Collaboration Integration

With this topic I'm more coining the term than I am defining it.

To me, competition is a problem often because it creates invisible walls that are counter productive for the group of us as a whole. For a simple example, I needed to have my cell phone "unlocked" before I could put an Argentine SIM card in it. But arguably, the planet and its inhabitants would be better off if this type of barrier didn't exist.

Thanks to healthy competition, barriers like this do exist and they sometimes prevent me from using a utilitarian device like my cell phone to it's greatest utilitarian extent. So while competition certainly does have benefits, and our economies depend on it, there comes a time when competition is actually "counter productive".

Thankfully, this is the reason why so many people on this planet are interested in building collaboration software: to help us work better together. But thanks to a market economy, a zillion projects are busy "competing" to produce the best collaboration software package. And that so many different products exist is actually "counter collaborative".

It is in this light that I coin the term CollaborationIntegration, which goes to say that any collaboration product that does not try to actively integrate and mesh seamlessly with other collaboration products is in fact "counter collaborative".

-- Contributors: KeithHelfrich - 05 May 2007

Discussion

Ultimately, I think the best in breed of all collaboration products will mesh together because this is best for "collaboration as a whole". In ZimbraPluginDev I brainstorm about an example of open source CollaborationIntegration. The JoomlaUsersContrib is an excellent example.

-- KeithHelfrich - 06 May 2007