Collaboration is a working practice whereby individuals work together for a common purpose to achieve business benefit. 

Collaboration enables individuals to work together to achieve a defined and common business purpose. It exists in two forms:

• Synchronous, where everyone interacts in real-time, as in online meetings, through instant messaging, or via Skype, and
• Asynchronous, where the interaction can be time-shifted, as when uploading documents or annotations to shared workspaces or making contributions to a wiki

Shared workspaces are among the most visible entries in the collaboration space.  Aimed at rolling document and application sharing up with chat and perhaps versioning and other auditing capabilities, they may have more or fewer features and may be available either for license or on a syndicated basis “in the cloud,” as they say. And yes, there are great CRM solutions to make this all easier.