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Collaboration is a mindset and set of skills. It is also a messy and occasionally frustrating activity, and in the short term can even take longer than not collaborating. But long term, effective collaboration provides far stronger results. But to get there, we must first take a look at ourselves.

Collaboration is an essential element of doing business. and most companies spend their working day communicating with customers, suppliers, partners and colleagues. For many businesses this is still an efficient process. Stats show that each business loses an estimated £10k per year sitting in traffic en route to meetings. This doesn't take into account the time and cost of communicating across their companies or distributed workforces. In other words the things businesses are doing to ensure they run smoothly are actually costing them money. Internet based collaboration tools can replace face-to-face meetings, allowing you to work with a team in another office, another company, or even another time zone. And they are just as useful to help you stay on top of projects that involve people in the same office, because they bring together the information and resources you need to run your business on a daily basis.

"Value Networks and the true nature of collaboration meets this challenge head on with a systemic, human-network approach to managing business operations and ecosystems. Value network modeling and analytics provide better support for collaborative, emergent work and complex activities."

"This book explains the power of collaborative production; a compendium of ways to throw open previously guarded intellectual property and to invite in previously unavailable ideas that hide within the populace at large. A primer for mass collaboration possibilities. This review link is to Amazon.com. It is also available from Amazon.co.uk "

Interesting discussion on the difference between Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter) and Collaboration Networks (Wiki, Enterprise Social Software)

Excellent collection of lists of online collaboration tools

An impressive 'mind map' of the Best Online Collaboration Tools

"Unleash your team's creativity with Jamboard. Sketch your ideas, whiteboard-style, while benefiting from the access and connectivity of an interactive canvas. Drop images, add notes and pull assets directly from the web while collaborating with team members from anywhere."

HoloMeeting allows you to collaborate by sharing, viewing and amending 3D models (e.g Revit), documents (e.g. PDFs) and collaborate (e.g. freehand draw, whiteboard, etc.). In addition, you can share your camera and use it for remote assistance/maintenance.

See how involvement in communities of practice, is helping Rio Tinto people share expertise and collaborate across the group.

SharePoint is unquestionably a success from a licensing perspective, but dig behind the firewall and the picture looks more chequered. For example in a uSamp survey last year, 80 percent of organizations using SharePoint said employees continue to share documents as email attachments. Recently, the UK Met Office abandoned a twoyear SharePoint implementation project in favor of the cloud-based Huddle service. Even where SharePoint is used, people aren't truly collaborating with it. Team sites are often really document graveyards where content is stored once collaboration has stopped.

"To truly embed innovation and agility, we have to be able to collaborate, work across boundaries within and between organizations, to bring together disparate experiences and perspectives, and to properly empower people to come up with ideas and make change happen. In other words, we have to build different corporate cultures and ways of working". Peter Cheese, CEO Chartered institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) These elements are the "softer" side of agility. But they are also the most critical enablers of change and adaptation, and they are harder to understand and to put into effect, which is why they are so often underestimated or misunderstood.

the Diigo team aims to evolve Diigo into the best personal knowledge management system (PKM) on the market, providing unsurpassed capabilities for the collection, compilation, organization, digestion, presentation and collaboration of knowledge and information.

"Here we present four specific approaches to the creation of what we call digital "hives"-electronic hubs bristling with collective activity and designed to solve a particular problem or set of problems, to drive new habits, and to encourage organizational change (exhibit). Digital tools to facilitate networking and collaboration propel these "horizontal" cascades, which at their best can weave new patterns of engagement across geographic and other organizational boundaries. In this way, they make it possible to have new conversations around problem solving, unlock previously tacit knowledge, and speed up execution. "