E-Collaboration Systems: How Collaborative They Really Are

Electronic Collaboration Systems support employees in communication, coordination and collaboration tasks to work together to a common purpose to achieve business benefit. However, the marketplace of E Collaboration systems is multifaceted and is made up of various types of systems with differing emphasis. E Collaboration systems may be well suited for communication tasks or coordination tasks (e.g., collaboration systems with focus on project management), but lack support of collaborative tasks – and vice versa. To identify the extent of the support of “real” collaboration of E Collaboration systems, an analysis of collaboration features is applied to a number of E Collaboration systems. Although we focus entirely on collaboration features and present results on a number of E-Collaboration systems with above-average collaboration emphasis, significant differences in extent and quality of collaboration support can be detected.