Multinational CMS vendors are tacking hard in the other direction - they use the word collaboration (and its derivatives) in a strictly top-down sense. Their push is to target their software to CEO's, Corporate honchos and Legal bigwigs. Collaboration is seen as something to be driven by management - a software solution to roll out to the users.

"OK everybody, here are the tools. Now, er, collaborate! What are you waiting for?" [pokes a user with a stick]

It's no coincidence that the phrase "lockdown" was deployed more than once in today's discussion - referring to IT's ability to force people to use the software. Lockdown is something that IT departments all over the world love, because it gives them as much control as possible over users.

But people hate being controlled...

My own preference is for bottom-up information management software, using weblogs and other pieces in the social software jigsaw. It gives control back to the people who have to use the tools. However I don't blame multinational CMS vendors for targeting the management layer of corporations and organizations. After all, that's where the money is handed out.

It's up to corporations and organizations to trust their staff to make decisions and create content. Unfortunately the kind of top-down Content and Document Management tools hawked by multinational vendors mirrors the management style at a lot of companies. How collaborative is that? Not very.

Below is a list of such apps - and it is a fairly wide-ranging list, and open to contention about what exactly is an "online collaboration platform". I've included the main Web Office suite players, as well as project mgmt apps and some wiki platforms. And I'm bound to have missed a couple of obvious apps (do me a favor and yell out which obvious apps I forgot to include, asap, in the comments!).

The poll is also multiple-choice, as I know a lot of people will use more than one of these apps (I know I do). So please participate in the poll and let's see which online collaboration platforms are the most popular.

Collaborators can be given either "Viewer" or "Editor" rights the folder, a setting you select before sending the invite. After the invitation is sent, those users will then see the same folder appear in their accounts. Every time a new file is added to the folder, all subscribed users are alerted either via email or in the "Updates" section of their Box.net homepage.

Along with collaboration, Box.net is also releasing Version History for any file on Box for users with a premium account. With Version History, any file that you or the collaborators edit will now have a complete record of versions, which is great for un-doing changes, recovering deleted content, and rolling back to previous versions.

The killer feature of the collaboration offering is that it's fully compatibility with Box.net's OpenBox services. With this functionality, collaborators can choose to edit documents online, like they can with Google Docs, but users can choose to use either Zoho or thinkfree to do so. Where Box.net trumps Google Docs is in the fact that Box.net collaborators can also edit photos online with Picnik or Snipshot. Once the edits are finished, Box.net makes it easy to then publish files online to any of the OpenBox services. The full list of these partnered web services includes: Autodesk Freewheel, blog posting (to Wordpress, LiveJournal, or Blogger), Echosign, eFax, facebook, Myxer, picnik, Scribd, Snipshot, thinkfree, twitter, Zazzle, and Zoho.

Although the collaboration feature makes Box.net a worthy adversary in the realm of online document sharing and editing, the Google Docs solution is still a more robust offering overall as it also includes business-oriented features like email, calendaring, IM, web page creation, and administration features.

The Box.net collaboration beta is available now to all members and everyone can participate in as many folders as they are invited to. However, free account holders can only create up to three collaboration folders.

Highlights from Defrag this year will include a discussion about Strategic Intuition, a presentation from Esther Dyson called 'The Quantification of Everything', a discussion about whether collaboration is changing how we consume and interact with analysis, and much more.

• Enterprise 2.0
• Online Collaboration
• The Implicit Web
• Collective Intelligence
• The Semantic Web
• Mash-ups
• Social Networking in the Enterprise
• Next-level Discovery

Highlights from Defrag this year will include a discussion about Strategic Intuition, a presentation from Esther Dyson called 'The Quantification of Everything', a discussion about whether collaboration is changing how we consume and interact with analysis, and much more.

• Enterprise 2.0
• Online Collaboration
• The Implicit Web
• Collective Intelligence
• The Semantic Web
• Mash-ups
• Social Networking in the Enterprise
• Next-level Discovery

There's still time to cast your vote; and remember that the poll is multiple-choice.

Hangouts also now offer screen sharing between users, a feature available on Skype and Apple's iChat as well as more work-oriented collaboration platforms. This is a killer feature for Hangouts, making it even more useful as a tool for live collaboration.

Hangouts allow users to bring in Google Docs, and smartphone users can use mobile video chat to participate. The addition of screen sharing makes Hangouts a versatile, compelling, free way to conduct remote meetings. Google Apps customers can use Hangouts with their team as part of the package.

