Roll back less than a decade, and online collaboration was so straightforward. We kept our files in dropbox, or emailed them to each other, after creating them in our standalone word processors. We chatted and video-conferenced on emerging enterprise-priced tool suites, and those newer tools like Slack, well… Sure, perhaps they’d catch on one day. But as more and more of us transitioned away from the wholly co-located workspace with its hot hissy server room, we fitted our styles of working to the emergent cloud-based tools at our disposal, and were glad to be able to do so.
Approaching 2020 however the field is diverse and fragmented more every day, and that is a good thing, for all of us. And at NomadCity’s 2019 Remote Work Summit, representatives from many of the tools we use to communicate and collaborate online every day included Microsoft, Doist, Buffer and Basecamp. Run-up afterwork meetups were attended by still more, including Zoom - because when it comes to targeting decision-makers directly through face to face events, it makes sense that SMEs or solopreneurs are more likely to be in attendance, free to check out new tools they like the look of and perhaps switching quite frequently - but bringing much smaller budgets than the CIO of a large corporation to that choice.
One thing which struck me though was the complex stack of apps everyone is still reliant on in their day-to-day digital collaborations. Will we ever get to the point of a single pane of glass to do everything, from the wiki to the whiteboard to the whispers?
“Yes, it’s already here, Basecamp!” called out the guy from Basecamp, in response to this question.
“Microsoft Teams! It’s like G Suite and Trello had a baby!”
...positions were taken, and defended. Had the likes of enterprise-level UC suppliers Cisco, Avaya, etc been present, doubtless all of them would have declared their ecosystems as the natural hub to be the centre of everything, that we’d all been looking for.
