Why collaborate?

Organizations grow and succeed when
they invest in their people. In order
for people to succeed in the organization, they must be able to collaborate.

“In today’s disparate, electronic, hectic
business world, it is difficult for people to
collaborate as a team,” says Toni Paoletta,
director of the Technology Solutions
Institute at Tri-C’s Corporate College. “With
the latest versions of collaborative tool
sets, businesses can leverage their current
IT infrastructure and provide their employees — and customers — a space online to
collaborate. These tools make it easier to
empower customers and employees to
work together to achieve success.”

Smart Business asked Paoletta how companies should approach online collaboration.

Why collaborate?

Businesses need to share information
and ideas with their employees, vendors
and customers. Traditionally, these exchanges of data occur over e-mail, shared
drives, extranets and the Internet.

However, when a team needs to get
together, it can be a struggle. Issues such as
‘Who has the latest version of the proposal?’ come up, or a salesperson is out of the
office and can’t access customer statistics
because the information is located on a
shared network drive back at the office.

Collaborative tool sets from software
suppliers like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle
eliminate these issues with digital ‘workspaces.’ Similar to a conference room with
all the amenities, the tool sets create an
online space where people can collaborate.

Why collaborative tool sets?

In business, every project matters. These
tool sets allow companies to connect their
people with business information. They
can streamline process management by
using existing communications to improve
team effectiveness. They make each
employee’s contribution to a key project
matter even more.

Local files stored on employee PCs eventually get out of synch when working on
shared document. Using shared workspaces, users have a forum to manage collaborative projects and readily share up-to-date information with colleagues, business
partners and customers. They can work on
a shared document, keep up to date about
the status of a project, find team members
online, and add comments or results to a
shared workplace.

Many such tool sets are available on the
market. The most robust allow businesses
to improve their organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content
management and enterprise search; accelerating shared business processes; and
facilitating information-sharing across
boundaries for better business insight.

What benefits do collaboration tool sets offer
a business?

Improve team productivity by connecting employees with the information and
resources they need. Users can create team
workspaces, coordinate calendars, organize
documents, and receive important notifications and updates through communication
features including announcements and
alerts, as well as the new templates for creating blogs and wikis. While mobile, users
can take advantage of convenient offline
synchronization capabilities.

Easily manage documents and help
ensure integrity of content
, including
the option to activate required document
checkout before editing, the ability to view
revisions to documents and restore to previous versions, and the control to set document- and item-level security.

Tailor solutions to your business
processes with application templates for
addressing specific business processes or
sets of tasks.

Build a collaboration environment quickly and easily with minimal administrative time and effort — from simple, single-server configurations to more robust
enterprise configurations. Because deployment settings can be flexibly changed, less
planning time is required and companies
can get started even faster.

Reduce the complexity of securing
business information
with advanced
administrative controls for increasing the
security of information resources while
decreasing cost and complexity associated
with site provisioning, site management
and support.

Provide sophisticated controls for
securing company resources by setting
permissions as deep down as the document or item level. Site managers, teams
and other work groups can initiate self-service collaborative workspaces and
tasks within these preset parameters.

Take file-sharing to a new level with
robust document storage and retrieval features, including check-in/check-out functionality, version history, custom metadata
and customizable views.

Easily scale your collaboration solution using a Web browser or command-line
utilities. Manage server farms, servers and
sites with a variety of custom and third-party administration solution offerings.

Build Web-based applications inexpensively, to offer your business enterprise-wide functionality for records management, search, workflows, portals, personalized sites and more.

TONI PAOLETTA is director of the Technology Solutions Institute
at Tri-C’s Corporate College. Reach her at (216) 987-5606 or
[email protected], or visit www.corporatecollege.com.