Stuart Roberts in a recent Silicon.com article asks why so many organisations fail to translate people’s love for social networking into the widespread use of workplace collaboration tools.

He makes a great point. One of the biggest reasons is that IT departments rarely, if ever, first ask employees what tools would be useful and secure buy in before something gets deployed.

At Speed Towers over the past month or so, we’ve tested a number of online collaboration tools, both free and paid for, with clients and for internal projects. Overall, we think they can be highly useful depending on the project and there are some fantastic tools out there, but equally there were some which left us feeling flat and frustrated. (Contact me directly if you want to know what we REALLY thought of them!).

We’ve outlined some likes and dislikes below based on our collective thoughts.

Likes:

• Some of the tools are excellent at helping you communicate with clients, suppliers and colleagues who can’t access the same shared server; They could bring significant productivity savings for companies who regularly work with partners or suppliers outside of their IT network. We think that makes them particularly useful for PR and marketing people who can be working with multiple parties on various projects

• Most are relatively quick and easy to set up, and many offer free packages so you can trial them on smaller projects first – which we’d certainly encourage!

• Some of the online collaboration tools we tried are pretty intuitive to use. However, some are a little bit clunky. Again, trialing some of the free tools will help you get a better understanding for what’s likely to work best for you

Dislikes:

• Our biggest bugbear was with one collaboration tool which routinely failed to save changes to the documents which had been inputted by different users. This created confusion and made the process more time consuming than it needed to be. We’d suggest trialling a few different collaboration tools on a test run first, before choosing one for an important project

• Some are tools are worryingly user unfriendly. We were actually surprised that vendors haven’t created templates for workspaces to make the process easier for people who might think of trialling them. For example, for a PR or marketing consultant, an events template could be highly useful.

If you any contributions of your own please let us know.