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New Year's Resolution: Collaborate or else

Once you decide to share more information, tools abound.

By James E. Gaskin, Network World, 01/08/09

It's a new year, so let's make some resolutions. Sure, you do it every January and little happens, but this year will be different. This year, the tightening economy will force people to pay more attention, watch what their customers and competitors are doing and look for an edge. Collaboration will give you that edge.

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You have phones in your office and in your pocket. You have texting for the phone and e-mail and Instant Messaging for the computers (if you can stand to thumb your phone constantly and stay at your computer all the time). But those tools are from the old days, and no longer give you an edge.

Take a step back and look at how you're communicating (or not) within the company. If you're still a small company in one location, yelling down the hall may be the same as an all-hands memo. But since few small companies have a single location anymore, and even those that do need to communicate with workers at home and on the road, you'll need to be connected to something somewhere.

Enter the modern Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, where vendors host applications that users access via their browsers. There's a reason every single “Top 10 IT Priorities for 2009” story puts SaaS at or near the top of their lists.

Why SaaS? Because the technology sidesteps three problems small businesses have with any communication technology: cost; distributed access; and security.

SaaS costs work in your favor. There's no hardware or software to buy or applications to program. You pay a flat fee per user per month. Add a person? Pay a few more dollars per month. Lose a person? Pay a few dollars less.

We talked about wikis as a way to “Get more work done with less e-mail” a few weeks ago, so lets look at brainstorming and project management angles. The brainstorming cliché of a whiteboard and a group of people scribbling away has gone Internet, and you can now do it from different locations and at different times. If you're a visual, draw on napkins type of person, the new world of whiteboards should thrill you. Check out Scriblink, skrbl (beta) and DabbleBoard (beta), among hundreds of others.