Libby Hemphill research and posts on social media, collaboration, and related technologies

31Dec/082

Comparing Collaboration Tools

Choosing a tool or set of tools to use when collaborating presents many challenges. Will my colleagues be willing to get yet another login? Will we use just email for communication, or should we make sure some IM or audio is available? How will we share documents?

All the systems included here allow you to store and share files of many types, including images, Stata files, video, etc. Here's a summary of a few of the off-the-shelf options available to people looking for a new online collaboration tool. I'll post more information about each system and how to tell which is right for you. Please feel free to email me if you'd like help planning for and setting up a new collaboration. I'm sure we can work something out.

System View/edit docs White-
board
Chat Video Wiki Platform Login Support Price
CTools     x (text)   X Any UMich Email, phone Free
Groove   X X (text, audio)     PC Groove Online part of Office 2007; $149.95 and up
Basecamp     X   X Any Basecamp or OpenID Email $24/month and up
Vyew   X X (text) X   Any Vyew Online Free/ $6.95/ $13.95 and up per month
Google (combine Docs/Sites/Groups) X   X (text) X   Any Google Online Free
Zoho X   X (text) X   Any Zoho Email/online Free/$50
Adobe Connect   X X (text, audio) X   Any Adobe Email/online $750/month

Honorable mention: eXpresso lets you upload and edit an Excel document together. Support for other Office documents is coming but no timeline is set.

29Dec/080

Talking Shop

I had the great fortune to spend my afternoon at Sweetwaters with Jude and Ingrid. While working diligently on my dissertation, I have been somewhat of a recluse. I've been too tired to socialize at night and too dogged to interact much during the day. Today, I took a break from writing and analyzing data to reconnect with friends, and I find myself greatly rewarded.

Ingrid, Jude, and I are all young scholars in related fields. Today we talked about the challenges of finding an audience for our work and how audience might determine, in large part, who we are as researchers. We shared horror stories of meeting conference deadlines and the loneliness of dissertation writing. We compared notes on job hunts and what to do with dissertations once they're written. We traded citations and names of interesting researchers. We even talked about how facts on the internet are sometimes wrong. This all may sound boring or typical for academics, but remember that writing one's dissertation is a lonely, remarkably individual endeavor. Sure, committee members, student friends, understanding non-academics, etc. are essential to the process, but the bottom line is that a lone scholar spends a great portion of each day alone, silent, writing.

In answering Ingrid's question about who I interviewed this morning, I found myself remembering why I care about the bridge project I study (because it worked!) and why I'm interested in collaboration in the first place (because we change the world when we work together). When we talked about the differences between departments that focus on the ACM and those that focus on the AoM, I remembered why Michigan was the right place for me (I care deeply about what people are able to accomplish when they work together and the technologies that enable them to do so.).

I recommend getting out of your office, finding a couple colleagues you haven't talked to in a while, and making a break for a nice coffee/tea shop. Maybe you already knew that was a good idea, but I'd forgotten how satisfying such an afternoon can be.