I recenly contributed an article to Web 2.0 Journal about email, collaboration, and how Web-based tools are an alternative to familiar communication tools like email.
When several authors need to cooperate on a document shared through e-mail, team members must wait for the document to become available before they work on their portion. These versioning issues can be avoided with another Web 2.0 tool called the wiki.
One of the ideas that we wanted to include but didn't because of deadlines was that a new wave of knowledge worker is entering the workforce that uses Web-based tools to communicate with their friends and arrange meetups. In essence, its how this group collaborates.
This presents a real challenge for firms that want to attract top talent from this wave. If firms don't have the tools that are familiar to this group, some likely events might occurr.
1. Candidates will approach companies that have the right tools.
2. Employees will go out on the Web and use many of the freely available Web based tools in order to get their work done.
If you have any thoughts about this, or any of the topics in my article, let me know in the comments.