Web 2.0 Collaboration Tools

THE INVITATION:

This Rolling Review focuses on Web collaboration products. To qualify, products must address data security, storage, and accessibility. We'll evaluate how they balance privacy, productivity, and security and test ease of installation and use, overall functionality, management, features, and price. Each vendor must provide pricing for a collaboration scenario in which multiple users work together on a data-heavy project.

THE VENDORS:

For this Rolling Review, we invited 10 companies that provide Web collaboration as a service or a product: CallWave, Central Desktop, Digital Samba, Google, Jive Software, Microsoft, Novell, PBwiki, Polycom, and Voce Communications.

THE PREMISE :

Rolling Reviews present a comprehensive look at a hot technology category, beginning with market analysis and wrapping up with a synopsis of our findings. Our extended testing span lets us accommodate today's accelerated revision cycles and focus our attention on individual products, while maintaining a consistent test bed.

THE TEST BED:

At our Phil Hippensteel Associates partner labs, we'll manage a collaboration project over time to evaluate ease of use, overall effectiveness, and security management, along with where project data is stored and who can access it. To test each collaboration tool, we'll open an administrator account, provision and deprovision users, assign people to groups, and administer rights (upload/download documents, make changes, share information inside and outside the corporate domain). Wearing our end-user hats, we'll put collaboration features through their paces.