Communication and Collaboration Applications

Description: The Communication and Collaboration Applications enable users to more effectively support the sharing of information and corporate knowledge between users across geographic locations. They facilitate an efficient and effective environment for coordination and cooperation between those users in achieving some determined and meaningful outcome to shared activities. The capabilities they support include conferencing, digital messaging, collaborative working and social networking. Communication and Collaboration Applications support tailored User Interfaces specific to the communication channel and tool to be used and the collaborative activity to be undertaken. Functionality to communicate, access and provision information may be limited or enhanced depending upon the Technical Services delivering them, the User Appliances supporting them and the User Equipment (metadata) of consumers accessing them. To be used effectively, Communication and Collaboration Applications should be employed to provide seamlessly integrated, consolidated, coherent and interoperable services and functionality. Indeed, these applications are often provided in a single package as unified messaging and collaboration platforms. However, it is important that they maintain the assurance of and management of information and knowledge exchange; ensuring collaborative users have the right information in the right place and at the right time and are able to stay connected with each other.