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Figure 2-12 Q2-6 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools to Manage Shared Content? 87
Example Survey Report

Team surveys are another form of communication technology. With these, one team
member creates a list of questions and other team members respond. Surveys are an effective
way to obtain team opinions; they are generally easy to complete, so most team members will
participate. Also, it is easy to determine who has not yet responded. Figure 2-12 shows the
results of one team survey. SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com) is one common survey
application program. You can find others on the Internet. Microsoft SharePoint has a built-in
survey capability, as we discuss in Q8.
Video and audio recordings are also useful for asynchronous communication. Key presenta-
tions or discussions can be recorded and played back for team members at their convenience. Such
recordings are also useful for training new employees.

Q2-6 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools
to Manage Shared Content?

Content sharing is the second major function of collaboration systems. To enable iteration and
feedback, team members need to share both project data (such as documents, spreadsheets, and
presentations) and work-product data as well as project metadata (such as tasks, schedules, calen-
dars, and budgets). The applications teams use and the means by which they share data depend on
the type of content. Figure 2-13 provides an overview. 4
For teams that are sharing Office documents such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the gold stan-
dard of desktop applications is Microsoft Office. However, it is also the most expensive. To minimize
costs, some teams use either LibreOffice (www.libreoffice.org) or Apache OpenOffice (www.openoffice.
org). Both are license-free, open-source products. (You’ll learn more about these terms in Chapter 4;
for now, think free.) These products have a small subset of the features and functions of Microsoft
Office, but they are robust for what they do and are adequate for many businesses and students.