I find collaborative workspaces as a big challenge with big learning potential. I am currently using asana and would like to share the following with the community. 

I put the workspace to two different uses. 

One is internal to our organization's team, the other cuts across teams of different organizations, all engaged in the same project. 

I will refer to the first one as INTRA, and to the second one as INTER. 

The INTRA experience is rich and rewarding. We all create content, we critique and revise it, and build a repository with various types of work outcomes. 

The INTER experience is limited to file sharing. 

The key reason why this is ahppening in my view has to do with the attitude of the workspace participants.

In the INTRA workspace, we identified the positive outcomes of the collaboration, the benefits vis a vis the costs, and all committed ourselves to make it work. 

In the INTER workspace, not all organizations are committed to the workspace, for various reasons. One of the reasons why in these organizations we see the "traditional" attitude prevailing could be the steep learning curve at the beginning of using the workspace. You have to work a lot harder, you have to invest a lot of time in setting things up in the right way, in order to be able to reap the benefits at a later stage.