People need to share first

One of the biggest hurdles to online collaboration is the word “collaboration”. Some people find it hard to share and collaborate in the real world and this carries over to the online world also.
Online, one of the most primitive way to share information is via email. However, when the lines of communications grow beyond two people, the classic inefficiencies come into play.
These are well documented in the mythical man month’s group communication formula: n(n-1)/2. As you add people to your project, the lines of communication grow very quickly. In email we see this as email threads that are impossible to keep track of that go off in multi-threaded ways.
If you add attachments into the mix, this spells total disaster. Not only does some of these emails get treated as spam, but others get blocked by firewalls, size limitations and email quotas.
However, these technical obstacles can be overcome with the proper tools if the underlying collaboration mentality is present in the team.