Collaboration software is the software that a company's employees use to work together across teams: a shared plan of who does what by when, shared pages where decisions are written down, and a search that finds what was written. Every employee uses it, but no single department owns it. It is also called workplace collaboration or work management software.
Consider a two-wheeler maker in Hosur that is launching a new electric scooter next spring. Forty people from five departments work on the launch: design, purchase, the factory, marketing and sales. They need one plan, a place to record their decisions, and a way to find those decisions later.
First, the launch manager builds the plan in project management software. Each task has an owner and a due date. Some tasks depend on others. For example, the brochure cannot be printed until the scooter's colours are approved. When one task is late, the software shows which later tasks move with it. Above single projects, a large company uses project portfolio management (PPM) to decide which projects get money at all.
Second, the team writes down its decisions in knowledge base and wiki software. A wiki is a set of shared pages that the team can edit and link together. One page might read: "Packaging: recycled cardboard. Decided on 12 March. Approved by the head of marketing."
Third, the team meets every week over video conferencing and team chat. Much is decided in these meetings and chat threads, and the important points are copied to the shared pages.
Fourth, six months after the launch, a new manager joins. He asks, "What did we decide about the battery warranty?" Enterprise search searches the plan, the pages, the chat threads and the meeting notes together. It shows him only what he is allowed to see, which follows the rule of least privilege. An AI assistant then answers his question in one sentence, with a link to the page where the decision was written. To connect tickets, code and documents, some search products also build an enterprise knowledge graph.
Most of these products are sold as SaaS, rented by subscription and used in a web browser. Teams often adopt them one at a time, and then the whole company does. The largest products in this market come in the office bundles of Microsoft and Google. This page covers the independent products as well. All of them now compete to be the place where an employee asks a question and gets the answer, instead of a list of documents.