A collaboration application is a program that facilitates groups working together by collecting, organizing, distributing, and tracking information across an organization. Although an application can be designed for personal use, after that application is placed in a public folder it becomes a collaboration. An effective collaboration environment streamlines workflow so colleagues can interact efficiently, find and share information, collaborate on documents, and publish information to the company intranet or the Internet.
Collaboration applications are supported by Microsoft BackOffice products including Microsoft Windows NT Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Outlook 97, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), and Microsoft Visual InterDev™. These products provide elements of functionality that can be combined as needed.
Examples of collaboration applications in the business environment include workflow and sales automation, document collaboration and publishing, e-mail, scheduling, and discussion groups and newsgroups. All of these are available when you use Microsoft Exchange Server as a platform for collaboration applications.
Collaboration applications are either synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous collaboration is like talking to someone on the telephone, and asynchronous collaboration is like leaving a voice mail message. This chapter describes asynchronous collaboration, which is currently the most widely used method of collaboration.