Billy tweeted earlier today:

“Collaboration is not document-centric. It is information centric & human oriented. Make sure your collaboration systems get this.“

Let’s think about this for a moment. Collaboration is about “people working with other people towards a common outcome.” So I agree with Billy on the people aspect. People collaborate around information – so I agree with Billy on the information part too. People often use documents as a mechanism to pull together and collate their shared position on a topic. Thus collaboration can be about documents, so I disagree with Billy on the primary emphasis of his tweet.

This line – coming from someone in the Enterprise 2.0 world – sounds like an attack on Microsoft SharePoint. As in, “SharePoint does documents, so it’s not really about collaboration.” Mmm, I don’t buy that.

Perhaps a more accurate comment would be this: “Collaboration is human oriented and information centric, and often document centric. Make sure your collaboration systems can do all three.”

With that, I’d agree 100%.