Which method do you choose for online collaboration?

Let's recall how we work together in the era of no network? First, you need an area that can stay together (we call it an "Office"). Collaboration members can communicate with each other easily, the next step is to write and transmit conversations, meetings, work assignments, and office documents. If remote collaboration is involved, telephone, fax, and letters are inevitable, only in this way can everyone's work be synchronized, and information can be transmitted evenly among the collaboration members. If you are the only one to complete all the work, then this is not necessary. In the Internet era, we are very accustomed to using email for work collaboration. Of course, there is also IM (many companies also use it as the killer of work efficiency ), today's blogs, wikis, discussion groups, and various forms of online collaboration tools and spaces are enriching our forms of collaboration as long as you can properly use them.

Like traditional office collaboration, online collaboration needs to work with the right people, which is related to the skill level, personality, knowledge, work style and harmony of members, we also need to provide the appropriate environment, tools, knowledge, training and a simple way for everyone to work together. These are more challenging than face-to-face real-time collaboration, but also more valuable. Online Collaboration completely removes the limitations of physical space and time, and makes the combination of collective intelligence more effective. This virtual collaboration method has made opensource prosperous. Thousands of developers around the world use wiki, SVN, Bugzilla, IRC and mailing list have completed great projects such as Linux, Apache, and Firefox. 37. Jason Fried of signals said: "Why do you have to restrict yourself to several people around you when you can work with anyone. If I only work with people in Chicago, I will never be able to work with David. Then there will be no rails in the world ." -- 37 interview with Jason Fried, founder of Signals

Online Collaboration

Before discussing how to choose the right collaboration tool, we need to abstract the form of online collaboration. According to the term of the Collaboration time, it can be divided into three forms:

• Conversations: you only need to contact your collaborators once or a few times to complete the discussion on one or more specific topics in a short period of time.
• Projects: You need to contact your collaboration members frequently until the project is completed.
• Alliances.

The following table lists the advantages and disadvantages of a common online collaboration tool:

Tools and methods	Advantages	Disadvantages	Suitable forms of collaboration
Weblog	Easy to publish and comment; The content can be subscribed to and re-published.	Participation is limited to comments	Session
Wiki	Anyone can contribute content	Difficult to learn; Easy to be modified and damaged; Not beautiful enough	Project/Union
Whiteboard (Whiteboard)	Real-time; Anyone can contribute content	The content only exists during the session period; Firewall Problems	Session/Project
Document-sharing (Document sharing)	It can be real-time; Anyone can contribute content	Focus only on one document; Firewall Problems	Session/Project
Im/Skype/phone/ Videoconferencing	Complete real-time collaboration; Voice/video content; speed	Content only exists during the session period	Session
Mindmaps (Mind chart)	Comments from multiple people	Unable to capture details	Project Type
Discussion forums (Discussion Group)	Ability to comment in the form of a topic; The content can be subscribed to and re-published.	There are limitations on the relevance of participation knowledge; It is easy to cause untrained behaviors; Topic cannot be discussed continuously	Session
Community of Practice/ Interest Spaces (Interest space)	Organized; Clarify member relationships; Collaboration tools suitable for multiple users	Difficult to learn; Formal restrictions reduce user intimacy and engagement	Project/Union
E-mail groups	Elastic; Personal; Easy to use	Junk mails and emails are overloaded; Difficult to navigate and organize, lack of relevance	Project/Union
Social networking (Social Network)	Suitable for large-scale members; Is the best way to discover other collaborators	In fact, you will not use a social network to complete specific collaboration work.	Collaborators found
In-person collaboration (Direct collaboration)	Simple; Real-time; Rich Performance; Elastic	High cost; time consumed	If time and money permit, any form of collaboration is acceptable.

