most of us exchange documents with team members via email, with changes highlighted for others to review. But this is a cumbersome process and not the best use of email, quite frankly. With DocVerse’s plugin, sharing and editing of documents is dead simple. It can automatically sync the document to an online vault and from there, with other team members. I used it briefly and really liked it.

Simon Mackie, editor of WebWorkerDaily, took it for a more extensive test drive and shared his take with readers. The company is sharing 200 beta invites with GigaOM readers, but Mac people need not apply. Functionality is also currently limited to PowerPoint, but Microsoft Word and Excel support is coming soon.

Even though it is still early days, DocVerse has a steep climb ahead of it. As I’ve said before, collaboration software is a very crowded space. Moreover, the company will have to live with the constant fear that Microsoft will release a similar offering as part of its future Microsoft Office upgrades. Nor can it ignore the fact that folks are starting to use Google Docs as a way to collaborate, never mind the other competitors that I haven’t bothered to mention. Of course, who said playing and winning in the big leagues, where billions of dollars are at stake, was going to be easy?

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