...but they either worked on-premises or weren't well integrated into the process.

Today, everything is different--due to modern work habits, the economic downturn, and the increased use of outsourced service providers to manage and contribute broadly to projects. For example, more knowledge workers, artists, and even project managers work from home and need the same functionality over their broadband connection as they used to enjoy on the business local area network (LAN). Also, many talented media and content professionals work as independent consultants (many not by choice but rather due to layoffs), and they're very often involved with projects on a case-by-case basis. And don't forget outsourcing, including the newest trend toward offshoring parts of a project to India, China, or other countries that offer a broad talent pool at lower costs. If offshoring, working with contractors, and supporting telecommuters is going to succeed, the given collaboration systems--be they big budget or homegrown--must accommodate their needs.

Take one of the simplest ways of sharing digital assets, a network file server, set up with access control lists and dedicated directories (also called folders) for individual project teams. That simply won't fly when you're bringing in contractors and outsourced developers, says Chris Cummings, VP of marketing at Interwoven Inc., whose eponymous content management system is strongly focused on collaboration. "You can talk to people about shared folders, but there's little or no security that lives within those systems," he says.

Even connecting those disparate workers via a secure extranet won't make a shared-file approach succeed, he says, explaining that while such a system would be difficult to maintain, the complexities of setting up access control lists for the file server, as well as granting permissions to even get onto the network, would be daunting to project workers, and wouldn't be...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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