Team collaboration is poised to become the new dial tone in a remote work era. Team collaboration is overtaking email and phone calls as the primary way for teams to communicate in real-time. As many enterprises restructure their communications infrastructure to adapt to changing workplace settings, team collaboration is a vital solution that for helping people get work done. 

Legacy communications applications are still in the midst of shifting to give way to team collaboration. As chatbots come online and computer interfaces become more human-like, team collaboration will be a means of communication between humans and the virtual agents that support them in the workplace.

In Research Note 2020-37, The Aragon Research Globe™ for Team Collaboration, 2020, we evaluated 18 providers who focus on finding new ways for teams to communicate and collaborate in real-time. 

The RFP process is one of the best ways to ensure successful procurements. It gives all your bidders the same view of exactly what you want, so they can accurately calculate their costs and make their proposals responsive. By providing a common form and format for all the responses, with a consistent framework to compare them in, an RFP gives you more confidence that what you buy will meet your needs.

Introduction

Aragon Research is publishing this guide to help buyers write effective requests for proposals (RFPs) and requests for information (RFIs) for sales coaching and learning (SCL). 

This book is divided into two parts. This section, Part I, is addressed to you, the buyer, who is setting out to write an RFP. It explains some of the ways you can use an RFP to make your procurement financially safe and technically satisfying. 

Because RFPs are legally binding and financially consequential, but can also be technically intricate, repetitive and tedious to create, we have compiled the content of a typical RFP for team collaboration software, which is contained in Part II. As an Aragon Research client, you are free to copy and paste this content into your own RFP template and then customize it to fit your specific situation. If you have never done an RFP before, work with your legal and financial staff to develop the rest of the necessary content. 

In Part II, everything that is not in italics is intended to be part of your actual RFP, and is addressed to the vendors you send it to. The material in italics is for you, the buyer. Be sure to remove everything in italics before sending the RFP to bidders.