[Sharepoint in Plain English | video courtesy: GetStartedSharePoint | via: Youtube]
To deliver the highest quality content, noone can afford to work in a vacuum. Particularly when it comes to large-scale document management and collaboration, many individuals with diverse expertise must work together.
Simple services like Dropbox, or Yousendit, can help to distribute collaborative content among a dispersed team, but don’t necessarily aid version control, so more complex content-management systems like Box or Sharepoint Online, can neatly replace existing collaboration methodologies, and can grow with the organisation.
Other complementary SaaS communications like Yammer allow for a real-time meeting of minds. The team can discuss the project on Yammer, with stakeholders from across and even outside of the organisation, and then they can apply the outcomes of their discussion outside of Yammer.
The standard collaboration technology is an in-house SharePoint deployment, on local IT hardware, administered by a local IT department. Its SaaS alternative SharePoint Online purports to share many, if not most, of its benefits, and does away with much of the administrative IT hassle — organisations can leave downtime-minimisation to Microsoft.
Associate Director of Social Collaboration Solutions at Kraft Foods Vinicius Da Costa knows what he’s talking about when it comes to organisations working well together. Check out this CMS Wire interview about how he works out what’s fit for purpose at Kraft Foods: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-collaboration/social-collaboration-at-kraft-foods-an-interview-with-vinicius-da-costa-010603.php
Next time you’re collaborating with your team, and you feel that you’re starting to be hampered by your collaboration technology, you might find it instructive to pause, and think about the options. In the end, the smoother the collaboration, the better the output.