Collaborative Applications

Collaborative applications provide a framework for people to work together as a team. While transactional systems focus on data elements and associated processing, collaborative applications focus on connecting people and letting them sharing their thoughts and ideas. Because of this, these applications are considered complementary to each other.

While messaging achieves one-to-one communication, reference and broadcasting applications achieve one-to-many communication. Collaborative applications use the many-to-many model of communication.

Collaborative applications connect people separated by geography and time zones. Time convenience is a major advantage of these applications. Compared to other modes of communication—such as the telephone, where people have to respond immediately—collaborative applications provide a framework for people to respond at their own convenience. As a result, people tend to have better thought processes.

The application framework provides end users with services such as security, newsletter, archiving, and notification. Its also provides a UI for interacting with the application and acts as a repository. Below, you may see the framework of a collaborative application.

Discussion forum and Team Room are examples of collaborative applications that are shipped along with Notes.

Uses of a Collaborative Application

These are some advantages of collaborative applications:

• They help people exchange thoughts and ideas and share mind space.

• These information sharing and collaboration tools are used for activities that require teamwork.

• They avoid day-to-day meetings by enabling discussions on issues and concerns among team members.

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  They help to achieve better structuring for communication.

• They help in building a knowledge base.

Discussion Application as a Collaborative Application

A central repository is the heart of a discussion application. People can use it to store documents and contribute their ideas and thoughts. Other end users can access this central repository and post responses, which are also added to it. The main discussion document and its responses are called the discussion thread. For ease of use, they are grouped using categorization. Eventually, the entire discussion thread goes on to form a hierarchical tree.

There can be two variations of the discussion thread, depending upon the facility provided by the application.

• Closed group discussions. In these discussions, a person initiates the discussion, and only people who are allowed to participate can contribute their responses to the discussion thread. Sometimes people are invited to constitute the forum. The thread may or may not be available for viewing or reading by nonmembers.

• Open forum discussions. In these discussions, there are no restrictions on contributing to the discussion thread. A moderation facility is used to maintain the subject focus of the discussion and control unwanted language. The moderator may be the end user who initiated the discussion or another end user who will take on this responsibility. The moderator has the right to edit or remove any documents posted by other end users.