ABSTRACT
Collaboration tools are used to facilitate the communication and exchange of information among team members who are working together to complete a shared task. The Army has under development a wide variety of tools for supporting collaboration. In addition, many commercial products have also been developed for supporting collaborative activities. Each of these tools offers very different types of capabilities, however, and little guidance exists as to which tools provide the highest levels of situation awareness (SA) and are appropriate for which types of collaborative tasks or situations relevant to Army Operations. An evaluation of these tools for Army command and control operations was conducted in a simulation exercise at Ft. Leavenworth. Overall, soldiers found to that face-to-face communication, a domain mapping tool and instant messaging were most effective for their tasks.
