The Shift from Email to Team Collaboration Tools
By Jim Lundy
I’ve been sitting at a conference in Napa for the last two days collaborating with other attendees using various team collaboration tools.
Interestingly enough, we haven’t used email once.
This blog discusses the shift from email to team collaboration as a regular way of getting work done.
The War to Win Collaboration Is Not About Email
One of the ways that Microsoft rows to dominate the collaboration market was because of their intense focus on winning the email wars.
It took a long time, but Microsoft’s focus on winning that anchor application eventually forced out many other players, except for Google.
However, the attitude that Microsoft created amongst IT professionals is that only one vendor should win when it comes to collaboration.
As I wrote last week in my weekly blog series, the era of one-size-fits-all for collaboration is over.
The big story is about the rise of business messaging, also referred to as team collaboration.
Email is Dead, Long Live Team Collaboration
Email isn’t dead by any stretch, it is just not the de facto corporation application that it was 10 years ago.
Today, people text others using a multitude of tools and team collaboration is gaining traction in the enterprise as every year ticks by.
The Reason the Team Collaboration Is Taking Off
Because of the mobile nature of team collaboration and because of the immediate notifications that you often get, it is easier to engage and get a response.
Therefore, it is much more effective than email when it comes to communicating and collaborating on the topic or on a work project.
The last three years have seen a tremendous focus on video conferencing which is overtaking voice-based calls and teleconferences.
All of these changes have been happening as the growth of team collaboration has been taking off.
In fact, the near term bundle that Aragon Research sees is videoconferencing along with team collaboration as a starter work bundle.
Aragon really doesn’t see standalone team collaboration offerings as being that viable in the marketplace.
That is why so many providers that offer video conferencing offer excellent team collaboration capabilities too.
What Happens to Slack?
From a pure collaboration perspective, slackers are still best of breed team collaborators.
They have basic video messaging and basic voice calling, but it’s not a tool you have to deploy across the enterprise.
Well, we’ll talk about Slack more in future research.
In many ways Slack has been reconciled to being used by engineers because it was a tight end to the Atlassian space JIRA application.
Microsoft Competes Against Slack
Salesforce seems to have overlooked one thing: Microsoft has been very focused on ensuring that Microsoft Teams wins the hearts and minds of the IT buyer.
Given that success, they are now targeting the business buyer with Microsoft Viva, which includes significant capabilities from Microsoft Teams.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is that team collaboration tools are here to stay and it’s become a critical part of hybrid work.
We see this trend continuing until 2025 when team collaboration overtakes email as the primary way of collaborating inside and outside the enterprise.
We do believe that there will be multiple team collaboration offerings. The federation will be required to make the different products talk to each other.
However, email had a great run and now it’s time to move on to team collaboration.
This blog is a part of the Digital Workplace blog series by Aragon Research’s CEO, Jim Lundy.
Missed the previous installments? Catch up here:
Blog 13: Collaboration – Proliferation vs One Size Fits all