It’s easy to say that new product development is more likely to succeed when you integrate customers, channel partners, and suppliers. How on earth do you do it?

Try getting everyone on the same page to innovate using PBWiki. The most famous wiki is of course the Wikipedia. A wiki is quite simply computer software that allows users to easily create, edit, and link web pages. All you need to do is set up the wiki (in less than 2 minutes!) and you have a shared space that you can manage. What’s so special here? Think of a wiki as simply an easy to use website where you can work together with anyone from around the globe. You can upload and store any type of file. You can define who can access what. And, for you corporate innovaters, PBWiki has enterprise class security – you can’t have all of your great innovations leaking out to your competitors.

The most important feature of all? You can email less and just get more work done.

Technologies, just like hemlines or or lapel widths, come into and go out of fashion. Remember when everyone thought search was a commodity and the real excitement was in portal pages? Chat may yet get its day in the sun.

If you need to get distributed teams to really work together, try using Campfire’s hosted chat service. If you have a team in India, a team in Europe, and perhaps teams on the East and West coast in the US, how do you get anything done? Sign up for this service, invite your members, then leave the chat room open for the conversations to continue 24X7. What’s different here is that this system records everything that’s said, creating a priceless and searchable repository of conversations and decisions. There won’t be a lot of wondering what was decided as it’s all in the chat room.

You or your teams may already be using instant messengers by AOL, Yahoo! or MSN. However, what’s most valuable – the data – is nearly impossible to share or search over time. Don’t you think your teams would be more effective if they could always be counted on to remember what they’ve agreed upon?

Everyone’s familiar with the fact that sales people hawk their wares using virtual meetings or sharing desktops using tools like Webex. However, because these tools can be expensive, they’re usually limited to either a specific department or a select group of people. What good is that?

With Yugma, you can let any employee conduct virtual meetings … for free. Simply sign up and install the system on your computer and you’re ready to go. As you’ll see in this demo, Yugma makes it easy to just spontaneously jump into an online meeting, maybe walk through a presentation, and jump back and forth to websites. What’s different here is that when the tool is free, everyone can use it to do what they need to.

By limiting your ability to collaborate with your customers, you may be missing out on growth opportunities. While of course sales has to give pitches, why not let all of your functional areas collaborate, especially when it comes to serving your most important customers?

Almost every company has been through the well known cycle when it comes to CRM. First, expend a great deal of effort to configure a system, maybe customize a process, and of course pay for many licenses, these days mostly for a software as a service (SaaS). Then, sit back and wait, while no one uses the system because it’s too slow, dull, tedious, klunky – take your pick. Forcing people into a process can generate a lot of antibodies.

If you’re facing this challenge, try getting back to the future with Highrise. With a groovy Web 2.0 look and feel, and developed by the makers of Basecamp (discussed in Before Everest), it carves out the heart of CRM – tracking and managing prospects, contacts, and of course, customers. When do you use it? Think about what you do if a customer calls and you want to take notes on the conversation. Where do you put these notes? Once you write them, how do you share them? And, even better, how do you make sure anyone on your sales team can search and find them? Highrise solves this problem, in addition to of course creating a company-wide set of constantly updated contacts.

Even better, it lets you simply forward an email (including attachments) and have it automatically append to a specific contact. When was the last time your sales team uploaded a document to your CRM system? This capability along with a nothing short of seductive ease-of-use can have your sales team working together, without even realizing it. There’s a free plan and all for-pay plans include a 30-day free trial period. Why not give it a try?

We admit it. It happens to us. We’re reading over something on our site and come across something that’s wrong, worded poorly, or uses language that we just don’t use anymore (insert collective groan). So, how can you make sure that your website is always on message, even if you’re not an HTML jedi knight?

ReviewBasics lets you capture review comments on your website from anyone you invite to participate. With this free tool, you can simply ask people to review a screen capture. Here are the simple steps: Create an image of a specific page, upload it to ReviewBasics, invite reviewers. Then, sit back and wait for the comments and feedback to roll in. Reviewers can highlight areas, attach smileys, and engage in all sorts of web-based snarkiness.

If you’re particularly daring, you might even invite some of your friendly customers to provide feedback on specific sections of your site. How can that hurt?