Collaboration Tools-Comparison and Contrast - Assignment Example

Ownership of Contribution: We can track contributions and attribute them to their specific contributors and are able to amend the work of other participants.Social: These are all social tools, especially MS NetMeeting, Flickr, and Facebook, as they permit the opportune discovery of friends and allow them to post updates etcetera.Role-based Sharing: This means whether the yield of the collaboration is made public or limited to only those who collaborated. These tools need the participants to register or have an account so the product is not public.

Differences:1) Synchronous or Asynchronous Collaboration: MS NetMeeting and Blackboard are synchronous like Twitter as these give instant responses to the participants which arecalled real-time collaboration, while Openteams.com, Flickr and Facebook are iterative or asynchronous like an email in that the response is not instantaneous.2) Older versus Newer Tools: Ms NetMeeting is no more included with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft suggests newer applications like Windows Meeting Space, Windows Live Messenger etc.

, whereas Openteams.com, Flickr and Facebook are still in use all over the world.3) Video Conferencing: MS NetMeeting and Blackboard Learning System include video conferencing and chatting, whereas Flickr and Facebook do not support video conferencing. Facebook does support chatting though.Suggestions for Improvement: A good collaborative tool is one that is easier to use, has a user-friendly interface and is cost-effective. Some of the improvements that can be made in the Blackboard Learning System are that there should be more flexibility in the way the information of the student is displayed on the Gradebook plus improvements are needed in sorting the data.

On Facebook, there should be an extensive web forum for groups. Plus there is no means to integrate applications. There should be better member sorting in groups like we should be able to figure out the commonality between the group members.