Over the last decade, it appears that workplace collaboration tool has progressed significantly. Intranet portals, which are still common in enterprise firms, don't seem to be as relevant as they once were. Is this, however, the case?

In 2018, the workplace collaboration sector is a multibillion-dollar business. Sharing ideas and organizing tasks has become much easier and more efficient thanks to tools like Slack, Trello, and Wrike. Video conferencing with your offshore colleagues is straightforward using Skype and Google Hangout, and scheduling is easy with Apple iCal and Google Calendar.

To begin with, it appears that workplace collaboration tools have progressed significantly during the last decade. Intranet portals, which are still widely used in businesses, do not appear to be relevant any longer. Is this, however, the case?

Collaboration defragmentation

In small and medium-sized businesses, collaboration defragmentation is a major productivity bottleneck. The average small business employs three to six tools to collaborate with its employees. This might include file sharing apps like Google Drive and Dropbox, project management apps like Slack and Trello, and appointment scheduling apps like Apple iCal.

Even within certain areas of collaboration, defragmentation is a fact. It's not uncommon for someone to cooperate with one department using Trello while working with another using Slack. This can be a concern because there is no practical method for data to move smoothly from one department to the next without manual intervention.

Consider a marketing manager who needs to give her sales colleague the specifics of a qualifying lead. All the marketing manager has to do in a united collaborative environment is attach the sales manager to the lead. As a result, the sales manager assigns this lead to one of her executives. The most common scenario is for the marketing manager to share the lead with her sales manager using a product like Google Sheets or MS Excel. The sales manager then enters this information into her CRM, where it will be sent on to the sales executive. Collaboration defragmentation can soon mount up to such modest inefficiencies in the system.

Unifying Business Collaboration

Small and medium enterprises, for example, can afford to make such productivity mistakes, which is one reason why collaborative defragmentation exists. Large companies with dozens of divisions and thousands of employees require more efficient workplace collaboration tools systems. Intranet systems, such as SharePoint, are used to house various collaboration platforms under one dashboard in such businesses. This helps to put the entire organization under one roof and ensures that data is seamlessly transferred from one department to the next.

Let's have a look at how this works. You can create a Microsoft Office 365 intranet gateway for your company if you utilize SharePoint. This portal provides users with their own workspaces as well as access to a variety of workplace collaborative tools such as Microsoft Office for different file sharing, Skype for video calls, Yammer for project collaboration, Outlook for sending E-mails, and Bookings for appointment booking, and StaffHub for employee effective communications, among others. These all tools are the best examples of workplace collaboration tools. Because all of this information is managed through a single login, a marketing manager in the previous example can easily utilize the same CRM tools as the sales manager.

Intranets Software for small businesses

Intranets are useful for a variety of reasons, in addition to increasing productivity. Scale is one of the most significant factors. A project management system like Wrike or Basecamp might cost a 10-person team as much as $100 per month. When you factor in the cost of other business tools like appointment scheduling, CRM, and emailing, the total cost can easily reach several hundred dollars. For the same ten-person workforce, an umbrella solution like Office 365 Intranet can cost roughly $200 and provide a productivity increase.

It's worth noting that one of the reasons for collaborative defragmentation is that it can save companies money. There are free solutions to handle several of these collaborative tasks, which can be a godsend for a bootstrapped organization. When you're first starting out, using free resources may seem like a smart idea, but it might really hinder your productivity.

This is especially true for businesses with less than ten employees. However, when your company grows and your personnel count approaches double digits, it's critical to concentrate on productivity enhancements. At this point, investing in an intranet that can bring all of your collaboration capabilities under one roof is critical.

To sum up, companies must recognize that an intranet alone will not solve workplace productivity issues. Small organizations often do not devote sufficient resources to staff training, which can result in the usage of intranet tools being limited or inefficient. Employees tend to stray from the official collaborative network in the lack of set processes, and they may begin to communicate using free third-party applications. Effective training systems and workplace processes are thus essential for increasing intranet ROI.  Agility is a cloud hosted out-of-the-box intranet solution, that can be up and running within 24 hours and without IT resource. With simple but sophisticated user interface and modules to scale.  

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