1. Low Cost Collaborative Tools to Support Student Teams
By Parthiv Malani
and Catherine Dwyer
9/18/2018

2. Motivation
By 2010 The Gartner Group predicts 60% of an individual’s work product will depend on group input from team members
Project teams are increasing working in “virtual mode,” using electronic communication tools to coordinate with other team members
and chat have their limitations
More robust collaborative tools are available to support virtual group work
This presentation will describes tools available for free or for low cost
9/18/2018

3. What is wrong with e-mail and chat?
Slow -- recently an took one month to reach its recipient
Disorganized – messages are sorted by time or sender, threads can be lost
Long discussions and forwards lead to too much information
Does not create a public archive, allowing team members to join a project after it has started and catch up on discussions and documents
Chat – logs are not usually kept
Chats with more than three discussants quickly become chaotic
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4. What alternatives exist?
MicroSoft SharePoint – available through MSDNAA
Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW) – open source
Wiki - free
Blogs - free
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5. Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint is a document management and collaborative groupware tool
More functionality for document management and control compared to Blackboard
User management and administration
Facility of personal and shared sites
Role based permissions and views, version control, check-in check-out, calendars, discussions
Available through MSDNAA
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6. SharePoint continued…
Integration with MS Office 2003 and .NET architecture as well as other Microsoft products
Full text search capability
Can be used to manage curriculum of a school. e.g. Eugene M. Isenberg School of Management at UMASS – Amherst
Provides workspaces for teams. Students can share documents and collaborate through these team workspaces
-Capability to make modifications in content layout.
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9. Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW)
Developed by MITRE in 1993
MITRE is a non profit organization managing federally funded projects for military
Available as open source via
Provides different “rooms” to allow geographically dispersed people to collaborate, similar to chatting rooms
Much more powerful than instant messengers
Allows document sharing
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10. CVW continued…
Persistence – documents and other information will remain in the room even when all users are logged out
Private discussions and conferencing between two users during a public discussion or conference
Allows video and audio conferencing
Facility of “room recorder”
A “shared whiteboard” to allow common editing of an image or diagram
Search facility for users, documents
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12. Wiki Main strength – “Open Edit”
Allows any user to freely create and edit web page content using any browser
Features like history, versions, orphan pages, sandbox, open tasks and hyperlink
Markup Language – engine specific formatting language, easy to learn and implement
Accepts HTML content as well
Students can use a Wiki to post project milestones, bugs, status and reports
Wiki is made up of web pages supported by Wiki engine
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14. Blogs Blog stands for web log Basically an online diary or journal
Can be created without having knowledge of HTML, FTP or web designing tools
Contains messages posted by author depending on his interest and comments by other members
Most recent message first
Features like archiving, calendar
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16. Summary
Modern knowledge workers will mostly interact with team members in ‘virtual mode’
and chart is not the only way to collaborate
Blog, Wikis, SharePoint, and CVW all have greater functionality, and provide more support for collaborative work, and are available for free or low cost
9/18/2018