Most small and large scale enterprises have collaboration tools such as e-mail, instant messaging, and Web conferencing among others for improving productivity and enabling easy communication among employees. However, the technologies enabling the aforementioned tools have a multitude of drawbacks. Consequently, the chief information officers (CIOs) and network administrators managing collaboration in an enterprise have a number of concerns that includes high overhead, cost issues, and security apart from issues related to e-mail overload and the proliferation of attachments. Also, CIOs are looking toward providing a Web 2.0-like collaboration environment that is familiar with the younger talent working in the organization. The most commonly used collaboration tools for addressing these issues are popular legacy systems such as Microsoft's SharePoint and International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation's Lotus Notes. But these systems come with a price requiring perennial maintenance, administration, re-configuration, and upgrades. Such systems also devour a considerable amount of computing resources for architecting, installing, and updating each platform. Apart from that they do not help addressing issues that crop up due to versioning when several users work on the same file.
展开▼
