What is a collaboration suite?
While there is no specific set of capabilities that a collaboration suite should have, all collaboration suites must have the following characteristic:
A collaboration suite is software that provides businesses with a set of applications, all integrated with a layer of online collaboration tools.
How exactly is this useful?
Effective collaboration tools help you to share knowledge, streamline processes, and keep everyone in the organization on the same page.
Picture this scenario played out in an organization not using a collaboration suite:
Members of an organization are working on a developing a product. The marketing team gathers insight from the social web and records their findings in one document. The marketing team may discover some sales leads, which they must then pass to the sales team. They may also uncover issues which they must pass on the customer support team; they also takes calls and receives emails from customers and makes a list of issues that need to be fixed. the R&D needs to acquire the document from all teams and create requirement that meet the company’s goals and customers’ needs. The project management team then uses the requirements to create relevant tasks and assign time frames for completion.
That’s a lot of steps, right? Not to mention, a lot of documents. If the members of this organization want to successfully deliver the right product, they need to make sure that information is clear when they pass on their documents to another department.
Let’s take a peek into an organization using a collaboration suite:
With a collaboration suite, all organization members can simply log into the software via a browser and have access to information collected by all teams. For example, if they were to use a collaboration suite like OneDesk, the marketing team can use the built-in social media monitoring tool to search for and listen to what is being said about the company’s brand on Facebook, Twitter and blogs. They can then tag the comments as ideas, issues, leads and feedback, and bring them into OneDesk for the appropriate department to find; the support team will find issues in the cases application, and the sales team will find leads in the ideas management tool. They can then make the feedback viewable to all departments, after which the R&D team can turn ideas into requirements, which the project team can create tasks from, and develop products that the market wants.
OneDesk: An all-in-one collaboration suite
OneDesk includes applications for many roles:
- Product management
- Requirements management
- Product roadmapping
- Innovation and ideas management
- Project and portfolio management
- Feedback management
- Social media monitoring
- Customer service and help desk management
- Release management
- Customer engagement
All these applications are interconnected and topped with a layer of collaboration tools such as an activity stream, chat, discussion forums, interactive calendars, blogs and more. These allow team team members to easily communicate with each other and ensure everyone is on the same page. Try OneDesk now for free and get your whole organization collaborating.