Filling the communication and collaboration gap
The days of Milton from Office Space being sequestered in a basement are long gone: team collaboration is the key to enterprise success, and any thriving organization knows it. Employee productivity is often predicated on their ability to interface with team members, whether in the office next door or an ocean away.
Until recently, though, there has been a long-standing gap in the way technology allows teams to communicate across organizations. Previous offerings have been fragmented – providing solutions from different ends of the spectrum, with some applications allowing seamless communication and others focused on document sharing and collaboration.
In the past, Unified Communication and Collaboration (UCC) services that lacked Enterprise Content Management (ECM) would be supplemented by a separate suite of tools - Microsoft SharePoint, Box, Dropbox and Egnyte for example. In today’s environment, however, market demand requires a comprehensive team support service that encompasses both UCC and ECM capabilities.
We are already seeing these services collide thanks to disruptive newcomers. Slack, for example, has dominated the persistent messaging collaboration space and traditional UCC vendors have taken notice. Microsoft, through its Teams product is combining its traditional UCC features with content collaboration and persistent messaging products, creating a truly unified communication and collaboration market.
About Teams
Microsoft’s enterprise solution landscape has always been somewhat splintered. SharePoint was the company’s go-to app for document collaboration, Yammer for public conversations, Outlook Groups for mail and meeting collaboration, and Skype for business for IM, telephony, online meetings and screen-sharing. To address this profusion of products, Microsoft launched the Teams product in 2017.
Teams will succeed Skype for Business and will integrate many SharePoint and Office 365 Groups features. The Teams messaging, chat, screen sharing, video and telephony capabilities are not technically founded on Skype for Business, but rather have been built from the ground up by the original Microsoft Lync team. In addition to the communication capabilities, Microsoft has chosen SharePoint as its native storage solution, adding its best-of-breed content collaboration capabilities.
Like its competitors, Teams has a marketplace of add-ons and an open developer’s API. As of the writing of this article, there are 165 apps in the Teams app catalog.
Download our whitepaper, “The Next Big Thing: Truly Unified
Communication & Collaboration”
Learn more about where Teams stacks up against the competition and using Teams in the Office365 ecosystem.
In the name of productivity, don’t waste your time swimming through the flood of new communication and collaboration tools coming to market. We are here to help you determine how best to not only use Teams, but also how to introduce it within your organization. Download our whitepaper or contact us directly for a consultation.
