How do you collaborate at your workplace?

There are times when your day job demands more than 9 to 5. I have been going through such times lately and thats the excuse I intend to use for not be bale to express myself last few days. What I found last few days was that more work you need to do requires more collaboration with your local as well as remote team. In fact, collaboration is going to be the key when it comes to accomplishing tough task on time. This has always been the area of interests to me. I have done extensive research on collaboration within organization and also been part of a small team which developed a web based tool that highlights under-water organization within a company.
So how do you collaborate? I have customized and used a bunch of free software and tools that are easy to setup and use and allow you to become more productive at workplace.

1. Twiki - is a wiki platform that can serve as an enterprise collaboration platform, a document management system or a company wide knowledge base which allows everyone to use and contribute. Twiki engine is very powerful with various plugins and applications as an added options. Setup is pretty easy and maintenance is very low. If followed the simple Installation steps, your enterprise wiki can be up and running in  a day.  So what can you do with it?
• Everyone can create pages (Information) using any web browser, decentralization of content creation and ownership helps foster healthy collaboration within team.
• Full text search available to entire content
• You can have fine grained read and write access for pages based on users and groups
• Updates can trigger email notification which keeps everyone in loop
• Extensive set of plugins provide added functionalities and make it a full fledged collaboration tool.
• You can create web application using twiki engine
2. Drupal - is a web content management system that can also serve as an enterprise collaboration tool. There are thousands of live websites believed to be up and running today that use Drupal platform. You can setup Drupal on a spare server and usually get it up and running in few hours. Unlike other free and open source products, Drupal comes with a rich documentation (probably because it has a humongous user base) for example you can educate yourself on Drupal technology stack and when ready use simple Installation guide to setup. You could use Drupal to create:
• web based form in few clicks
• setup blogs and forums
• RSS feed aggregation from multiple sources
• fine grained access controls
• versatile design of your website
• and much more..
3. phpbb Forum - Email based help system and problem resolution limit the ability to reuse valuable knowledge base in any organization. A web based forum is a proven way to collaborate and create an effective repository of information that can be searched and reused. phpbb can be setup quickly and easily and it comes with a huge user based support system. 
4. Moodle - You want to create an eLearning portal for your organization and do not want to spend big money and resources; you got Moodle. It is a famous web based course management system which can be used both by educators and learners as virtual learning portal. 

There are more advanced tools and I will discuss them in future post, let me know your experiences...