SmartBiz IT Research Library

Web collaboration offers the capability to meet with anyone, anywhere, anytime letting businesses share documents, presentations, and other applications over the web with rich interaction. Web collaboration solutions deliver a web-based, real-time, synchronous meeting environment that can be utilized for presentation and/or collaboration. Users can conduct slide presentations, collaboratively share applications and files, annotate documents, send text messages, have polls and surveys, and record and broadcast meetings. Web collaboration is enabling organizations to increasingly meet their business challenges in two ways – immediate cost and time savings generated from reduced travel and enhanced workforce productivity resulting from improved business processes and communications.

Organizations today are thriving in an age of information glut. Information or technology by itself does not provide a competitive advantage, but putting the technology to strategic use as an integral part of business processes does. Collaboration tools have become key enablers of a virtual workplace in which employees can quickly get information they need and ad hoc groups can set up meetings on the fly. Benefits of web collaboration are not just derived from being able to communicate instantly, but also from its true integration into the day-to-day enterprise workflow (back-end management systems, existing operating databases and enterprise applications). To be truly effective, however, web collaboration technologies must be capable of streamlining entire business processes in multiple functional areas, by facilitating the workflow that occurs before, during, and after online meetings or events.