Collaboration Software, Unified Communications Collaboration Software

Software Tips

What is Collaboration?

Collaboration means working together. It refers to cooperation between individuals or teams or organizations in order to achieve a common goal. The common ground and togetherness are to be promoted and strengthened through collaboration. The cooperation within and between organizations, groups, teams and employees should be based on mutual trust and appreciation as well as support. For joint work, sharing information and access to current data is just as important as exchanging ideas about the tasks at hand. Fruitful collaboration fuels the creativity of the individual. Successful collaboration therefore requires both technical prerequisites and a corresponding attitude or the will to work well together.

Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) describes the combination of communication and collaboration technologies. In practice, this means nothing other than that a software platform is available for UCC that combines all communication channels in a single user interface.

What is collaboration software?

The collaboration software provides the technical requirements for collaboration. The software is used for efficient communication and coordination. The tools provide for various communication options such as instant messenger, message board, video chat, etc. and for ideal task distribution with to-do lists and, above all, for file sharing and the fundamentally required single source of trust. As a rule, the collaboration tools are cloud-based.

Advantages of collaboration software

The most important advantage of collaboration tools is the possibility to work independent of location and time. In times of home offices and distributed working groups and teams, it is enormously important to have tools that enable virtual exchange. Team members can call up to-do lists, track the progress of tasks or leave comments, for example.

Collaboration tools enable the improvement of the information flow and consequently the knowledge transfer. The advantage of using collaboration tools is that everything is in the context of the respective topics.

File sharing and real-time access to information is another major advantage of collaboration tools. Revised documents do not have to be laboriously sent by team members via e-mail, but can be stored centrally and accessed by others. All members with access are always up to date. At the same time, centrally stored documents improve the team's shared knowledge base and are easier to find.

Tips and question suggestions

Further specific criteria and question suggestions for the evaluation of collaboration software:

• How are roles and rights assigned? Are user rights clearly displayed? When selecting a collaboration software, check how the assignment of rights for users is regulated. Can you define what each user can see and edit?
• Ask if event-driven messaging is possible. Does the software offer features to automatically inform about certain project situations. This is particularly useful for larger projects with many people involved, because experience shows that there is always a greater need for information here.
• Make sure that the processing statuses of the people involved in the project or task can be displayed transparently. This promotes an overview of the project or task status.
• Collaboration solutions are mostly cloud-based. For data protection reasons, pay attention to where the server is located!
• Ask if the software includes live streaming capabilities.
• Which language versions does the collaboration software cover? If the software is to ensure smooth collaboration, it is advantageous if as many of the languages spoken in the company as possible can be mapped.
• Since the shared documents should be kept centrally in the cloud, the question is whether the collaboration software includes version management? Storing different document versions can be advantageous for larger projects.
• Can the solution be customized? Can the layout or design be adapted to your company?
• Clarify which authentication methods the software uses. Social collaboration is increasingly being used as a gateway for an IT attack. The login procedures for the tool should be as secure as possible and comply with the company's security standards.