Rethinking Enterprise Collaboration

Computer habits die hard. Many early experiences with personal computers and documents centered on Microsoft Office. When transferring documents we put them on a floppy disk or printed them out. Later we emailed them. This manual flow of files and documents was as close as we got to effective collaboration.

Internet and mobile device ubiquity should cause an absolute rethink on creating and sharing information. But many of us still rely on decades-old, document-based approaches, forgoing many opportunities of our Internet existence.

Let’s take a look at four collaboration areas of Content Creation, Task and Workflow Management, Email, and Enterprise Messaging Platforms, and both the old and new players working to improve the experience.

Content Creation

It starts with content, and companies like Quip are reinventing how we create material collaboratively online. With integrated documents, messaging, and broad mobile device compatibility, Quip makes sense for generating words together in real-time.

Of course Google has long had Docs, now integrated into Google Drive, and recently rebranded “Google for Work.” Google Docs lies in between the simple style of Quip to the bloated online versions of Microsoft Word, now Office 365 Online. And while not quite as developed as any of the above, Box recently added Box Notes, a simplified collaborative online document, to its suite of offerings.

Task and Workflow Management

While some of us have memories of project management tools like Microsoft Project, this discipline has thankfully evolved too.

Basecamp, a classic online collaboration tool, provides all the simple features you need, and none that you do not. Basecamp has stayed remarkably true to its simplicity mission since the beginning.

New entrants like Asana promise “Teamwork without email” and enable a highly interactive approach to organizing teams, projects, milestones, and goals.

And in a further bid to establish value around online document collaboration and creation, Box recently announced Box Workflow as a manner to establish rules for document routing.

Email

At the core of our online communication, email has not changed much in the last 25 years. New entrants like Accompli aim to change that with a new take on how professionals use mobile email. Of course Google still hopes to topple Microsoft Outlook and recent headlines around its “Google for Work” rebrand included “dethroning” and “unseating” the corporate email champion.

Enterprise Messaging

The most vibrant sector of collaboration today is the emergence of enterprise messaging applications. The first wave of tools like Yammer provided a corporate feed to enable social interaction, and now a second wave of tools provide a richer feature set including integrations to other applications.

The important tack for these companies is recognizing that no single collaboration tool covers all things for enterprises. Rather than trying to own all of the collaboration features (document sharing, code repositories, customer service and more) these Enterprise Messaging companies simply focus on a unifying metadata layer to collect information from all of the services a business might use.

Slack is one of the newest and high profile entrants for real-time messaging, archiving and search. The simple approach to managing communications channels like chatrooms with links to other applications has been a hit. Other companies in this arena include Cotap which is differentiating with a heavy mobile focus, including groups that might have only phones and not laptops, such as retail service workers. Hipchat is another, though as part of the Atlassian suite of tools tends to favor software developers.

Make A Move

Of course, none of these new tools and services will prosper unless we move beyond our old ways and try something new. So pick your favorite tool or service and start a new take on enterprise collaboration!