Sharing information and ideas at anytime from anywhere has been long sought after by businesses. Companies must continually innovate their processes and products to maintain competitive advantage. Internal and external collaboration is a critical component of product innovation, process improvement, and a healthy environment for organic growth.
Businesses migrating their IT environment into the cloud have been doing so at an extraordinary rate. Tools for faster and more secure migrations have been developed to make the transition seamless for IT departments. The concept of sharing information at anytime from anywhere is now a reality. Organizations now share large files through the cloud quickly and securely with prospects, partners and employees. What if just sharing documents wasn’t enough? What if you wanted to meet with a colleague or customer located hundreds of miles away?
Video conferencing and hosted voice solutions have been adopted into the cloud’s robust capabilities. We have listed several industry leading top cloud based collaboration platforms and what solutions they offer.
Cisco Spark provides seamless collaboration on mobile devices, phones and laptops.
Cisco Spark Collaboration
Cisco’s all-in-one app-centric, cloud based collaboration platform in Cisco Spark offers an exciting array of features. Spark provides users with a plethora of options for collaboration. For instance, Spark Messaging enable users to easily exchange messages and files to another user or a group of users. Another example is how Spark Meetings give users the ability to create, communicate and collaborate in one continuous work stream across mobile or video devices. In addition, Cisco’s Spark Calling enables users to make calls to other Cisco Spark users via SIP dialing, and calling regular landline or mobile phones via the PSTN.
Cisco Spark also offers hybrid services. These set of services connect on-premise services and Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution to Cisco Spark.
Ring Central offers a robust collaboration platform with video conferencing, messaging and file sharing.
Ring Central Collaboration
This collaboration platform provides a robust offering to businesses of all sizes. For instance, Ring Central Meetings enable users to meet up to 200 people in a single conference and hold unlimited HD video calls. It gives users the ability to schedule online meetings from Microsoft Outlook and integrates with other cloud services such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and One Drive. In addition, Ring Central Rooms integrates with your existing video conferencing set up to avoid costly proprietary endpoints and complicated configurations. Users can manage camera zoom/tilt, microphone volume, scheduling and meeting participation. Lastly, Ring Central Webinars offers users the ability to host up to 3,000 attendees along with email invitations, confirmations and follow ups.
Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint are powerful collaboration tools that integrate into the Office 365 Suite
Microsoft Office 365 Collaboration
This cloud based collaboration platform offers users an array of tools to share files and communicate on changes that have been made to those files. Office 365 gives users access to the entire Office suite of programs (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, etc.). Files have the ability to have storage locally on the device or saved simultaneously in SharePoint or OneDrive. Users are able to invite users to have access to files on SharePoint and OneDrive, and with the granted permissions have the capability to share their files in the same folder. In addition, Sharepoint users can build multiple sites for different business segments to gain access to resources. Skype For Business offers users a secure way to initiate online meetings through audio and video conferencing collaboration.
Microsoft is also integrating Teams within Office 365 to bring in all your team’s chats, meetings, files and applications into a single pane of glass. This offers users more transparency into what others have been working on and collaborate on next steps to complete those projects. Teams integrate with other cloud based programs such as Hootsuite, Wrike, Trello, Zendesk and Visual Studio.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the need to collaborate anytime, anywhere has become a reality with the cloud. New innovations and platforms allow users to easily share and communicate. Businesses adopting Cloud Collaboration have quickly seen enhancement in work quality and a growing Return of Investment. Breaking down the barriers of communication will allow businesses to adapt to a changing market, and continue to grow in an ever-growing competitive world.
For more information regarding collaboration in the cloud and how it can benefit your business, contact us at www.yourstrategic.com/contact-us.
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