Creating a collaboration website is a great way to share information and ideas with your team and improve the work gets done. Easy to use software is an important factor in encouraging the greatest percentage of your team to actually use the website in the ways you've intended. At the end of the day, we're only human, and software is designed and developed for use by humans. Software alone can't do the job.

Here are a few collaboration pitfalls we've learned that should be avoided at all costs

1. Be negative. It would be great if everyone at the company would go to the team collaboration site or intranet to find information first. Chances are, they'd find what they're looking for. But it may take time for the entire team to learn this behavior. The natural inclination is still to ask their colleagues and coworkers for the information they need. People don't react well when the only response from you is "that's on the intranet," and they don't need a constant reminder of what they did wrong. Try being positive instead, and replying with "Sure! I know right where to find that, let me email you the information you're looking for" along with a few links to the pages on the intranet.
2. Create empty pages. When starting a collaboration site, it's tempting to "frame out" how the information should be entered into the site by create placeholder pages. To the rest of the team, this provides an illusion there's already lots of helpful content in the site. That is, until they start to search those pages to find what they're looking for. They'll quickly come to the conclusion that the website isn't very helpful at all, and will probably avoid coming back. Instead, create pages of helpful content as you go. This sets the expectation with the team that there is a growing knowledgebase on the intranet.  After all, a great collaboration site is built by an evolving team of people, not just 1 or 2 administrators.
3. Tell people what and how to do it. Some people like to create bullets and lists, some like tables of information. Others will do massive brain dumps of knowledge in to a single web page that might resemble a stream of conscious ramble. If what's in that content is useful to the team to know, then all those forms of content are good. Asking your colleagues to "fix their pages" so they look cleaner or neater is just another way of saying "you did it wrong." A collaboration site is a clean workspace for your team to add the content in the areas that they wish to. Instead of enforcing rigid rules, let people collaborate in the way they want to, and feel most comfortable with.
4. Create all the content.  At first, it will be hard to get people to care about the collaboration site as much as you do. The temptation will be there to fill your collaboration site with as much information as humanly possible - regardless of your direct area of expertise. It's a natural way to showcase the value of collaboration to skeptics, and to prevent the "oh, this site is not useful" response that first-time visitors might encounter. But this is not a strategy for long term success. Instead, try spending some face-time with potential contributors. During the course of normal conversation, think about how your current conversation might be useful to others as  new intranet sections or pages. Suggest that a coworker add that content. If your coworker feels intimidated or is unsure how to do it, offer to sit down and do it together.
5. Mandate. In a collaboration site, it's up to each individual team member to come their own conclusions about how useful the site is, and whether or not they wish to contribute what they know to the site. Sure, it's helpful if you can get management buy-in to provide the proper encouragement for your team, but you'll need people to want to contribute. Mandating that everyone updates the collaboration site just adds another task to your colleagues already busy schedule. You will not win a popularity contest this way, and your collaboration site will suffer. Instead, think about fun, alternative ways to incentivize behavior. $1000 in cash will help.

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