Collaborative document management – Where do you stand?

Sharing no longer means email

This point was inspired by David Armano’s blog post in the Harvard Business Review. I completely agree with the points he’s making there (although he is referring more to social sharing). We had a similar blog post on using emails for sharing documents a while ago, focusing more on business collaboration.

Email, in many ways, has become obsolete for company collaboration, whether we talk about internal or corporate collaboration or customer collaboration. We do not share news or other mundane things over email – we now have Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc – but we’re also relying less and less on email for file sharing collaboration and other sensitive information.

We’re moving our sharing toward other specialized collaboration applications, most of which are “in the cloud”. This trend to use web collaboration tools will continue to increase, to the point at which we won’t be sending (copies of) documents via email at all. Having more than one copy of the original document or too many versions of it is counterproductive.

We’ll focus more and more on keeping documentation in a well-structured and secure centralized location. We will share that location (and login credentials) only with specific users or teams and avoid all that versioning madness – so unproductive especially for workgroup collaboration.

Service unification

Most of us have a Twitter account, a Facebook account, a StumbleUpon account, the list goes on! It’s painstaking to log into every single portal. Social networks' aggregators have already started to emerge. I think the focus will switch more to these rather than the original platforms.

A lot of companies are already using social media for business purposes. They might be among the first to adopt these third-party apps. This will push the aggregators to include business collaboration tools as well (such as text editors, document review apps, etc.)

Completely move to the cloud

Even Microsoft agrees – according to one of their outreach team members.

We already positioned ourselves on one side of the fence with this one.  As we said before, companies reluctant to adopt cloud technologies will become less competitive and be threatened by new entrants that offer a better and cheaper service.

Business collaboration applications in the cloud can be just as secure (if not more) as desktop apps. They are more intuitive to use and more user friendly. I truly believe they are the future, contributing to business innovation. Even Operating Systems are moving to the cloud!

More remote teams

Cloud computing will eventually lead to workforce globalization. Cultural differences are still an issue here, but I think the trend is to overcome this.

The main idea behind this reasoning is: if we have access to all work-related documents and collaboration applications, from wherever in the word, what’s to stop us from seeking team members from all over the world? This way companies can employ the best talent, wherever they might find it.