Collaboration with the Cloud

These are challenging times for everyone with the pandemic and the social distancing measures. This has led to most public servants working from home, often with a lack of tools and access.  There are great efforts to increase the VPN connectivity but this is very challenging as these solutions were never designed for this level of volume.

With the inability to use the network fully, many public servants are working offline or on the cloud.  It is important for people to know that when you are using tools in the Cloud you cannot currently use these for sensitive information. This still leaves lots of opportunities for using these to help us in this time of crisis as well as longer term.

Cloud based collaboration tools have been gaining traction quickly this week. The two big tools that are in use are Slack and Microsoft Teams. These tools are like modern message boards that replace Lync and Outlook for many interactions. They are fantastic tools for teams or projects to keep people connected and productive.

The real power of the solutions are the modern user interfaces that the tools bring to the table. They create tools that users want to use. The experience is engaging and it makes you want to use it.

In ESDC, we will likely see Microsoft Teams as the longer term solution but for this post I will discuss Slack. I have been using Slack for some time at work to communicate. Here is a view on the Slack application and some communication.

Let's walk through how this tool is helpful.

On the left hand side, you can see icons for EA, GD and ET. These are either teams, communities or projects that i am involved in. Each of these has different people involved but it is easy to switch between them.

To the right of this is Channels. Think of Channels like a Lync discussion between multiple people. The great thing about it is that it retains all of the information so you can search messages from the past. This can replace a lot of email messages and gives a much better user experience. These Channels are easy to setup and manage.

There are lots of other great features(uploading document, using it from your mobile, previews of links, etc. ). The real power of these tools is the user experience.

I think that as people see these tools and get to use them, they will have a hard time going back to older tools. This will likely change our toolset fairly quickly for the government.

If you have questions or comments, just let me know and I can update.