What Is Collaborative Software And Why Is It Important?
Collaborative software is also known as groupware. It applies to cooperative work systems, and is usually applied to software that enables collaborative work functions.
Collaborative software/groupware lets people work together on the same documents and projects over local and remote networks. This term, groupware, was actually coined by Lotus Notes to describe collaborative software. Another name for it is social software and includes things like e-mail, videoconferencing, instant messaging and chat.
Tools used in social software applications run the gamut from communication tools to interactive tools. What do communication tools handle? Well usually they are concerned with capturing, storing, and presenting communications. The communiction in this case are usually written, but lately, have come to also cover audio and video. These tools are usually asynchronous.
Interactive tools handle interactions between a pair or group of users. Their focus is to set up and maintain a connection among users. Interactive tools are usually synchronous (meaning users talk in real time) by whichever method they choose. Social software, that which defines software that supports group interaction has really only become as popular as it now is within the last three years or so. But, the IDEA for it has been around much longer - in fact since about 1945. It started with a device dubbed the memex which we call a personal computer. That was some foresight in those days. The idea never caught on, as it was way before its time. Nothing was really mentioned again about collaborative software until the 1960's. This was the era of ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) that eventually led to ARPANET, commercial time sharing systems and inevitably, the Internet. In the 1970's, along came office automation, the evolution of word processing in the 60's. Somewhere along the line the idea of collaboration got lost. The 70's also gave us the electronic information exchange system with grew up to eventually become groupware - a term coined in the 1980's by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz. This concept eventually evolved into the Computer-Supported Collaborative (or sometimes Cooperative) Work (CSCW) - which most people still insisted dealt with groupware. The 1990's finally brought mainstream acceptance of the term and concept of groupware. It seems that things kind of got out of control right about then and several large IT companies jumped on the bandwagon and turned groupware into something else. And there it hung. Was it groupware or a multi-user data base. The great debate still seems to prevail even today. But whichever way you choose to look at it, collaborative software has a major role to play in the bottom line of many large companies who need to find ways to collaborate cooperatively to achieve their goals.
Knowledge Management
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