Collaboration Today

Our work life today requires better tools to support virtual work and team collaboration. We need to be able to do online and offline meetings and expect integration with our organization's business data and online services. Thus the demand for new, smarter, easier to use enterprise collaboration tools that integrate into your day to day workflow. Today, there appears to be two tools in the market that tend to lead the way in this space - Slack and Microsoft Teams. However, CISCO has also entered into this space with their collaboration platform, Cisco Spark. It's obvious that most of us have outgrown the traditional web meeting tools because the driving need is to collaborate using audio/video conferences, while simultaneously interacting with your company's data and external cloud.

IT needs to consider the following user requirements when selecting a collaboration platform.

• There is an urgent need to update and interact with his or her team from their mobile device, having the ability to open an app and add a new post, or reply to a previous post, should be effortless.
• Compare the mobile experience of each of the tools offered such as Slack, Microsoft and Cisco.
• Microsoft Teams and Slack are good examples of intuitive enterprise collaboration tools, in that both include shortcuts to initiate video/audio chat directly from the chat window and to invite others.
• Keep storage needs in mind - the current offering at Cisco provides up to 5 GB of storage per user, compared to 20 GB for Slack and Microsoft Teams allows for more flexibility, as it leverages SharePoint and OneDrive for some of its storage, which can start at 1 TB.
• A nice thing about Microsoft is that it offers the use of its existing storage platform to support end-user storage needs.
• One of the user-friendly features of Slack is its ability to offer a significant number of connectors that allow the platform to bring in external content and make it part of the conversation. It is similar to the way some social media sites, such as Facebook, allow users to pull sports or game stats into their profiles. Additionally, tools in Slack allow users to have visibility into other data elements that come from outside of the platform.
• The same integration capabilities mentioned with Slack have also been introduced in Microsoft Teams, and are in their infancy stage in the Cisco Spark tool.
• The search feature is another critical function to assess. Slack recently introduced the Slack Enterprise Grid feature, which will allow larger organizations using Slack to search and communicate across multiple business units. Of course, this area is not new to Microsoft, as they have integrated one of their flagship enterprise content management platforms, SharePoint, with the Teams solution.
• Lastly an areas that has seen an increase is artificial intelligence. Both Slack and Microsoft have implemented bots within their collaboration platforms to deliver smart virtual team functionality. How cool right?! This allows companies to build bots to help automate different manual processes and increase efficiency.

Now if only someone would go ahead and invent a transporter so we could beam to place to place! Live Long and Prosper my friends.