I personally didn’t vote for any option except for “D” because none of the other solutions really solve anything that is lacking today.

 

We already have collaboration today via the mailing lists.  Yes, they are not in a “Forum” layout, but I actually prefer mail threads better – they are searchable (because of my mail client).

 

Angel already exists, and many people use it, so that is nothing new.

 

What is missing for me, is :  

 

(a)     Document Collaboration Tools – e.g. I work on lots of documents with other departments.  Right now (since the Google rule cam into effect), I have to email the document to 10 people, each of those 10 people make changes to the document, then I have to aggregate those changes and form a single clean document, and send it back out to everybody for round 2 of changes.  This is extremely cumbersome without an automated tool.  The way Google and Buzzword worked was people would make the changes to a single document, and those changes would be versioned and everybody would have the latest copy in real-time.

(b)     Instant Messaging – This would be useful if we were ALL on a common platform.  I realize that IRC has been setup for some people in ACNS, but that is a form of active communication.  IM is a form of passive communication, where I don’t have to be watching the screen to get a message.  This is akin to having a phone on the desk (which is the most useful for me).

 

-Nick Kwiatkowski

 MSU Telecom Systems

 

 

This morning at the MSU IT Exchange we were shown three collaboration tools, vBulletin, SWAP and Angel.  During the voting we were asked which one we'd choose, along with an option "D - Other".  As I remember, there were a number of votes for "D - Other", but when it was opened up to suggestions there was only one, PHPvB I believe.