Alternative to face-to-face communication-session-based collaboration

Conversational collaboration is a popular conversation, that is, instant face-to-face conversations. Everyone will initiate a dialogue with the help of a common interest, an important idea, or an urgent need. During business activities, we spend a lot of time talking about solving problems, discussing ideas, and asking for opinions. We can quickly ask and answer questions, all of these are completed in a short session. There are two key points for efficient Session-based collaboration:

• Find the right person: If you work in a large company with many employees and complex organizational structures, "Who should I ask to discuss this issue?" is the most common phenomenon (I believe some of my friends will feel deeply), extending this problem to the outside of the company, only when appropriate customers, collaborators, and support personnel are found can effective communication be conducted, because the right person can do the right thing. Therefore, I think that social networks (such as wealink in China), which can help you find appropriate collaboration objects, whether inside or outside the Organization, it will be a basic tool for online collaboration because it serves as a bridge to build collaboration relationships.
• Use the correct tool: After finding a suitable target for collaboration, if you can communicate closely with each other directly, it is better that you do not have to worry about the remote communication tools you choose. But the reality is not so beautiful. Even in the same office building, we cannot face each other all the time. Because the physical space resources are limited, it is impossible for everyone to use the meeting room at the same time. Now you have two common options: Im and phone. Using IM (Text Chat), you can express more clearly and concisely. It is suitable for multi-task scenarios. You can talk to multiple people at the same time. Using phone calls can help you better understand the cause and effect of things. A more complex real-time collaboration tool such as white-boarding and document-sharing can be used as a supplement to IM and phone calls to enhance the expression of conversations, the premise is that participants have the ability to manage these collaboration tools that are more complex than im.

Make everyone work in a more organized manner-project and joint collaboration

Compared with Session-based collaboration, project-based collaboration allows more people to participate. You do not have to enter at the same time. All operations are non-synchronous, so that there will be a larger collaboration time span. Like normal project management, all projects have at least one goal and completion time. We can assign tasks, define milestones, and track the progress of completion in the project, these are the basic elements of a project. Now most online project collaboration services have implemented these functions, such as the famous Basecamp, and mangbar in China (mixed mode with vertices, more like project + SNS ). This is equivalent to the specification and constraints of a process. When participants collaborate under such a framework, the operations will naturally become organized. Traditional project management software (such as MS project), the user is always busy for that Gantt Chart, Members cannot interact through software, online project collaboration focuses more on communication between personnel and Status feedback. Both the project report and Gantt chart system can be automatically drawn based on the current progress.

Consortium collaboration is a mixture of projects and dialogs. It is a more persistent space that will always exist and will not disappear because of the end of sessions and projects. In such a space, you can create a project, initiate a session, and use a variety of tools to perform more close collaboration, such as wiki, although it seems difficult to understand, but it is indeed a sign of the real beginning of collaboration. Tens of thousands of volunteers used wiki to complete Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia. Through entries and links, different documents and content can be automatically associated, participants can add different parts of the content, which is very suitable for shared document creation and content construction.

Of course, there are also some more powerful solutions for joint collaboration, which we call a "collaboration space". Previously, they were often called "groupware", the former Lotus Notes, the groove recently acquired by Microsoft is the best representative. It is expensive, complex, and takes a lot of time to learn how to use it. In this era of user experience first, we need a simple way of collaboration. A "collaborative space" based entirely on the web may make this traditional software a good alternative.

Public-oriented collaboration-blogs and discussion groups (forums)

Session-based and project-based collaboration are basically closed, and only specific members can participate after authorization. If you need open public-oriented communication, blog will be your best choice. It takes a little time to build a blog. Through your readers, blogsphere, and a variety of RSS aggregation and search tools, you can spread your ideas, ideas, and opinions on the Internet, in addition, they can get excellent comments and feedback. With social networks in some specific fields, we can find more suitable partners in open networks. Discussion groups are more free to participate in the discussion than blogs. You can refer to the content based on the discussion clues, but sometimes it is easy to run the questions. Managers need a lot of time to manage this public discussion area. However, the two methods have their own strengths. Blogs are more suitable for content dissemination, while discussion groups are more suitable for communication. It depends on your choice.

Ideal online collaboration tools

Currently, there is no perfect online collaboration software, which may be the limitation of network bandwidth, or the user has not yet developed the online collaboration habit. However, we can also think about the tools that will emerge in the future (it may already exist, but I am a bit ignorant ):

• A simple, beautiful, and professional program that can be attended by many people. It provides functions such as Skype, whiteboard, document sharing, and thinking diagrams to complete conversational collaboration;
• Then, coupled with an easy-to-use collaboration space, we can use it to collaborate on projects, manage related resources and links, store documents, and freely participate in and edit content in the form of Wiki, all collaboration members can jointly maintain this collaboration space

Address: http://www.cnblogs.com/David-weihw/archive/2006/12/06/583993.html