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Top1. Introduction And Rationale
E-collaboration refers to utilizing electronic technologies in collaborative activities (Kock, 2005). Following an exceptional evolution in just a few decades, e-collaboration is a common and widespread practice nowadays. Rutkowski et al (2002) believe that e-collaboration is more than only a technological trade-off for traditional face-to-face collaboration. By focusing on the communicative dimensions of e-collaboration over a period of four years, Rutkowski and others developed a project with hundreds of participants from different national backgrounds working during six weeks of collaborative work. They used different interventions including IT setups and interviews based on which they concluded that: First, the evolution of e-collaboration is transforming the nature of teamwork, its functionality, and its productivity. Second, geographical distances between team members or time zones, no longer form a barrier to remote collaborations. Third, the fast spread of information and decentralized communication enables both problem solving and creativity. Further, it is necessary for the organizational structures to support e-interactions as a central element to efficient online teamwork. In addition, after removing the basic technical barriers, the main challenges in collaboration to deal with are organizational and social issues. Since Rutkowski et al’s study, technical barriers have been significantly minimized and e- collaboration technology has continued to advance, however, as the study concluded, organizational and social challenges related to collaboration appear to remain central factors in teamwork failures. In this study, we intend to deal with technical methods that can help us to overcome the challenges of poor e-collaboration. For this purpose, in this section, we will first discuss the history of e-collaboration evolution, its current scope, and existing challenges, then we expand the concept and our solution in the next sections.
The idea and history of e-collaboration date back decades ago. Christopher Allen (2004) has traced its evolution from the very beginning till the 2000s; we have re-shaped and summarized Allen’s work in Table 1, to portray the evolution of the e-collaboration basis, and then discussed the current status. We will next touch on evidence suggesting that technological development has not necessarily ended up with the same improvement in collaboration quality.