Practical business content collaboration: Personal tools show the way

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Introduction
  3. Today’s collaboration challenges
    1. Understanding the pain points of email
    2. Understanding ease of use
    3. Social platforms and activity streams
  4. Collaboration workflows through the firewall
    1. Mobile
    2. Email focus
    3. Security
  5. Simple collaboration options
  6. Outlook and next steps
  7. Key Takeaways
  8. About Thomas Vander Wal
  9. About David Card
  10. Further reading

1. Summary

Organizations face many challenges these days as the work world shifts and changes. This is particularly true when it comes to collaborating on projects, and while there are many new services and platforms dedicated to this area, each with differing strengths and focuses, much of today’s business communication activity still happens in email.

In today’s business world, that presents a problem: The pairing of large files and email takes its toll on speed and storage capabilities. Access and tracking have become more critical as workers go mobile and teams and projects assemble on an ad hoc or distributed basis. In short, the need to adapt to these changes and others by providing tools that are simpler to use is essential for businesses.

This report, based on a recent survey of business managers, highlights some of the problematic areas around business content collaboration, and it provides some options for working through them. Managers’ business objectives, pain points and feature wish lists strongly indicate that easy-to-use applications and services with roots in email, document sharing and file syncing will play an important role in collaboration in the future.

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