- Some of the biggest players in technology
have made major commitments to developing collaborative
capabilities in their products.
Once again, this is something we've already alluded to
when we were talking about communities and team spaces.
The best of the providers offer full integrated suites
of programs that perform multiple functions seamlessly
across their stacks.
To me, Microsoft Office 365 is a great example
of what I'm talking about.
It's an incredibly rich environment
within a very well integrated and feature-full package.
You have Outlook email, Skype calls and video calls,
shared calendars in Teams,
organized communities in Yammer,
document sharing in OneDrive.
Plus, it all ties together with popular business tools
like Word, Excel, Project, and SharePoint.
The fact that the entire O365 suite lives in the cloud
means that all your stuff is available to you
from wherever you are, whenever you want it,
and from any device you want to use.
As long as you have an internet connection,
you're good to go.
However, I know that there's a percentage of the population
who are reluctant to get locked into using Microsoft
for everything, so it's a good thing
that they have alternatives.
Google's G Suite is another popular choice.
It has many of the same types of functionality
that O365 does, although things like spreadsheets
and documents use Google's proprietary formats.
These formats may not be as feature-rich as Microsoft's
but they can be converted to Microsoft-friendly files
as needed.
I think IBM Connections is another super impressive suite.
Although it's maybe not as friendly
to a non-technical audience,
there are some really intriguing possibilities
about Connection's future direction,
especially around bringing in more artificial intelligence
capabilities through IBM's Watson project.
We'll talk more about that
in a later episode of this course.
Want to learn more?
Once again, there are some really great courses
here in the library to get a grounding on these tools.
Look for Learning Office 365,
Team Collaboration in G Suite,
and Learning IBM Connections.