Managers may shun collaborative products because they don't see how they might improve their departments' efficiency. Consultant David Coleman at Collaborative Strategies recalls speaking to a sales manager who was worried about his staff's decreasing ability to win contracts. The company had recently expanded, and it was difficult to get the right people together to draft a quality proposal on deadline.

"To him, it was a sales management problem. But it was really a collaborative problem," says Coleman. "A virtual team room would really solve his problem."

Another obstacle is employee resistance to change. When Dow Corning implemented Documentum's eRoom, which features document repositories and discussion forums, it was a big change from the usual methods of sharing documents -- via e-mail, FTP sites or FedEx. So far, few employees have joined.

"About 4 percent are using eRoom, whereas 70 percent could make use of it," says Ann Marie Horcher, an enterprise application engineer at Dow.

According to David Via, an analyst at Ferris Research, a research firm that covers the collaborative software market, that attitude is common. "People get frustrated with the usability, and they're back to e-mail," he says.