Kitchen Sink: Many Collaborative OptionsKitchen Sink: Many Collaborative Options

Everyone wants to get in the collaboration game. Here's a look at other software tools that can help your company play up to its potential:

Portals
Designed to let companies build sites that act as gateways not only to information, but to collaborative resources such as applications and processes, portal server software reflects the growing sophistication businesses want from their collaboration access points. Key vendors include IBM and PeopleSoft, as well as niche players such as Plumtree Software and Vignette (which acquired Epicentric last year).

Content management
An Internet-era spin-off of document management, content-management systems, which are used to shepherd content from creation and revision through delivery and reuse, increasingly are being embedded with messaging and collaboration features. Major vendors include Documentum, FileNet, IBM, Interwoven, Microsoft, and Vignette.

Web conferencing
Perhaps the most popular spot collaboration tools, Web-conferencing services let companies set up real-time online meetings during which users can do everything from online presentations to white boarding and app sharing. WebEx Communications is the dominant player, followed by PlaceWare and a list of smaller competitors that includes Latitude Communications, Raindance Communications, and Spectel Solutions. Online learning vendors such as Centra Software Inc. are also branching out here. And the industry is holding its collective breath as Microsoft, which last week completed its $200 million acquisition of PlaceWare Inc., works on its first substantial foray into this arena.

Knowledge management
This unfocused market has evolved into an umbrella category that includes any business practice for capturing a company's experience and making it retrievable. Notable vendors include Autonomy, iPhrase, OpenText, and Verity.

Niche collaboration
Specialized categories address specific business processes. Offerings are available in areas such as project management (Microsoft, Project.net), product life-cycle management (Formation Systems), and architecture, engineering, and construction (Autodesk, E-Builder), to name just a few.

Wikis
An emerging collaboration tool that has yet to catch fire in corporate America, wikis pick up where Weblogs, or blogs, leave off. Whereas blogs let individuals broadcast their views and ideas to an online audience, wikis are completely free-form (see Wikipedia.com). Visitors can edit what they find on the site or add content. It's not chaos, though, as wiki-building tools let the administrator control content by rolling back the site to a given time in the past. The tools are available from organizations such as TikiWiki (tikiwiki.sourceforge.net) and TWiki (twiki.org).