Outsourcing Collaborative Tools

A group at UC Berkeley is working to align campus wide approaches to technical infrastructure to support education and research. They have published a report summarizing their findings in the "...areas of mail, calendaring, and web based file sharing are a reasonable alternative to UCB running these services locally." They focused on offerings from Google and Microsoft, but mention other companies.

They did not investigate a variety of other collaborative tools, but mentioned them. (See below). This is slightly surprising, since wikis, for example have been in use in many universities for around 10 years and are undoubtedly used by the majority of under-graduates.

• Collaborative Authoring (e.g., Google Docs, 37signals Writeboard)
• Discussion forums
• Instant messaging
• Knowledge bases
• "Live" collaboration tools (e.g., electronic whiteboards, screen sharing tools such as
• TeamSpot)
• News Aggregators/Feed Readers
• Personal Portals (e.g., UPortal/NetVibes)
• Photo Sharing (e.g., Flickr)
• Podcasting (e.g., iTunesU)
• Social Bookmarking (e.g., Del.icio.us)
• Social Networking (e.g., FaceBook, MySpace)
• Surveys/Quizzes/Polls (e.g., SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang)
• Video Sharing (e.g., YouTube)
• Web/video conferencing (e.g., WebEx)
• Weblogging ("blogging") tools
• Wikis