What Are Your Collaboration Behaviors and Preferences?

Just as the objectives and use of collaboration in your company can vary immensely, so does the behavior of people when they work together towards a common goal. Look around your organization and you will recognise people with different attitudes, aspirations and motivations. These are characteristics that shape our behavior, how we live and work, and even our technology preferences. Different collaboration technology and tools are more suitable for certain "types" of people and business purposes. One size does not fit all.

Some elements of collaboration solutions include:

• Video conferencing providing fully immersive "look them in the eye" communication
• Audio conferencing and document management enabling group document preparation and editing
• Presence, IM and chat providing efficient access to key resources and decision makers
• Mobile applications facilitating anytime, anywhere access to people and resources
• Interoperability with customers and partners collaboration platforms enabling more efficient business operations and happier customers

When you use technology to collaborate in your personal or professional life, what are your preferences?

Simplicity

In addition to being suitable, in order to proliferate across an organization in a relatively a short period of time and be widely adopted, collaboration solutions must be "simple" to use and be "available."

Some key elements of "Simplicity" include:

• Intuitive interfaces
• Invitation and scheduling capability across major vendor solutions
• Common user interfaces across platforms and devices
• Setup wizards to speed installation,
• UIs that can be configured to expose different functionality for different user populations
• Context sensitive help resources
• Getting started videos

Availability

Some key elements of "Availability" include:

• Interoperability across all classes of devices (mobile, tablet, desktop)
• Seamless interoperability with major 3rd party platforms
• Ability to securely interoperate in a controlled fashion with partners and customers
• Cross browser and OS compatibility
• Anytime, anywhere access
• Federation

While there are no collaboration solutions today that have all these elements, progress is being made.

When collaboration is simple, with tools that are suitable and available, people achieve more than they can on their own in a shorter period of time.