A collaborative prototype designed to support an organizational workplace

In this paper we present a prototype of a collaborative tool that provides shared documents between users of a group, with the possibility of editing and comparing multiple drafts of the document. In order to prove its effectiveness, the collaboration must be associated with a proper software infrastructure. Our interest is to determine whether a collaborative tool must provide special features apart from any other kind of application, in order to be properly received by its future users. Organizations have always been concerned with detecting new opportunities and resources, but the economic and social realities now force them to keep the resources they already own under observation. Concepts like collaboration and knowledge management have rarely been integrated as an efficient resource of the organizational culture, mainly as a result of the fact that they have been launched as an image towards other organizations and less as a perspective for the organization’s structure itself. It might be of course extremely difficult to determine what are the members of a community that adhere to such a conceptualized notion like collaboration, if they encounter the lack of support in understanding the benefits of implementing this kind of approach. There are a large number of organizations that claim strong values and principles as part of their culture, but it is our interest in this paper to find a middle point between the boundary an employee faces when embracing an ideology and the organization’s position towards it. Key-Words: collaboration, collaborative environments, knowledge management, collaborative software