Web Reserach: a collaborative solution

As team members located in separate offices, we had a challenge of conducting a large amount of research on the web and did not have the luxury of time to be duplicating each other's work. At first we tried to set up work stations in the central office and designate time in the afternoons to come over and work on the project; but this proved infeasible because of the workloads of team members. Secondly, we tried having the project manager send out a document with designated areas for team members to work on, and team members would send the updates to the project manager at the end of the day. Although this solution seemed fine at the outset, it proved to be terribly inefficient. Why? Even with predesignated areas of the document to work on, team members were duplicating each other's work left and right. The problem was that the web pages being researched had bits and pieces of information that pertained to several different sections of the document. As a result, the same link was being saved multiple times in the master document and this was creating an organizational problem. After experiencing these issues for several days, one of the team members suggested looking into trying out collaborative link sharing on the web to update the links. The project manager was open to trying this out and the team got together and mapped out the tagging conventions and organizational structure of how the links would be listed and the site was subscribed to. As team members began adding tagged links in and got used to working with the software, the benefits of using this program for our particular tasks was immediately evident. As long as team members were on the same page with tagging conventions and categorization, it worked great. If a team member came across a link that was relevant to the project, they would proceed by initiating the tagging process. If the page had already been tagged, the team member could see this immediately. The team member would then review the tags and place a tag for the particular information piece that was important to their section on the master document and update the page. This helped move the project on more quickly and efficiently and the project manager liked the fact that she could update from anywhere, including while travelling or sitting at home on the couch!