If you're going to collaborate, you will likely want to share electronic documents. And you probably already use one if not several tools for creating, editing and storing those documents. So the last thing, and I mean the VERY last thing you and your colleagues want and that your business needs is yet another application to facilitate document sharing and collaboration.
What you really want is a solution that enables these abilities in ways that are, as the most popular and valuable business IT features always become, pervasive, ubiquitous and invisible. From a more technical perspective, what you want and need looks and feels a lot like middleware -- software that users never see or touch, but that makes the tools and services they do touch work better together.
From this perspective, I believe that I have seen the future, or at least one strongly compelling future, where document-centric collaboration is concerned. I believe a harbinger of that future is CloudPointe, which has just introduced a cloud-based service that enables users of Amazon.com S3, FTP, Google Docs, Microsoft SharePoint or Secure FTP (SFTP) to share, collaborate with and store documents easily and securely.
For more details, I direct you to a recent SYS-CON article on CloudPointe by my industry colleague and fellow Focus Expert Network member Tim Negris. You can find the article at http://dortchon.it/CloudPointe, and you should read and remember it, even if you never become a CloudPointe user. Tim makes several points about what's needed for effective document sharing and collaboration -- points I've decided that I don't need to make here if you read his article, because I enthusiastically agree with all of them.
Check out Tim's article, and let him (and me!) know what you think. Ditto regarding CloudPointe. Sometimes, it's true that the future is now, and I believe now is one of those times.
