Instant messaging
Whether corresponding with colleagues across the hall or with those who are a part of the virtual enterprise, instant messaging (IM) is of tremendous value today. Checking to see who is online and whether they are available for immediate discussion on something urgent can be of great advantage in today’s busy work scenario. The most common kind of collaboration tool is the desk-to-desktop kind, while the more complex applications extend to wireless applications and handheld devices like PDA’s and cellular phones.

Enterprise messaging tools are replacing the public Yahoo and AOL chatting tools and they contain added security features to keep critical data from the view of unauthorized viewers. Messaging tools open up communication bottlenecks and combine heterogeneous knowledge bases, thus allowing the entire organization to speak the same language.

How does an online discussion help in collaboration? An entirely human activity like speech that's now being automated? While saving on personal meetings, the actual saving of chat transcripts helps keep useful records. Allowing real-time audio and video conferencing including whiteboard integration enables application sharing repositioning the term 'collaboration', to nifty levels.

Web conferencing tools
Web conferencing tools offer desktop and application sharing and can help conduct real-time meetings and seminars. External applications like training and customer support employ these tools extensively.

Enterprise information portals
A company's useful knowledge is usually in the form of unstructured information residing in email, on the desktop and other internal documents. To optimize this human-centric knowledge, an effective collaboration solution that works across large, distributed organizational teams is needed. An enterprise information portal provides an environment where people collaborate and share information, manage relationships and share work.

With the new shift in information from a document-centric model to a more dynamic collaborative one, the defining characteristics for an enterprise information portal are changing. The most common functional components of an Enterprise Information Portal are content management, personalization, application integration and collaboration.

Content management solutions
An enterprise information portal facilitates collaborative creation and deployment of content and also manages large volumes of content and transactions. Increasingly, it concerns itself with document creation. Form and textual content are separated and stored separately in a content repository. Workflows concerned with content creation and deployment are managed and monitored too. Currently, content management supports access to wireless devices without any device-specific formatting.

Web-based employee communication tools range from email to instant messaging and selecting the right one that will suit all the team members is sometimes quite tricky. The Enterprise Information Portal solves this problem by hosting all these tools on a common platform and ensures that ideas and knowledge are not lost, thus playing a fundamental role in knowledge capturing and sharing.

In addition the personalization features offer filtered and targeted content and thus enable a user-customizable interface on the portal. The portal also hosts search services that can offer results from various data bases, web sites and other collaborative categories that make the search process an easier one.

Contextual collaboration
All the above collaborative tools combined with enterprise applications are what Gartner and other analyst firms refer to as contextual collaboration. These tools help organizations store and share information from a centralized location from various applications like CRM applications and sales force automation. Contextual collaborations embed collaboration into other applications such as enterprise information portals and give the user a fresh and personalized feel. Through the creation of dynamic project-level teams file sharing, attachment distribution, creation of polls and alerts, project management and workflow are streamlined. Alerts that tell the user what happened in his absence when he didn't use the portal allow a collaborative web that extends beyond the presence of the portal.

Collaborative functionality when available across business applications and web sites, reaches a broader level and a wider audience.

Integration with CRM applications
CRM technologies are customer-facing technologies that represent the interface that interacts with customers and suppliers. Organizations can tie together critical information from various applications like CRM (customer relationship management) and SCM (supply chain management) into a common storage area from where other collaborative applications can interoperate efficiently.

Finally, adding web services to the existing collaboration tools like e-mail, P2P technologies provide a better chance to create and link relationships. What's important is to select a common easy-to-use platform to implement all collaborative ideas, like web and email with a clear understanding of the organization's culture and the needs that motivate such a solution.

Selecting the right collaborative tool
Consider the current state of collaboration existing in your organization and decide if you want to expand it or merely digitize the process. Do u need simple chat or instant messaging? Do u need to save the chat sessions? It is always better to select a package that offers shared services and supports multiple file types.

Indispensable features of any collaborative tool are web conferencing, shared calendars, discussions, shared workspaces, document sharing, chat, instant messaging, and whiteboard features, either offered individually or as hybrids.

Selecting a product is fine, deciding how and where to deploy it within the organization is the next step. Study your business and understand the role that the Internet plays in interacting with suppliers and customers. How is information shared between suppliers and customers? Across private lines or firewalls? Find out how the service addresses firewalls and what limitations regarding security exist.

Map your integration and customization requirements and understand them. Understand how they integrate with backend and CRM-like systems. Determine the length of time required for integration and customization. How many internal resources are required for support? How easy is it to train users? The answers to these questions will make for an easy and painless deployment.

Use a common easy to-use-interface like the web to deploy the solution. This requires no prior setup and users from different locales remain connected irrespective of the collaborative application that they are working with.

Collaborative systems make it easier to capture interaction between participants in a team and respond to a crisis situation. They help gain insights into failures and successes.

Additionally, what they do is to:

• Increase efficiencies
  
• Streamline business processes
  
• Deliver services more cost effectively
  
• Enhance organizational intelligence
  
• Develop stronger relationships with key stakeholders — e.g., employees, vendors, nonprofit, the business community, other levels of government and the public
  
• Share resources

Check out this link to read more about vendors in the collaborative tools market today

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