In the simplest sense, collaboration is the process of two or more people working together to achieve a result (a goal). For years, teams would meet in conference rooms to collaborate. Depending on the scope and importance of the project, some team members would fly in for face-to-face meetings. Those team members who could not attend would call into a speakerphone, which was strategically placed at the center of the conference table.
With the advent of the cloud has come a vast collection of distributed or remote collaboration tools, as shown in FIGURE 7-1.