Open Letter to Collaboration Tool Providers
To: Collaboration Tool Providers
From: Collaboration Team Leaders Everywhere
First we all want to thank you for the tremendous amount of tool development over the past few years, to support our growing collaboration needs. The growth of Software as a Service (SaaS) tools has been great for us because they enabled us to get new tools without having to wait for the enterprise IT group to install them; they bridged the network firewalls so we could collaborate with customers, vendors, and partners without special authorization; their variable pricing has made it easier for us to include them in our departmental expenses; and the trial structure has given us the chance to test many different models of tools.
At the same time, we have to admit to being overwhelmed by the number of choices of tools to meet our needs. There seem to be more added to the list every month and major feature upgrades in the others every week. It is nice that we can select among Sharepoint, Basecamp, Central Desktop, PBWorks, Collabnet, Huddle, OnePlace, OneHub, MavenLink, TeamBox, and many, many more. Forgive us if we need some time and more testing to make up our minds. We know your shareholders must be frustrated by the time it takes for you to reach break even or profitability, as well as alarmed by the number of new contenders.
We want to share our list of needs to help you move to the front of the pack.
- Tell us clearly what your product does that makes it better than all the others. We are the collaborative team leaders, so we already know such things as "collaboration is a critical capability for enterprises for this decade". We all know the importance of project planning, team communications, and so on. Most of us are also aware of your competitors and have experimented with a half dozen in the last few months. What we need to know is what your product is really good at, especially if it meets a particular need for my type of company or type of project. Some of you seem to be solutions in search of a problem. Surely one tool must be better if I am an advertising executive coordinating a new ad campaign with my client executives and creative directors, and another tool must be better if I am coordinating system requirements with an IT development team in Asia. You can't all be perfect for all our needs in all our projects.
- Keep focusing on making the tools easy to use. You might have great functionality for me and my project, but if my team members tell me they need training or find the tool difficult to use, I will fail as a collaboration team leader. Your tool must be as easy to use as Gmail -- from registering to signing in to uploading files to making edits to managing alerts. Pay particular attention to that latter category, alerts and notifications, because it is often forgotten. My team members need to know when there are new things of interest to them in their collaboration site -- yet we cannot bombard them with email alerts.
- Give us free trials so we can test your product. Many of you already offer free trials for small work teams, and that is valuable for us to try out your product. Keep doing that. The 30-day trial offers are good for a start, but we often cannot test out the full function in 30 days, because we often need to find a small trial project and enlist other experimenters, which all takes time. If your 30-day trial expires or you charge for us to learn about your tool, then we are likely to move to another platform. We know you need to make money, so we understand you might have to restrict the size or functions of the free trials, but please put our ability to experiment and learn ahead of your desire to charge me.
- Build us the full suite we need, rather than point solutions. In absense of any distinctive product advantages, we will migrate to the suites that give us the best range of functionality we need. If we can get project management, file sharing, discussion forums, group calendaring, blogging, group editing, instant messaging, and conferencing all in one place, we are likely to choose that. Otherwise it is too much effort to ask our team members to jump from tool to tool -- managing the sign-ons and alerts for different sites. When several of you offer sufficient breadth, good user interface, and compelling product description, you will become the leaders and we will ignore the others. Build more breadth, partner with others, merge companies, or do whatever it takes to give us the one-stop-shop.
- Accommodate our many simultaneous projects. Keep in mind that most of us are leading or contributing to as many as five or ten projects at a time, of different characteristics. Please walk a mile in our shoes and consider a day in our lives, moving from project to project and role to role. The more you can help us manage different user permissions and view our activities from a common dashboard, the easier our lives will be. And the more we will prefer to use your tool.
- Respect our data and privacy. When we use your tool we will be loading valuable data and contacts into your systems. Show us you respect that and will treat the data with the utmost care. Avoid marketing to our team members and hitting them with spam. Back up the data base. Maintain high system reliability. Avoid any data leaks or privacy issues. And give us an easy way to retrieve our data when the project is done, so we have the flexibility to move elsewhere or store it for future reference.
Much of this is common sense, yet still far from the reality today. Please consider these requirements before adding more (and potentially confusing) features and functions. And then we might have a beautiful future together.
Sincerely yours,
Your collaboration leader.
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