In my opinion, the key to online collaboration is product design for the right audience. It can't be a swiss-knife solution. Collaboration means different thing

In my opinion, the key to online collaboration is product design for the right audience. It can't be a swiss-knife solution. Collaboration means different things to different people. Targeting large organizations or targeting SMB's will require different strategies, since both perceive and use collaboration differently. My feedback below derives from experience within medium-large Financial Services organizations AND a small Web-based startup. We use shared documents and workflows on a daily basis. Currently we use SharePoint internally. But we also use Google Docs between smaller groups of people. We migrated our main Wiki to Sharepoint, and have also been developing on SharePoint to extend it a bit. I think more than the mere charm of devising a cool collaboration tool, what really works with "document management" is it's centralized version-controlled nature. More than anything, people want quick & easy access to documents. They also want to compare or recover previous versions of a document. Collaboration (as we geeks think of it) is different from collaboration in the real-world. Some may disagree, but in real-world businesses documents are rarely edited by more than one person at the same time. In medium-large organizations, collaboration and meetings are often synonymous. From what I've witnessed, document-based collaboration in most medium-large organizations means 5 people sitting in a room going through a document and taking notes. Having said that, it's also a fine opportunity to promote a change and make it truly collaborative in the 21st century sense. SMB's (and startups) are more savvy, flexible and open to experimentation. I think the best way to look at online collaboration is, first and foremost, by taking collaboration out of email.