Past efforts with collaborative software

I've tried plenty of collaborative software packages. I belonged to The Well for a time; I think even paid for it.   I helped them get their Gopher server running.  I worked for one of the original regional ISPs called CICNet, and I had them buy the Caucus text-based conferencing system, which was based in turn on the Confer conferencing system built at the University of Michigan.  (Or was it PicoSpan?  PicoSpan was used by The Well, but I'll have to look up it's origins.)  Over the last year I've been somewhat into Wiki software, and starting using at CNN while I worked there. 

So I'm a bit of a skeptic when it comes to this general area.  We'll see how this works.