Teams need to clearly understand their responsibilities in order to have any chance of achieving the goals of the collaboration.

To accomplish this, you need to make sure that each and every team member knows what you expect of him. Bear in mind that it can also be quite helpful for each team and team member to clearly comprehend the purpose of the collaboration and the reasons for working together.

You may be able to do this by communicating the overall goal of the project as well as the intermediary objectives that you've set for the teams (perhaps initially using the Announcements list on the SharePoint site). Of course, you can also do this later in Tasks lists that clearly spell out the steps that each team member needs to take in order to achieve the objectives and reach your goal.

Behind every successful team there needs to stand an effective team leader.

The key to being an effective team leader depends much more on your ability to reach out and be there for each of your teams than on any particular skill set that you bring to the collaborative project. Keep in mind that your openness to new ideas and your willingness to find out the answers to questions that you don't immediately know can go a long way towards building rapport with the team.

Another way to establish this rapport and also show your support for your teams may be to get the teams together and take the time to introduce them to the SharePoint site they'll be using. This offers a good opportunity for you to discuss both the rationale for using SharePoint technologies as a collaborative tool and the benefits that you believe it can deliver. This is also an opportunity to express and discuss any reservations that the teams may have over using this technology (especially if the teams have never used SharePoint before or have had less than stellar experiences with collaborating on previous SharePoint sites).

By airing your hopes for using SharePoint technologies in your collaboration and relieving any qualms that your teams may have about it, you get a chance to set some of your expectations for the project in the context of demonstrating your level of support for your teams.

Teams have to have easy access to the information they need to make decisions and get their work done.

However, information is not just data. Data is just lots of facts and figures coming at you that all too often become a kind of din that you tend to shut out. To convert raw data into useful information, you often need to filter it, and you almost always have to organize it so that your teams can readily find it.

Fortunately, SharePoint's many lists and libraries and their ability to filter out unwanted data can go a long way in helping you transform raw data into the type of information that your teams can quickly put their fingers on and readily use in their collaboration.

A team is only as strong as its weakest member.

Each member of every team needs to buy into the goals and objectives of the collaboration. For team members to buy into the project, each team member not only needs to understand his responsibilities but also know that his voice is being heard and his contributions appreciated.

Keep in mind that every member of the team brings to it a different point of view along with his unique skill set. Harmonizing these different perspectives and harnessing these different ways of working are the preeminent challenges of teamwork. Failure to bring about this type of concord can result in team members who give up on the team and slack off in their teamwork. This, in turn, can negatively impact the morale of the group and threaten its ability to bring the collaboration to a successful conclusion.

You're never going to respond to a message you never receive.

To be successful in collaboration, team members have to communicate with one another. However, this communication has to be effective, and in order for it to be effective in today's business environment, it has to remain timely.

The first steps in terms of maintaining competent communication in a SharePoint collaboration is to use its e-mail messaging abilities and automated alerts to keep your fellow team members informed of changes, especially those that require some type of timely response on their part.

You can't begin to deal with issues until someone tells you that they exist.

One of the most challenging aspects of collaboration is being able to listen to the teams' concerns and learn from their experiences (both good and bad) as a group. One of the best ways to do this is by eliciting feedback from your teams during the course of the collaborative project.

SharePoint makes this easy to do through the use of its surveys and discussion boards. You can use surveys to poll your teams' opinions on any issues that arise in the course of the collaboration. You can use discussion boards to encourage your teams' members to air their concerns and share their feelings, and to learn about their group experiences.

Issues always come up when people work closely together — it's how they're resolved that counts.

How well you're able to resolve the issues that arise during the course of completing a collaborative project may determine whether you can complete the project within budget and on time. Even when your project isn't so big and resource intensive that it requires the use of special project management software, you still need to account for the way that issues are tracked and resolved.

In SharePoint, you can make liberal use of its Issue Tracking lists to enable efficient issue tracking and ensure straightforward and timely resolution. These lists, especially when combined with SharePoint workflows, can keep you on top of the project-related issues that need to be decided, while at the same time helping your teams stay on track in bringing them to closure.

The open give and take of ideas is often what sparks real creativity in the group.

Fresh ideas are the mainstay of successful collaborative enterprises. The old ways all too often don't stand up in the face of the new, accelerated ways of doing business. Successful collaborations promote creative problem solving by all the teams involved. In turn, creative problem solving hinges upon the open sharing of ideas. Brainstorming with your teams for new ideas and original approaches to the challenges presented by the collaborative project not only promote effective solutions but also advance team cohesiveness, making it easier to later achieve consensus when it's needed.

SharePoint helps make resourceful idea sharing possible through the use of its blogs and wikis. You can use blogs to encourage the give and take of new ideas and tactics through a series of categorized messages and responses that your teams post. You can use Wiki pages to encourage team members to respond directly to the contributions made by their fellow team members.

Tasks that don't get assigned in a timely manner don't have any chance of getting done by their due dates.

Unfortunately, things just don't get done all by themselves. Someone has to be there to assign the essential tasks to particular teams as well as monitor the teams' progress in completing them and chart when they're actually completed. In other words, it's not sufficient to simply divvy out the tasks that have to get done. You also have to stay on top of their status in order to know whether they have any chance of being completed on time.

SharePoint makes this enormous responsibility a great deal more manageable through the use of its Tasks and Project Tasks lists. You can use these lists to both assign the tasks as well as keep a watchful eye on their status.

You can't measure the success of a collaboration if you can't measure your teams' performance.

When your collaboration concludes, do you have any way of measuring its success or failure? If you come up with a way of measuring your teams' performance over the course of the project, you can, at least, use that as a partial gauge of the collaboration's relative success.

Fortunately, SharePoint's Tasks lists enable you to keep track of your teams' performance on tasks. You can then export the data in such Tasks lists to a program such as Microsoft Excel and use its analytical capabilities to get the statistics you need in order to judge the areas where your teams performed like champs as well as pinpoint those areas where they could stand some improvement on the next collaboration.