A collaborative communication system is disclosed. The collaborative communication system integrates a number of electronic communication tools to meet the collaborative communication needs for an enterprise, family members or friends. The collaborative communication system allows a group of users to participate in communications including chatting and accessing files among the specified users. When a users uploads a file to a file store, each of the users gets notified of the availability of the file for accessing, wherein the file is not sent to any of client machines respectively used by the users, and is downloaded to a client machine when one of the specified users associated with the client machine accesses the file in the file store, thus avoiding to distribute copies of the file to each of the users regardless they need it or not.