Web collaboration can be a powerful tool in your business. The Internet has made it possible to work closely with people who are thousands of miles away or simply working from home on a snowy day. Yet the closest many financial services professionals come to online collaboration is sending e-mail.

Web collaboration tools fall into two categories: synchronous and asynchronous:

> Synchronous communication takes place in real time. The most basic is a phone conversation, but online collaboration offers more possibilities. One is video conferencing, with which you can communicate with advisor colleagues at other branches or with your network of business professionals.

Video conferencing has had a slow uptake, partly because of cost and partly because of complexity. But Craig Malloy, CEO of Austin, Tex.-based LifeSize Communications Inc., argues that things are changing. Higher-definition video-conferencing systems provide better quality and, instead of running over ISDN lines (for which you pay by the minute), most systems are moving toward broadband Internet connections, which normally connect branch offices. Prices for these dedicated systems are falling. LifeSize just launched a video-conferencing system for less than US$6,000.

Other Web-based services incorporate video as part of a wider set of features. For example, WebEx, a part of Cisco Systems Inc., includes “whiteboarding,” which allows you to share what is happening on your desktop with others. You can deliver a PowerPoint presentation to your team, your network of business professionals or a family of clients. Handing over control of your desktop to conference participants means documents can be collaboratively edited. Participants can also click on a panel and see one another.

> Asynchronous communications includes “everything from e-mail to document management, shared calendars and other collaborative applications your team requires to work together independently of physical location,” says Farzin Arsanjani, president and co-founder of Rockville, Md.-based online collaboration service Hyperoffice.

These services tend to be accessible via a Web portal that presents the user with a virtual desktop on which team members can view documents other members of the team have uploaded and see who made changes to different versions. Meetings scheduled by members of your team can also be listed.

Thanks to Web. 2.0, a flurry of developments in which Web applications are designed for input from a large number of users, such collaborative efforts are becoming more useful. Web 2.0 applications include blogs, social bookmarking (in which you highlight the resources of interest you have found related to a particular subject), social networking and “wikis.” Wikis enable you to create pages of information online and can be used to create client files, client profiles and marketing strategies with your team. Wiki pages can be edited by others, making it possible to refine input from other team members.

“If people are contributing via blogs and wikis,” says George Goodall, analyst at London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group, “we can mine their connections and understand what they are working on. It becomes more organic.”

But your business needs to take data security seriously, and online collaboration unfortunately still presents security and regulatory challenges. Zoho Office, for example, allows you to take a large number of productivity applications online, accessing spreadsheets and word processors, for example, directly in the browser. Documents can be shared and worked on collaboratively, regardless of where people are. Applications include database creation, presentation software and customer relationship management.

Raju Vegesna, a product evangelist at Pleasanton, Calif.-based parent company AdventNet Inc., says the enterprise version of Zoho Office, which will encrypt documents stored on company servers and when sent over the network, has yet to be launched: “The applications are evolving at a rapid pace but are not yet enterprise-ready.”

An option is to use a collaborative environment that secures data effectively and install it behind your firewall so employees alone have access to it. A variety of applications can be purchased in this way, including Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint, which supports group discussions and document management.

Online collaboration can make you more efficient and allows team members who need to work out of the office to do so. The infrastructure supports such practices; businesses need to do the same. IE