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The Campus Collaborative Tools Strategy Development Project will determine the needs for, current use of, and current expenditures on collaborative tools on the UC Berkeley campus (including undergraduates, graduates, faculty, researchers, and staff). This information will then be used to develop a common strategy that can be used broadly across campus to guide the ongoing development of the diverse set of online collaborative tools currently in use on campus as well as to guide the selection and introduction of new tools. The project is sponsored by the Chief Information Officer and is being run by Collaboration Services.
Teams within IST currently use a number of collaborative workspaces provided by team collaboration suites such as BearShare, bSpace, Basecamp, etc. At the request of the IST Directors, Collaboration Services is guiding the selection process for a single, common suite for use across IST.
In early 2007, a diverse committee of campus leaders met with representatives from Google and Microsoft to explore the Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Live@EDU service offerings and to determine if these vendors' offerings in the areas of mail, calendaring, and web based file sharing are a reasonable alternative to UCB running these services locally (via the current CalMail, WebFiles, and CalAgenda services).
In addition to examining the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing campus messaging services, such as email and calendaring, to one of these vendors, the committee also explored their associated collaborative tools offerings, such as collaborative writing; social bookmarking; photo, audio, and video sharing; and mapping, which may also be of considerable campus interest.
The report from this committee (192KB PDF) is now available.
Collaboration Services developed a presentation that gives an overview of collaborative tools, attempts to provide categories or taxonomies to talk about collaborative tools, and discusses the pros and cons of outsourcing these tools to providers such as Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft.
This talk was given January 4, 2007 by Shel Waggener and David Greenbaum at a workshop at the Common Solutions Group entitled "Collaborative Tools in Higher Ed: The growth, intersection and overlaps of options".
The Common Solutions Group (CSG) is a set of institutions of higher education and higher education IT consortia working together to create a common infrastructure and toolset required for the future of our institutions.
The presentations from this workshop are available at http://www.stonesoup.org/Meetings/0701/tools.pres/.