The conversation around collaboration applications has evolved, but has yet to deliver on the promise of providing a truly fluid experience.
In 20 years interacting with collaboration applications such as voice, video, conferencing, instant messaging, and other technologies I have heard that these solutions will be integrated, easy to manage, and simple to deploy; thus driving user adoption. The conversation has evolved over the last 15 years, but still never delivered on the promise of what could and should be.
I think regarding what a significant achievement in collaboration it was to get “Federated Presence.” Federation allows organizations with disparate instant messaging applications to cross organizational boundaries to interact via messaging and see each other’s availability. This unfettered access to users no matter where they are allowing a much more natural flow of information and ideas. It works as well as text messaging does across carriers and different devices.
The evolution of “Federated Presence” is federated collaboration allowing users, no matter where they work and with what technology they use to interact with each other using voice easily, video, IM, web conferencing, file sharing, virtual whiteboards, and any other interactive tools that allow users to share information seamlessly. The speed with which users can interact with each other, untethered by limitations of stagnant technologies, the faster organizations can capitalize on their business objectives and offerings to their customers. The other soft benefit is that users will stop having technology fatigue interacting with “clunky” and aged products that offer nothing to them to help their work efforts – they slow productivity.
We are in an age of unlimited interactions and collaboration using social media, smart devices, Apple and Google software, applications, and intelligent assistants such as Amazon Echo. Users will expect to interact with collaboration technologies at work the same as they do in their personal lives. Businesses need to investigate cloud or hybrid cloud solutions that can deliver on the promise of federation from 15 years ago, allowing the evolution of the technology to be done in the background – eliminating difficult upgrades to on-premise platforms.
The platforms have caught up with the promise and now deploying Team, and Customer Engagements are simple, accessible, affordable, and ubiquitous. Cross delivery platforms make it easy to consume collaboration at the rate a business can deploy across premise, cloud, and hybrid models. In a lot of examples, you can integrate and sweat your current assets while leveraging the experiences offered.
