We are awash in new and exciting tools for working collaboratively online. Tools such as wikis, content management systems, and social bookmarking tools, along with old standbys such as email discussion lists and instant messaging, offer us a bewildering array of choices that can feel somewhat overwhelming. Yet to ignore the potential of these new tools is to miss out on important opportunities for collaboration.

What follows is a brief guide to some of the leading tools for online collaboration. Rather than trying to name "best of breed" tools, we'll focus more on outline the strengths and weaknesses of different types of tools.

Email discussion lists

Allows people to send email to a group via a single-address.  List is centrally maintained.  Lists often have web-based archives of messages.

Good For

Email is a "lowest common denominator" technology, used by virtually everyone who is online.

Unstructured format is very flexible.

Email is a "push" technology that goes directly to the user.

Not So Good At

Large numbers of messages can be hard to organize.

Email attachments are very difficult for collaborative writing, since email propagates many copies of documents.

Web archives are possible, but are not always very easy to use.

Instant Messaging

Instant messaging (IM) allows users to exchange short text messages in real-time.  There are a number of large instant messaging networks run by AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft.  In addition, Skype, the popular internet phone calling software, also has a capable instant messaging function. 

Good For

Instant messaging is quicker than email and less interruptive than a phone call.  It also doesn't create email inbox clutter.  As such, it's great a great medium for asking short, urgent questions of colleagues when you don't need to share or archive the response long-term.

Not So Good At

Communicating large amounts of information

Complex conversations that require lots of back-and-forth

Conversations with more than 2-4 participants.  (Larger IM chatrooms are possible, but can grow unwieldy very quickly.

Internet voice calls

Good For

Escalating IM chat sessions to voice calls when more information or back-and-forth conversation is needed.

Communicating with colleagues in field offices.

Not So Good At

Conference calls -- quality can degrade quickly with multiple participants

Internet videoconferencing

Computers can be used to make video-and-voice calls, but high quality videoconferencing still requires fairly expensive infrastructure, especially for multi-party videoconferences.

Screencasting/Screen sharing

A new generation of "online meeting" tools make it easy to combine a conference call with a web-based "screen sharing" session, which allows all participants to see the presenter's computer screen.

Good For

Live presentations, demonstrations and training sessions.

Recorded "how to" demonstrations.

Not So Good At

Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Google has recently launched an interesting experiment with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which is a free service that allows users to create word processing documents and simple spreadsheets in their web browser, store them on Google's servers, and share them in almost-real-time with other users.

Good For

Drafting simple, collaboratively-written documents and spreadsheets with several other people who are not in your office.

Sharing small numbers of documents with small groups of users.

Not So Good At

Complex or highly formatted documents.  (Docs & Spreadsheets have a much smaller feature set desktop word processing and spreadsheet programs.)

Sharing large numbers of documents

Sharing documents with lots of users