EVALUATION OF DESIGN COLLABORATION TOOLS FOR THE SUNSTANG ELECTRIC CAR PROJECT

Engineering design teams require a variety of collaboration tools to work effectively. The SunStang Electric Car student team at the University of Western Ontario has identified specific collaboration needs, and has surveyed and evaluated a variety of available tools including Yahoo! Groups, Microsoft Sharepoint, Google Apps, Microsoft Groove, Microsoft OneNote, and Solidworks PDMWorks. They have concluded that no single tool satisfies all of the requirements, and that a combination of tools is required. They have adopted Google Apps, Microsoft Groove and PDMWorks as their main tools.