• Unified calendars to coordinate availability at individual and team levels
• Chat tools or online meeting room applications
• Discussion threads that focus on the outcome of a decision
• Document co-authoring and the ability to add annotations, vote, and set subscriptions
• Team tracking and collaboration for common deliverables
• Delegated administration capabilities that enable collaboration "rooms" to be opened by virtually any person for any purpose, without central administration or support
• Robust searches.

Challenges of Collaboration
With our clients who have undergone substantial collaboration efforts, we have seen successful adoption of document sharing features, but less use of chat, discussion boards, e-mail, calendars, or project tracking features.

We see a number of reasons for this partial adoption:

• Users already have ingrained habits and more robust tools for online communications. Only collaborative document sharing has an edge over networked drives or document management for sharing files in a team context.
• Most communication plans focus on the individual value of each specific feature, rather than the holistic value of the suite of tools.
• Teams often preferred to set up and maintain a private collaboration space, rather than participating in public information communities or going through the more formal processes of requesting the development of a dedicated area of the portal.
• Since only members of an Intranet generally access collaboration spaces or rooms, assets managed under collaboration can become isolated because they don't participate in a common taxonomy and, they can't be reused easily elsewhere because they depend on the collaboration tool for management or delivery.

Find out more about how LDS makes collaboration work.

• Collaboration
• Making Collaboration Work