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Q2-8 Which Collaboration IS Is Right for Your Team?

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the Comprehensive Tool Set

The Good Collaboration Tool Set

The second set, the Good set, shown in the third column of Figure 2-25, shows a more sophisticated
set of collaboration tools. With it, you will have the ability to conduct multiparty audio and video vir-
tual meetings, and you will also have support for concurrent access to document, spreadsheet, and
presentation files. You will not be able to support surveys, wikis, and blogs and share pictures and vid-
eos with this set. If you want any of them, you will need to search the Internet to find suitable tools.

The Comprehensive Collaboration Tool Set
The third set of collaboration tools, the Comprehensive set, is shown in the last column of
Figure 2-25. You can obtain this tool set with certain versions of Office 365. However, Microsoft
continually revises the versions and what’s included in them, so you’ll need to investigate which
version provides the features of the comprehensive tool set. Look for a version (perhaps a free trial)
that includes all the products shown in Figure 2-26. If your school has adopted Office 365 for
Education, then you should be able to obtain these features for free.
This set is the best of these three because it includes content management and control,
workflow control, and online meetings with sharing as just described. Furthermore, this set is
integrated; SharePoint alerts can send emails via the Microsoft email server Exchange when tasks
or other lists and libraries change. You can click on users’ names in emails or in SharePoint, and
Office 365 will automatically start a Skype for Business text, audio, or video conversation with
that user if he or she is currently available. All text messages you send via Skype for Business are
automatically recorded and stored in your email folder.

Choosing the Set for Your Team
Which set should you choose for your team? Unless your university has already standardized on
the Office 365 version you need, you will have to pay for it. You can obtain a 30-day free trial, and
if your team can finish its work in that amount of time, you might choose to do so. Otherwise, your
team will need to pay a minimum of $10 per month per user. So, if cost is the only factor, you can
rule out the comprehensive tool set.
And even if you can afford the most comprehensive set, you may not want to use it. As noted
in Figure 2-25, team members need to be willing to invest something on the order of 3 hours to
begin to use the basic features. Less time, on the order of an hour, will be required to learn to use
the Good tool set, and you most likely already know how to use the Minimal set.
When evaluating learning time, consider Figure 2-27. This diagram is a product power
curve, which is a graph that shows the relationship of the power (the utility that one gains from a