• Enterprise 2.0
• Online Collaboration
• The Implicit Web
• Collective Intelligence
• The Semantic Web
• Mash-ups
• Social Networking in the Enterprise
• Next-level Discovery

You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $200 off of the early bird price.

In addition to the collaboration features, Docs has added new transitions, animations and themes, with which PowerPoint users have been fluffing up their posts for years. The new features are only supported on modern browsers.

It's the latest Docs product to enable live collaboration in a rollout of updates that began over a year ago with basic co-editing. Google Plus has opened all kinds of new potential ways to collaborate. Hangouts, the group video chat feature on Plus, got live Docs integration in September.

The integration of all these Google services into one seamless collaboration platform is a ways away, but it's coming together. The Docs team keeps on adding features like Presentations that make Microsoft Office less and less interesting.

Read more on the Google Docs blog.

Unified communications is the convergence of voice, data, instant messaging and presence technologies. It is one of the broadest terms that we come across but it is providing context as collaboration services and mobile technologies leverage the social Web.

HP is seeking to gain on Cisco in the networking market by focusing on unified communications through interoperability efforts and alliances. It sees Web 2.0 technologies as messaging systems that can go to any device through any network.

In terms of alliances, HP and Avaya have entered into a three-year partnership. HP will sell Avaya's Unffied Communications solutions, including Avaya's Aura plarform. Avaya is the leading vendor in the VOIP market. Avaya Aura launched last year. it provides the control of voice, video, messaging, presence and Web applications.

HP also has partnerships with Alcatel-Lucent and Microsoft to provide networking and unified communications.

HP's is forming these alliances with multiple partners as the enterprise market opens and the capabilities for using Facebook, Twitter and other services become ways to communicate through voice networks.

That is coupled with the deeper use of collaboration and mobile technologies.

According to IDC, the number of mobile workers worldwide will reach almost 1.2 billion. That's in large part due to the migration to unified communications.

The collaboration space is also expected to boom. But there's a catch. There are few, if any, collaboration standards. That can make any integration a process that requires matching vendors capabilities. Plug and play is still pretty much a concept.

As Mike Vizard points out:

"Right now, the few standards that exist in the collaboration space are built mostly around existing messaging protocols and growing industry support for SIP. But not all vendors implement even these standards equally well, and the providers of online services are notorious for providing APIs with limited data-sharing capabilities. That means that IT services companies in this space such as IBM, Avaya and Siemens, which will shortly demonstrate some interoperability between its unified communications platform and Twitter, are being asked to do the heavy lifting by building custom connectors between services."

That's in large part why a company like HP needs to form alliances. Customers need to know the networking vendors they pick can make the connection to Web 2.0 services.

While we love Basecamp and use it daily here at ReadWriteWeb, the idea of embedding this type of software into a page using only a few lines of code is appealing. Easy to use, you just point to the domain you want it to live on, create a username, password and voila - ProjectThingy spits out the code for you to cut and paste to your site.

Projects

• Name and mission statement
• Status: none, in progress, problem, complete
• Due date
• Milestones with dates and status indicators
• Project members from your user pool

Work items

• Discussion threads with assignments
• Limited client access
• Work items
• Name and description
• Status: none, in progress, problem, complete
• Assign to any project member
• Attach links and files (up to 1GB per file)
• Add link and file revisions
• Clients only see latest revision when assigned

Messages

• Project and work item message threads
• Optionally assign to any project member with status: none, in progress, problem, complete
• Clients only see messages when assigned

User pool

• Unlimited number of users
• User permissions: no access, client, team, administrator

Pricing

There are four levels of pricing and you can cancel your subscription at any time. ProjectThingy will keep your data for six months after you cancel, making it easier for you to return if you change your mind later on.

• Free: 1 Active Project, 50MB Storage
• Small: $19 P/M: 10 Active Projects, 6GB Storage
• Medium: $39 P/M: 30 Active Projects, 20GB Storage
• Large: $139 P/M: Unlimited Projects, 100GB Storage

Using Amazon Web Services for scalability and reliability, ProjectThingy runs on EC2 with a MySQL database with data storage on Elastic Block Storage and files in Simple Storage Service buckets.

The team behind the project Chris and Utka Ritke have created five short videos if you want to learn more or check out their FAQ page.

