I believe Ray Ozzie should be named the father of collaboration. Way back he created Lotus Notes, probably the first successful server based collaboration platform. Then he created Groove, a peer to peer collaboration system that doesn’t require any servers. He’s currently Chief Software Architect at Microsoft.
What’s so special about Groove? Jon Udell put it this way back in 2000:
Groove, enables groups of collaborators to form in a decentralized, ad-hoc, administrator-less fashion, within or across corporate or other firewall/NAT-governed realms. Groove is a peer-empowering form of groupware. These spaces collect all the documents, messages, and applications ("tools") related to a group activity. Everything replicates to each member's computer.
But at $225 a user, jumping in to Groove for an ad-hoc project probably will keep the members collaborating via email.
There is an alternative that is free—Collanos Workplace (http://www.collanos.com/).
Using Collanos is really quite easy. You install it on your computer. You create a workspace for a project. You invite other people to participate (they get a link to download the software onto their computer).
You put files into the shared workspace, when the other people are on-line they get copies. If anyone makes a change, everyone else gets that updated version. The shared files can be just about anything. Plus you can keep a series of discussions, all nicely archived on everyone’s computer.
Think of how you might be collaborating with people outside your company—other sales people, peer networking groups, etc. The price is right, download it and start experimenting.
