Wikis and blogs may be today's Web 2.0 darlings, but forward-looking institutions are going after the next big thing: collaboration in real time. As mainstream technology has advanced and the cost of web conferencing has dropped, a growing number of institutions are finding creative ways to achieve synchronous collaboration. What's more, the innovations are infinite, and have uses even beyond eLearning or blended learning in real time. This article reports on how some institutions have adopted synchronous collaboration technology that is enabling IT workers to build programs together. It also describes how educators at other schools are turning to synchronous collaboration tools to revolutionize the traditional approach to teamwork. It highlights some synchronous collaboration examples which focus on one or two specific applications, and stresses that the most intriguing deployments of collaboration may be those that mix and match a diverse set of enterprise-level tools such as those offered as part of the free Google Apps Education Edition (www.google.com/a/edu).