What is the best online collaboration tool?

This question comes up a lot and for good reason. Nearly every techno-savvy company is looking for time saving tools that will help their team collaborate and achieve more. Before we start spouting solutions, however, we have to ask some follow-up questions: “Collaborate on what? With whom? Using what mediums?” There are a number of different categories to consider. Each has a variety of collaborative solutions, some of which overlap:

• Audio Conferencing
• Co-Browsing
• Collaborative Reviewing
• Collaborative Writing
• Document Sharing – Wikis
• Event Scheduling
• File Sharing
• Instant Messaging
• Mind Mapping
• Multimedia Presentations
• Screen Sharing
• Video Conferencing
• Web Conferencing
• Web Presenting
• Whiteboarding
• WorkGrouping

Robin Good has put together a huge mind map list of tools in each of the above categories, complete with links to each tool. Check it out here. Use the +/- buttons (lower right) to view.

If you prefer the iPaper format, use this link instead.