Group collaboration

Group collaboration software provides tools for groups of people or organizations to share information and coordinate activities. IBM Lotus Notes, developed originally by Lotus Corporation, is considered one of the first commercially successful group collaboration tools. Many other applications and services have been developed and offered to the marketplace as well. The field is also sometimes referred to as collaborative software.

The UK Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies describes group collaboration tools as related to but different from social networking tools and content management systems.

Jon Udell's influential Practical Internet Groupware is a standard design guide for networked collaboration tools. Udell recommended they be built on top of existing standards, like email servers, news servers, and web servers.

A number of free online group collaborations solutions exist. In 2000 Yahoo purchased eGroups and renamed the service Yahoo! Groups. This is probably the most widely used service although other companies such as AOL and Microsoft also offer online group solutions. More recently a number of startups like Wiggio, AirSet and Groopt, have emerged to take advantage of newer browser technologies like Ajax to deliver more sophisticated applications in their collaboration suites.

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