Supporting Resource-Constrained Collaboration Environments

The many collaboration and document-management products available today help establish controls over document workflows. Essentially, these applications automate information categorization, filing, version control, and historical tracking. The advent of products that help find the necessary but long-forgotten documents needed to complete a task has spurred demand for these applications. Organizations with document collaboration requirements clearly benefit from this technology. Computing professionals, in turn, play an important role in identifying the most appropriate technology for the collaboration problem at hand. Unfortunately, resources are not always available to acquire the needed product. Document-management and collaboration tools can be cost- prohibitive to many organizations. This does not bode well for resource-constrained organizations that need some form of information management. However, computing professionals can propose nonautomated solutions to accommodate manual problems, such as file-naming conventions and document versioning, through the appropriate use of the technology at hand. Although automated tools are more attractive and exciting, making such acquisitions is not always feasible.