What are the features and facilities you really need when collaborating online?

Is it true that present-day state-of-art conferencing solutions integrate and include what we, professional end users really want?

Who is driving the Web conferencing industry?
Technologists, businessmen or us?

Time to wake up.

Business and technology have been driving this and other industries where the market would have never thought of even looking to. Let's look with a bit more criticism to what we have been getting, while trying to define what it is that really makes the types of collaboration tools that will have to be built in the near future.

One consideration that I ought to make is that there many types of live collaboration scenarios one can join in. Online collaboration is not all about presentation and conferences. Actually that maybe the smallest part of the overall market.

Much greater amounts of time are spent in online collaboration sessions that have little of the actual official presentations and which require tools and facilities more in line with our day-to-day work and habits.

Here is my personal list for what makes the foundation of an ideal online collaboration platform, but I leave the comments area open on this one for you to add and integrate as much as you think I have been missing.

(I will pull through all of this content after your reactions fall off and compile an ideal, dream system, list of killer features and facilities for different types of collaboration tools.)

a) Required qualities technologies must have to enable efficient teamwork offline and online

Key qualities:

1) Ease of use

2) Unobtrusiveness

3) Integration with tools and processes already in place

4) Modularity

5) Reliability and performance

b) The technologies themselves

a) Multi-protocol instant messaging

b) Screen sharing

c) Web touring

d) Presentation delivery facility

e) Live annotation and markup

f) File sharing and distribution

g) Voice over IP

h) Video (even at low frame rates)

i) Fully Featured Text chat

l) Emoticons

m) Room - Shared space creation and management

n) Access privileges

o) Encryption

and also

p) Application sharing

q) Remote control

Again: the list here could go on quite a bit (discussion threads, polling, project management), but I would consider the above the absolutely necessary building blocks to construct anything of value in this direction.

***The above was inspired by an excellent post from Garsett Larosse inside Howard Reinghold Brainstorms forums, to which I replied by providing essentially the list here above.