Col. Rose Favors, the chief defense counsel of the U.S. Marine Corps., speaking at a Digital Government Institute conference Thursday, turned to collaboration tools to improve the operation of her office.

The defense counsel office includes 40 attorneys and 20 enlisted Marines in offices around the world, including in war zones. Some of these attorneys, not long out of law school, were working in offices by themselves. "I need them to feel the strength of the whole," said Favors.

Favors said she had been getting information via faxes, e-mail and telephone. "I need data; they need knowledge," she said. The tool that Favors adopted this year was , and her office began using it to share legal briefs and other documents to enable closer collaboration on defense strategies, among other things.

Favors displayed screen shots of the SharePoint pages and almost seem apologetic for their relatively rudimentary layouts. To some it might seem amateurish, she said, "to our world it's amazing."

Brian Newman, a knowledge management practitioner with a Washington consulting firm Oculus Group LLC, was impressed with how Favors had arrived at a decision to first improve the business process and then determine if there is a tool that could help.