Further, says the feisty startup, while Google can only produce "an unnamed telco" as its first enterprise customer, Zimbra boasts Comcast (the largest ISP in the US) and Embarq (formerly Sprint LLC) as customers. Other Zimbra customers include Raytheon, H&R Block, and Century 21 - who use Zimbra for messaging, document sharing, and enterprise collaboration.

So Google is taking it from all sides currently - from arch-rival Microsoft, and Web Office startups. It shows just how much of a threat Google is in office software.

One feature the team purposely left out of the editor for now is an in-page chat. Given how many users already us IM or IRC already, this wasn't a priority for the team, though this might come in a later version.

Try It

If you want to give Bespin's collaboration a quick spin, here are some instructions courtesy of Bespin developer Joe Walker:

• Sign up or login to Bespin.
• Press CTRL+J/CMD+J to open the command line.
• Type 'follow joewalker' to get someone to share files with. Joe shared a project called pubproj globally.
• Type 'project list'. You should see joewalker+pubproj in your list of projects.
  Type 'set collaborate on' to turn on shared editing.
• Open a shared file by typing 'open /joewalker+pubproj/example.txt'.
• You should then be in a collaborative editing session with the rest of the Internet.
• Click on the collaboration icon (2 people) in the top right hand corner to show you who's editing with you.

For more details about Bespin itself, have a look at our earlier coverage.

What's even better is that you can click on the notification in the Activity Stream to see all the relevant details. If the item was an image, for example, you can preview it or download the original. For blog posts and wiki pages, you can click to read the item that was updated. Plus, you can download any files that have been added straight from the Activity Stream to your desktop.

However, the cyn.in desktop client isn't just about automated notifications - it allows for those personal updates, too. But this is the enterprise, mind you, so we're not calling them "tweets" here - they are "status updates" instead. Guided by the prompt "What are you doing?" anyone can quickly set their status update which is then sent into the Activity Stream to update everyone else.

Taking a page from Jaiku's book, the client also includes a threaded discussions feature. Any item in the stream can be commented on whether it's an automated update or a personal status update. The replies can be viewed in a pop-up sidebar to the right of the original Activity Stream, just as with photos, wikis, and blog updates. Like FriendFeed, when someone comments on an item, that item bubbles up to the top so everyone is immediately alerted.

As any Twitter user could tell you, no microblogging product would be complete without search, and cyn.in is no exception. When you need to find something that had been posted before and has since fallen off the page, you can enter in a query straight into the desktop client itself. The results returned are ranked for you according to the percentage match and you can scroll through them just as you can with the Activity Stream.

The cyn.in client is beautiful implementation of how microblogging could (and perhaps should) work for businesses, but it's the client's integration with the cyn.in team collaboration suite that makes it so worthwhile. Of course, the decision to move away from your company's current collaboration suite is not one to be made lightly, so you should review the suite's features before deciding if it's right for you.

Other enterprise microblogging clients include Yammer, Present.ly, and Status, but none offer an integrated collaboration suite, too. Cyn.in is open source, but it can also be purchased as a hosted service or as an enterprise appliance.

From massively multiplayer Q&A app Quora to invite-only, group-scrapbooking tool TwitAlbums to developer-centric, code-coaching resource Squad, the web is rife with sites focused on making groups more communicative and more efficient. Teambox has popped up on our radar as "a Twitter-like project collaboration tool," and it fits right in with this trend.

Communications occur through threaded topics. Participants in a conversation are notified via email when their topic is updated. Tasks are updated in series of comments and act as to-dos that can be assigned, modified and completed.

The app further allows for sharing files of any size, and profile pages allow supervisors or others to see what a particular user has been working on lately.

The Twitter-like UX is familiar and fast, and the interface seems simultaneously lightweight and robust. For project management and team collaboration - including distributed teams - we can see this application going over very well.

Best of all, Teambox is a free and open source project. The app is built using Ruby on Rails, and while the web version of the app is perfect for small- or medium-size teams, larger companies can host Teambox on their own servers - which might also be good news for users and admins concerned with data security.

These distinctions set Teambox apart from Basecamp, a popular product from 37signals that also provides web-based project management tools.

Although the web app is completely free, Teambox also offers paid features, such as server installation for self-hosting, customer support and white-label versions.

What do you think? Is Teambox's Twitter/Basecamp mashup something you could use at your company or for a group side project? Let us know what you think of the application in the comments.

Or, for a bonus round of backstory, check out the ReadWriteWeb Spain interview with founder Pablo Villalba.