Yet another post about online collaboration!

However, we might generate more ideas.... Think about it, how do we collaborate? We have so many ways of collaborating:

• Email
• Web Chat
• Phone
• Fax
• Mail

Arguably, the most successful collaboration medium has been email. Professionals all over the world are able to manage calendars, documents, decisions, reminders, archival through this versatile tool.

However, email powerful as it may be, has traditionally not been very good at providing specializations around these tasks.  One of the common problems has been around document collaboration. There have been very good attempts,  for example - having a grouping based on Subject line, Tags, Sender, Recipients etc. But most of these solutions lack cohesiveness and really do not aid management of the documents themselves. 


Lets review the problem one more time. Typically, people (senders) email documents to other people (recipients) for ideas, comments, review, approvals, information etc. Recipients appropriately oblige the sender. Sometimes, recipients need to be reminded (nudged) about an impending request. However, during a lifetime of these requests, the documents undergoes several revisions, annotations, approvals, etc. to arrive at a final state. 


Today, this whole process happens unaided to the sender, recipients. Is there a way to build a collaboration workspace without coming in the way of users? Could there be an intuitive way to manage the entire conversation (including back and forth exchange of emails)? Could we create a seamless extension of email to web - so that users are able to collaborate in the way they prefer? The thread of communication for tying in conversations might be the hard part. 

An idea might be to center the communication around the documents getting exchanged. 

However, we also need to solve the document undergoing many changes while being shared. Typically, each recipient starts off with the same document version as the sender - but over time the document changes, and either the recipients change the document themselves or the sender changes the document based on the recipient commentary. If all of these documents have different version information tagged along with the exchange (typically the message(s) going  back and forth), we can now aid the document management.


Document name would be an obvious choice for pinning this summary view. I am attaching here a graphic to denote the thoughts pictorially. Note that the view has access to the emails generated. Since the emails themselves contain meta data about senders and recipients, there could be limited views for the logged in user for authorization to documents as they flow back and forth.