Initial Findings Round 1: What does “collaboration” mean?

Everyday, someone asks us how the survey is going. So we thought that we’d provide some initial results.

1. What does collaboration mean?

Here’s a wordle cloud of the responses that we’ve got so far:

• It’s all about work & working together. Is your software fit for the workplace?
• People seem to crop up a lot. Is it people-friendly?
• There is a focus on outcomes. Does it help users achieve their goals or does it hinder them?

2. Do we have a plan for this? Over two-thirds of respondents said that their organisation does not have a formal collaboration strategy with one-third saying that there wasn’t even an informal one.

3. Have we got the basics right? Search is the most critical function for collaboration followed by Shared document storage & access. Microsoft’s purchase of FAST would appear to be a smart move. At the other end of the scale, a majority of respondents said that 3D Virtual Worlds were irrelevant. More evidence that Second Life is dead or just ahead of the curve?

4. It’s crowded in here. Microsoft’s Sharepoint & Atlassian’s Confluence are the two most popular products but it’s a space with no clear leaders – with both commercial vendors (e.g. SAP, Documentum, Salesforce) and open source (Drupal, MediaWiki) in use.

We’re still collecting data so please visit the survey and tell us your experiences.

Please fill out the survey at http://tinyurl.com/ozcollab now!