As projects have become shorter and the number of stakeholders has risen, the need for effective management and sharing of the project management information has increased. These changing needs have given rise to new project management tools, techniques, and
attitudes. Through the use of a new breed of collaboration-based project management tools, team members of differing roles are now being given additional responsibility and involvement in the project management process.

This paper examines the roles of various team members within a distributed environment and looks at how a collaboration tool can be of use in bringing projects to successful completion. The additional benefits of lower cost of ownership, absence of required training, and ease of integration with other key systems are also investigated.