And don't forget scalability. Your collaboration tool may start as a departmental application, but someday you may want to expand it to the entire company. Can it scale?

The choice really depends on three basic factors, says Brown at J.P. Morgan Chase. "It comes down to how dispersed your team is, what type of collaboration you need to do -- like do you need to collaborate on documents or just share access to them -- and your budget," he says. "Once you know what the word collaboration means to you from a process perspective, then you can start looking at your budget and what technology is out there."

Hildreth is a freelance technology writer in Waltham, Massachusetts. She can be reached at Sue.Hildreth@comcast.net.

Sidebar: Obstacles to adoption

A reluctant employee population can foil even the best-planned collaborative implementations.