Why use a collaborative platform?

Why adopt and use a collaborative platform for your organization? What are the advantages of a collaborative platform in terms of communication and collaboration? What is the particularity of the Jamespot solution? We give you all the answers in this new blog post! 🔎👇

What is a collaborative platform?

What exactly is a collaborative work platform? 🤔 A collaborative platform is a virtual workspace that brings together applications, documents, data, and information to make them available to its users.

A collaborative work platform is both a communication and collaboration tool that allows employees to exchange information and resources to optimize their daily work and thus maximize their productivity.

This type of tool is used for a wide range of purposes: optimizing internal communication, facilitating, and managing projects, accelerating innovation, and encouraging collaboration between all members of the same organization.

Who can use a collaborative work platform?

However, the use of a collaborative platform is not limited to the internal activity of a company. An organization can deploy a platform for external use and use it to reinforce its exchanges with the third parties it works with: suppliers, partners and customers can also be included in the use of a platform depending on the needs of the structure that deploys it.

What can a collaborative platform look like?

A collaborative work tool can take different forms for different purposes. An intranet, a Enterprise Social Network or a Digital Workplace are all 3 collaborative platforms but with different forms and uses.

The first one takes the form of a portal and is used for bottom-up communication, the second one shares information in the form of an activity flow and is more focused on cross-functional collaboration, while the third one is an entirely digital workspace that gathers and unifies a multitude of different tools within it. 3 collaborative platforms for 3 different paths to collaboration.

What are the advantages of a collaborative platform?

Now that we have precisely defined our subject, let's look at the different advantages of a collaborative platform.

1. Facilitates communication and collaboration between users

This is the first and main advantage of a collaborative platform. Such a tool allows the professionals who use it to communicate and collaborate by sharing information, documents, and resources in real time.

By allowing several people to connect at the same time, the platform facilitates and coordinates the work of an entire organization, allowing each employee to access the information they need at the right time and thus optimize their productivity.

2. Optimize business uses

A collaborative platform offers its users a multitude of features through different applications. Some are dedicated to the whole organization to reinforce its communication in a general way (document sharing, publication of news and updates of the structure...) while others have more precise uses and will be used by certain departments and employees according to their needs.

Thus, if the organization benefits from the advantages of a collaborative work tool, the employees are not left out since they will be able to find in the platform applications specifically designed for their business uses.

3. The solution to the proliferation of tools

As mentioned earlier, the health crisis has greatly accelerated the digital transition of organizations. However, not all organizations have proceeded in the same way.

Some have deployed a single collaborative platform to continue their activity remotely, while others have acquired a multitude of tools for each of their uses: a solution to manage projects, a corporate social network to communicate, a videoconferencing solution for meetings...

This choice can be counterproductive in the long run: the proliferation of collaborative tools results in the isolation of employees in closed systems and the dispersion of information and documents throughout the organization. The global communication of the organization ends up being weakened. Using a unique collaborative work platform allows to align the collaborators on a single system while linking to it all the applications necessary for their use.

4. Securing data

At the heart of organizations' activities, collaborative platforms offer multiple possibilities in terms of security. The stakes are high because documents, information and confidential resources are shared daily via these tools.

To guarantee the security of exchanges and shared information, collaborative platforms have various protection systems: data encryption and backups to make information opaque, platform duplication to ensure the continuation of activity in case of technical problems...

These are just some of the ways to ensure the security and protection of users against cyber-attacks and data leakage.

What is the impact of collaborative work today?

What is the impact of collaborative work on businesses today? 🤔 There are many reasons why organizations are switching to collaborative tools.

First of all, studies have shown that companies with a collaborative platform adapted to their uses benefit from an advantage over their competitors: strengthened communication 📢, smoother processes, more productive employees 🤝...

Bringing your teams into the digital world is today an essential step for companies wishing to adapt their business to the challenges of their time. Then, the health crisis having disrupted the established order, new ways of working have emerged, with agility and mobility at their center.

A fact that many companies have become aware of in early 2020 and have accelerated their digital transformation to adapt to these new challenges.

How to choose the best collaborative platform?

The market of collaborative platforms being today as developed as the digital uses, several factors (besides the fact that it must necessarily fit in your communication plan) must be considered when choosing. Let's look at 3 of the most important ones.

1. The budget

It is impossible to ignore the budget factor, which has (and will always have) a particularly significant weight in the decision-making process of organizations. Collaborative tools are not all proposed at the same price, so two questions arise: what is your budget? And how much are you willing to invest in your future collaborative tool? A comparison of the prices of the different players in the market is a good start and will give you an overview of the budget options available to you.

2. Features

Although it is an important point to consider, the budget is not enough to decide which tool to adopt for your organization. The features aspect is just as important: for what purpose do you want to use a collaborative platform? Is your objective to optimize your organization's global communication? To increase exchanges between collaborators or even between departments? To facilitate the daily use of your colleagues? Or to simplify the management of your organization's projects?

Your objective will determine the uses you will make of the tool you adopt.

3. Implementation and support

The third element to consider does not concern the tool itself but is no less important: the support. What type of support will I receive when I choose a particular editor? Will I be guided in the deployment of the solution? 🤔 In understanding its key features? Will I benefit from a follow-up over time? The level of support varies from one editor to another. Some companies prefer to provide extensive support to get their employees as involved as possible, while others focus on the speed of deployment of the solution rather than on the deployment phase.

Other factors should be considered, such as the inclusion or not of tracking indicators in the platform, the editor's experience on the market (young innovative company or experienced player), the data security provided by the solution and many others.

Collaborative platform: discover Jamespot's expertise

Who is Jamespot?

Jamespot is a collaborative platform editor which has been in business for over 15 years. Jamespot has worked closely with organizations of all sizes and in all industries and has developed and perfected its expertise over the years to become the leader in cloud-based collaborative solutions.

What is the particularity of the Jamespot collaborative platform?

The Jamespot collaborative solution is a modular and customizable solution with all the necessary business applications to improve communication and collaboration within organizations. Able to adapt its form according to the needs and uses of the organization that deploys it, the Jamespot solution provides its users with more than a hundred business applications so that each employee using the platform can optimize its own uses. Jamespot is committed to providing each organization with the collaborative solution that best suits its needs, both in form and in content.

What support does Jamespot offer to its users?

Jamespot offers different levels of support depending on your needs and priorities. Need to deploy a collaborative platform with basic functionalities as soon as possible? The Fast Track package lets you create your platform independently to get your new tool up and running as quickly as possible. Does your organization have several thousand employees and you want to take the time to customize the deployment of your future solution? This is also possible. Whether it's about your uses or the size of your platform, Jamespot always makes sure that your collaborative platform reflects your organization, both in form and in content.