Tool Categories:
- Conference
- These tools support collaboration of small number of participants, often and preferably one-on-one, where the exchange of information takes places in "real time". They generally provide textual chat and audio transfer for immediate communication. Another frequent feature of conferencing software is a shared whiteboard, where participants can collaboratively draw, type, underline, and insert graphical objects. Some solutions support real-time video exchange, collaborative Web browsing, even application sharing.
- Discussion groups
- For collaboration taking place over extended periods of time, where access to archived records of communication as well as good organization of such records play an important role. Most of the tools in this category allow maintaining hierarchical collections of posted messages on servers. Some support textual chat for immediate communication between participants.
- Document sharing
- Enables a group of users to exchange electronic documents in multiple formats, either directly (when all the users have access to the applications required for opening the documents) or via an intermediary format (e.g. PDF, HTML). Ideally, solutions under this category should support easy transfer of documents to a designated server, version control (for collaborative editing), and some form of logical organization of a set of documents.
- Dynamic databases
- Tools that open databases to the Web and thus allow searching, viewing, editing, creating, and deleting database records via standard Web browsers
- E-mail clients
- The true "killer apps" of the Internet, e-mail clients allow sending, receiving, and organizing electronic e-mail. Newer offerings in this category support not only ASCII text, but also HTML, images, even voice messages.
- Scheduling
- These tools give access to electronic calendars maintained within a collaborating group, either by individuals, or by the group and its subgroups. At the very least they should allow viewing the content of these calendars. Preferably, they should also offer means of proposing meetings, reservation of resources (meeting rooms, videoconferencing equipment, etc.), even direct editing of other people's schedule.
- Virtual campus
- A relatively new and specialized type of "virtual community" service offering colleges and universities customizable portal sites with a range of features related to campus life, such as: course registration, financial aid applications, gradebooks, chat, discussion boards, online bookstores, and more.
- Virtual classroom
- Very similar to the Virtual Office category below, but with features that make them particularly suitable for distance education, e.g. gradebooks, announcements, virtual lecture halls, etc.
- Virtual community
- The most complex of the social software solutions, these hybrid environments usually combine multiple functions of the tools listed above and thus require a category of their own. Especially suitable for large groups with a common, long-term interest.
- Virtual office
- Another hybrid, just like the Virtual Classroom above, but geared toward corporate environments. Most of these environments can easily be customized to serve a wide variety of teams, or to support distance education. Also included in this area are the so-called "instant intranets", which charge per-user rental fees for workgroup space and applications available on independent hosts.
- Web publishing
- HTML-coded text files sprinkled with gif or jpg images are no longer the only medium available to those putting content on the Web. Modern HTTP servers and publishing tools are expected to serve multimedia content, provide fine-grained access control, allow publishing of files in many formats, on-the-fly conversion of variety of files to HTML, drag-and-drop publishing, etc
