Collabalanche Structured and Unstructured Tools

Unstructured Tools

Unstructured tools are typically where the process begins with ideas and concepts that need debate, discussion, and shaping to determine the value proposition for the stakeholders. This process is best accomplished in an unstructured manner using a variety of unstructured collaboration tools.

Wikis:  A website or work space area that allows the community participants to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, and in either a secured private area where invited team members can be invited into or on a public platform where anyone with access to the internet can participate. The design point was to enable a non technical person to update information.  This example is an example of how to edit a wiki page. Each Team can have their own personalized wiki/website, and within those sites the players can set up their own personalized wiki page.
 
Blogs:  A Blog is a user-generated public diary website or where entries are made in journal style. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other content related to its topic. Think of a Blog as a personal or public soapbox.
 
Wikis and Blogs have gained social and professional adoption due to the advent of the digit economy and geographic, economic, security and time constraint barriers that impede real-time interaction between peers, colleagues and communities of interest participants.

RSS Feeds: RSS (which, in its latest format, stands for "Really Simple Syndication") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel", contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that's easier than checking them manually. 

What is a Wiki Tutorial Here
Business Friendly RSS Tutorial Here

Structured Tools 
 
Structured collaboration begins to focus the activity into a potential set of deliverables and value proposition for the stakeholders.  Accomplishing a more structured collaboration process takes a different set of tools and capabilities. 
 
Topics :  A topic is a logical grouping for a working group, technology, product, or concept.  The people that are interested in the topic have the ability to participate in the collaboration activities.  The topics can further be divided into multiple sub topics for more specific collaboration activities. 
 
Projects : Each topic can have any number of specific projects that manage the specific activities with the participants. This is a project management 'light' tool where participants can automatically be notified about specific tasks via the email tool.

Each topic has their own set of collaboration tools including: 
 
Events : A calendar of events for each topic, upcoming discussions, webinars, etc. 
 
Document & File Repository : A place to store and manage documents and files as well as versioning of documents.
 
Forums : Specific discussion forums for a topic.
 
Survey :  The ability for a topic to issue and gather results from a survey.
 
Checklist :  Similar to a project, but more light weight.
 
Data Tracker : An online configurable database to keep track of data points such as requirements for a project. 
 
Mailing Lists:  Specific mailing lists for topics, blogs, or other groupings of customers or members.

CRM: Collabalanche utilizes the most current open source CRM product suite available. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by organizations to manage their relationships with customers, including collecting, storing and analyzing customer information.

My Pages:  Each specific user has their own set of tasks assigned, topics, and blogs that they have subscribed to.  All of these show up under the MyPages Tab.
 
Security:  Collabalanche has implemented a profile based security scheme to govern access to the the information. 

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Revised on Friday, August 10, 2007 at 06:20AM by Michael Kuhbock

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