Mobile Collaboration: From Working Here to Workers Everywhere

By Geoff Spick (@Goffee71) Mar 24, 2011

Enterprise collaboration is going mobile at a great pace as enterprise incumbents expand their existing products to add mobile support while new vendors try to energize the mobile SMB workforce.

Collaboration is Far From New

For years, one worker has rung up or emailed another, faxed them or mailed over a document and received useful input or insight by return post. It might have been a conference call, an early Web whiteboard session, but it was all about people helping each other.

Still, in the modern age, every aspect of the working day has to be branded and crafted into something marketable. So every company has a "solution" to aid collaboration — to make it easier, more immediate or smarter. All of today's efforts are focused on the, now insidious, mobile web — where anyone can be reached 24/7.

All of this leads to many opportunities for developers and a shopping aisle's worth of choice for companies large and small. The most likely candidates in need of collaboration tools are those who have been doing it for years anyway. Remote web or app development teams have often built their own fun little collaboration tools or sites; but as teams grow, a need for an interface and features that those outside the core team can use becomes a pressing need.

Similarly, day-to-day web workers need features that make them feel at home, they come from a world of mobile apps for Facebook and Twitter (and, let's face it, most collaboration has evolved from the evolution of the social Web, just with a business face), and expect a similar level of design efficiency and features while being able to access work documents and information without jumping through ill-designed hoops.

Approaches to Collaboration

Almost every business suite has developed a collaboration theme over the last few years and, in the rush to liberate the worker from the desk, we've seen an increase in mobile offerings, from vendors big and small. There seem to be two current approaches to collaboration:

1. Either a team within a company starts using their choice of free or cheap tools on an ad-hoc basis to get the job done. When someone senior finds out about this their reactions are usually:

Well done, you showed initiative.
Can we use it too?
Crap, you didn't log everything for compliance! What if someone says something rude? What if we get sued?

2. Or, if a company launches a collaboration system the response of workers is:

Cool, a new toy.
Back to my day job.
(Sometime later) I don't remember that memo.

The incoming enterprise solutions aim to cancel out both of these potential outcomes by ensuring all the big legal boxes of archiving, user identification and policy compliance are ticked. At the same time, they try to use features seen in popular social sites like Facebook, Twitter and the cloud-based startups like Campfire and Yammer to offer appealing themes for us cubicle smurfs and road warriors who have to work with them on a daily basis.

Working on the Go

Mobile Collaboration actually simplifies some of these challenges as, by their nature, all data has be stored somewhere central for all users to access — easy to archive and since it has to go through a server or service, easy to apply ground rules and filters to.