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When faced with the choice of learning new technology and chatting to colleagues on the phone and email to get a job done, if it can be done with what they already know they will go with that; Collaboration tools work best when your collaborators are geographically distributed and in other time zones and I wonder how many teams have that as a situation? Sure, globalisation is spreading and small, nimble operators are connecting using these tools, but how many large corporations are active users? I know IBM is and I would imagine technology firms would be at the vanguard. I was surprised however when PriceWaterhouseCoopers consultants arrived in IBM because there were unfamiliar with collaboration tools and disinterested in using them. It works best when all the collaborators are equally enthusiastic and capable in using the tool. It just takes a handful of influential members of a team to stop using the tool for the tool to be abandoned. The majority of people in organisations are baby boomers (I'm not sure this is true) and haven't been brought up in environment using collaboration tools. I was in a pub the other day meeting our complexity group and I overheard a small group of people in their 20s and 30s talking about the MySpace interactions. These people already know how to use the tools and will expect them in the workplace.

The current release of Chandler builds upon the experimentally usable calendar for individuals and small workgroups. It is a test release for collecting feedback based on real usage. In addition to basic calendaring, advanced features include: recurring events; time-zones; overlayed, multiple calendars; and managing a single event across calendars. Chandler offers innovative capabilities in calendar sharing to support workgroup collaboration. Chandler sharing is server-based, works across platforms and supports multi-author editing. Our goal for our most recent release, 0.7alpha4, is to give a rough sketch of what Chandler will be by our first Preview release (Spring 2007). This release introduces the Dashboard, which gives users a runway view of all of their information. Users can try creating a simple task list, and can share that list with others just as they can share calendars. Users can also experiment with sending notes, tasks and invitations to others via email.