Terri Griffith

For years, organizations have installed powerful software designed to get employees to collaborate. But at most companies, the software has just sat there, unused.

The problem: Too often, the software proved a poor fit with how people actually work.

Now, several Web-based applications are taking a different, more focused approach. They aim to make it easy for an individual team member to recruit co-workers and other potential partners to solve specific work problems, whether or not the rest of the organization comes along for the ride.

Here are three tools that can help overcome the inertia that has blocked use of other applications. Each highlights the power a single person can have in getting co-workers to work together.

The first challenge with any collaboration tool is getting people to actually use it. Wrike is an online project-management suite from Wrike Inc. that makes it easy to persuade team members, even those outside the company, to share documents and stay updated on one another's progress by tapping into the power of a tool people are already comfortable using -- email.

Team members can send progress reports and receive updates via their regular work email, but all the information is automatically collected in a powerful online project site. The project leader, and other members, can monitor the status of the project from the site, assign and accept tasks, share documents, and add notes to other members. In other words, they can take full advantage of the tool's collaborative possibilities.

While broad sharing has value, sometimes a co-worker needs to be brought in to change, add or verify some part of a document while the rest of the document has to remain confidential. Normally in that case, cutting and pasting is the only option.

Smartsheet, from Smartsheet.com Inc., is an online project-management app based on the common spreadsheet that makes it possible to collaborate on parts of the document. With the application, a team member can create a Smartsheet and then invite others to share the entire sheet or just the specific rows (with any related files or discussions) that the co-worker needs to work on. Any updates to those cells percolate through the entire sheet, so that it isn't necessary to cut and paste sections into emails and then update the master sheet with responses.

Even the most powerful collaboration tool can't ensure that team members follow through on their assignments. CommitKeeper by 4Spires Inc. is based on research into the best ways to ensure people pledge to meet their commitments. The tool is designed to ensure that co-workers explicitly negotiate over who will do what by when.

A sales director, for example, may use CommitKeeper to send a request to an analyst for a set of sales projections by Friday at 5 p.m. The analyst receives an email with a big 'respond' button that takes him or her to the CommitKeeper site. From there, the analyst accepts, declines or counteroffers -- perhaps suggesting Monday at 10 a.m.

By making the terms explicit and allowing members to negotiate alternatives, the tool makes it more likely that they will follow through on assignments as promised.