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Worse, IM leaves no history. New members to the project can't get up to speed by reading old messages. Even though e-mail information tends to be scattered around, at least some can be tracked. Regulations in some industries require companies to archive IM messages, but the goal isn't to share the information with co-workers, it's to let management fulfill the CYA requirement.

That has given rise to the move to provide messaging between groups of employees strictly within the application used for their particular team project. Messages aren't really from one person to another, they're mostly one person to a group. The leading technology enabler? Wikis.

Yes, the pseudo blog technology with the funny name can jumpstart group information sharing and boost productivity. Wikis now appear in all sorts of hosted applications, such as project management tools, collaborative team workspaces, and project portal applications.

My favorite, PBwiki, lists over 30,000 businesses using its software for a variety of collaborative projects. Central Desktop built its entire Software as a Service application, which it calls “simple project collaboration tools,” on a wiki foundation. Liquid Planner, a fairly new SaaS project management application, uses wikis to keep track of who's doing what and other messages.

In fact, it's hard to find a hosted collaboration application that doesn't use a wiki somewhere, so we'll stop pointing them out. All offer free trials or even free service for small groups, so check them out yourselves. Search for “online collaboration tool +wiki” and you'll see hundreds of thousands of results.

Using a hosted collaboration application with a wiki isn't technically difficult, but does take a mindset change. Everyone can see how much you contribute, or don't contribute. You must work within the hosted collaboration application, rather than putting everything into a spreadsheet because you like those better than the flat form database the others like.

You can't get away from e-mail completely with these products, because most send you an e-mail alerting you to changes made by co-workers. But if you miss an update e-mail in the spam flood, you'll see the changes when you next log in to the application.

Being hosted applications, the cost is based on per user per month access, not new hardware and software. If it doesn't work, you can kill the project and stop paying. Try the “stop paying” trick for a new server and software if a traditional project doesn't work and see how fast the lawyers call.