- We touched on this when we were talking
about chatting, but let's take a bit closer look
at digital communities and team spaces.
This is a rapidly growing area in the digital workplace,
and I think rightly so.
Communities and team spaces
let groups within an organization
have a central hub where they can chat,
share information, and work together.
Sometimes these groups are set up organizationally.
You'll have a space set up where you can talk
and share information with
the people in your department, say.
And sometimes groups are set up around a common interest,
such as a project or a technology user group,
or even a non work interest.
There's also typically an all feed,
where you can see general interest messages
to the entire enterprise.
You also usually have options to make groups
or communities public.
Anyone can see them.
Or private, restricted to a specific set of people
with membership controlled by the group owner.
Now some companies automatically assign employees
to specific groups, where other companies
allow employees to self select the communities
that they want to interact with.
I personally think that the strongest approach
is a combined one.
Employees are automatically a part of groups
that mirror their organizational structure,
but then they're free to join other groups
as they feel necessary or appropriate.
Microsoft was a big, early champion
of community based tools with Yammer.
Over time, and as the Office 365 suite
has become more tightly integrated,
Teams has evolved to become a more comprehensive offering.
In Teams, you can easily move between chats,
one on one conversations, phone calls, and video calls,
and it's all tied in with Office tools
that you use all the time,
like Word, Outlook, and SharePoint.
Now Cisco was also an early entry
with their WebEx social application,
but they dropped support after only a few years.
They've reentered the arena with their Spark tool,
which is getting a lot of interest
because of how it integrates with online meetings.
Something that a lot of people are excited about
is Facebook's foray into the Workplace setting.
Since almost everyone is familiar with Facebook
as a consumer application, making the transition
to Workplace for Facebook is an easy one.
Workplace is still relatively new
and doesn't have all the bells and whistles
that some of the other tools have,
but it's going to be really interesting
to see what happens over the next couple of years.
If you want to get more information about this kind of tool,
there are some good courses available to you in the library.
Check out Learning Workplace for Facebook,
Microsoft Teams Essential Training,
or Yammer 2016 Essential Training for details.
I have to admit that I think community
and team spaces are some of the most powerful tools
in the modern workplace.
However, I have one important caveat to that.
I am not a big fan of private groups,
except when organized around sensitive information.
We'll talk about this a little more later in the course,
but I have a personal preference for transparency
within organizations.
To me, the benefits of broadly sharing information
dramatically outweigh the risks,
but you'll have to stand by to hear my arguments.