Most enterprises acknowledge that their employees and the fresh ideas they generate are critical to help them stay competitive. Collaboration plays an important part in curating ideas. In this digital era, collaboration solutions are essential to support teamwork between people who are geographically dispersed.
So, where do we start?. There are so many cloud based collaboration solutions in the market and it can easily get overwhelming for enterprises to decide on which platform to consider to standardize or adopt.
There are many factors to consider while selecting a collaboration platform. Key factors include:
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- Business needs and costs
- Storage limits to account for proliferation of digital data each day
- Licensing models to accommodate users who use many devices to get work done
- Easy of use to accommodate a wide generation of users
- Both online and offline access to get work done from anywhere
- Search capabilities to allow users to obtain information at their tips
- Service levels, business continuity, help desk and support features
- Cycles times to get new platform features
- Security, Access and Audit controls
- Data (Types, Sizes, Sources etc) to be migrated and supported
- Change management efforts
In reality, most mid to large size enterprises over the years have created and are using a portfolio of siloed collaboration systems yielding in sub optimized performance . Many of these systems at times are used at a departmental level or by small groups. This introduces another dilemma whether to standardize on a platform or bring some integration capabilities.
Cloud connectors is another concept that enterprises should consider. These connectors serve as storage brokers to allow users to access data that is stored across multiple systems and provide the users familiarity of the tools that they are currently using.
There is a lot more to think about before deciding on the collaboration platforms. Collaboration specialists at Vikheda are ready to help you in your efforts. Contact us to get started.