Collaboration tool

A collaboration tool helps people to collaborate. The purpose of a collaboration tool is to support a group of two or more individuals to accomplish a common goal or objective they have set themselves. Collaboration tools can be either of non-technological nature such as paper, flipchart, post-it notes or whiteboard, purely based on computer systems such as Memex or, which is more common these days, enabled through complex and often web-based collaborative software like or SharePoint that perfectly integrate in an agile work environment and make us more efficient.

The first idea to use computers in order to work with each other was formed in 1945 when Vannevar Bush shared his thoughts on a system he named "memex" in his famous article "As We May Think". A system that stores books, records and communications of an individual and makes them available at any time. At this stage he called it "an enlarged supplement to his memory". In 1968 computer systems were brought in connection with communication and the potential way of working together when not at the same place by Dr. J. C. R. Licklider, head of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In his article “The Computer as a Communication Device” he envisioned the idea that there should be a way of “facilitating communication among people without bringing them together in one place” , which eventually led to ARPANET, commercial time-sharing systems and finally the Internet.

When the manual typewriter was invented in 1970, everyone learned about office automation, which led to the first collaborative software called Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) that allowed to do surveys, threaded replies and group-structured approaches. In 1980 educator C. A. Ellis came up with the definition of the term "groupware" as “computer-based systems that support groups of people engaged in a common task (or goal) and that provide an interface to a shared environment” . After six years Brian Wilson then shaped the term “Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in 1986. He described it as “a generic term which combines the understanding of the way people work in groups with the enabling technologies of computer networking, and associated hardware, software, services, and techniques”.

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