Can team spirit be automated?

    Two weeks ago the remarkable workshop was conducted at our company: about different tools that may be used in different aspects of the IT projects. I was presenting CruiseControl.Net as build server and continuous integration tool. Other report was about Notepad++ - actually very good editor to amend configuration files. The third report was an overview of team collaboration tools given by our the most experienced consultant.
    His task was really challenging: web is flooded with different solution regarding team collaboration and managing IT-projects. It's really difficult to come up with something the top most convenient on this. IMHO, this tendency took unstoppable power from banal wish of every two from three developers to become a project manager. Another reason is that there is no good solution for managing IT-project indeed. Not all projects that have the modern infrastructure for collaborating have success. Among this, I have seen couple of successful projects were neither team collaboration nor bug tracking nor even source control systems were used. Accordingly to our gurus Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister the most valuable thing is team spirit, which can not be replaced by tools or methodologies. Their book about peopleware is issued in 1987 and against all odds still lives after many collaboration tools are dead ...
    Day by day, moment by moment I am being persuaded there is no way to replace team spirit by some tool, like poor architecture can not be replaced by superb UML designing.
    Well let's turn back to our workshop: then only one tool attract my attention - dotProject - it was said to be free, light-weight and full functioning. With Trac that also is very remarkable (our company once had it as default tool for IT-startups), it is going to be something I'm gonna start future investigations.
    I felt I badly needed some place where I can see myself evolution of the team and evolution of the team collaboration.
    Two weeks after I suddenly get an opportunity to set some experiment with both Trac and dotProject. The first in line was dotProject, so in next post I am going to share experience about this ...