Framework for Collaborative Tools Selection Baed on Collaboration Purpose: Case of Planning Purpose

The worldwide web technology and electronic networks have created an environment, where place no longer matters. E-collaboration and collaborative tools bring geographically dispersed teams together for virtual meetings across great distances. This results in tremendous time and cost saving, greatly decreased the need to traveling, faster and better decision-making and improved communications flow throughout the organization. Broadly defined, the field of collaborative computing encompasses the use of computers to support coordination and cooperation of two or more people who attempt to perform a task or solve a problem together (Bornstein, 1992; Schooler, 1996). However, just providing team members with a method of collaboration will not ensure its success (Olsen & Myers,1999). If individuals are to work efficiently in a distributed fashion they will need collaborative tools that can support the purpose of their collaboration .Thus there is a big challenge that which of collaborative tools is suitable for each collaboration purpose because there is a variety of collaborative tools with different capability. In this paper we present a framework that helps groups to easily select appropriate collaborative tool(s) fit on their collaboration purpose. The paper is structured in the following manner: in the next section we will introduce the most common collaborative tools that currently used by groups and organization. In section 3 the primary purpose of teams for collaboration will be presented .In section 4 we will describe our framework for collaborative tools selection based on collaboration purpose and finally, Section 5 presents the conclusions and indicates future research issues.