Online collaboration for workgroups

Meet Me Online

Collaboration tools allow administrators to work together even if they can’t get together.

People rarely work in isolation. But it’s not always easy to meet in person to work on a project. Connecting online can be done from almost anywhere. The collaboration possibilities run the gamut from passing a Word document back-and-forth via e-mail to holding a multiparty videoconference.

Read on to learn how a variety of online collaboration tools are helping college and university administrators execute projects more efficiently. …

[Some managers] find the ability to keep all aspects of a project, from open tasks to documents, in one location a valuable way to manage varying work schedules. “As I began the project to overhaul our college’s home and news sites, I needed a solution to manage parallel work plans,” says Jay Collier, web communications manager at Bates College (Maine). Ease of use, unlimited users, and collaborative editing were among his top features. “I wanted people to be able to see their small section and not the whole project,” he says. He was also in the awkward position of having a project too small for a full blown project management tool but too large for a to-do list. After doing some research, he shared a Google Doc Spreadsheet with an e-mail listserv and used the feedback to select project management software ActiveCollab.

“Access and permissions are important,” Collier says, since people might have different roles for each project they work on. The ability to slowly introduce users to all the available features is also helpful so they don’t get overwhelmed. The system links to the campus e-mail client, so team members receive notices of open tasks and have the option of responding via e-mail or through the system. Either way, the conversation thread is attached to the project.

Collier also finds the wiki page feature useful for drafting documents, since he can control each user’s ability to view or edit a document based on their role in each project.

“I’ve seen an increase in productivity,” he says. It was easier to coordinate student workers over the summer. “Since they were in two different buildings and had varying schedules, the software helped us stay on the same page.”

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