Tips For Choosing a Collaboration Vendor

The power of any team collaboration and communications solution you choose is determined by how well it meets your business objectives. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution for team collaboration. Rather, you have to understand what your organization's specific needs are before you can confidently select a vendor. Below are some tips on how to make this decision:

Evaluating Your Collaboration Options

The collaboration landscape is full of vendors offering all manner of solutions. Some offer unified communications solutions, but may not provide the collaboration tools that integrate with those solutions. Others may offer solutions that integrate but are not as feature-rich. In the end, choosing the wrong solution means your employees only get part of what they need.

You could choose to purchase pieces of a robust solution independently and try to integrate them on-site. But this will create a solution that was not engineered to work seamlessly. Plus, your IT team will have to deal with multiple vendors and a variety of disparate support options. More importantly, your employees will still have to work with multiple applications and user interfaces. This defeats the purpose of unified communications, minimizes the impact of team collaboration tools, and creates a disjointed user experience that may not enhance work processes.

So, take care to select a vendor with fully integrated features. This will make it easier to keep employees connected, streamline communication, enable seamless collaboration and make interactions as effective and efficient as possible today and tomorrow.

The right vendor should be able to address a variety of requirements with purpose-built solutions for:

• The cloud to break down team silos and consolidate diverse communications and collaboration tools into a single work stream-style experience
• On-premises deployment to bring together all of your team’s disconnected methods of communications, collaboration and sharing into one integrated work stream
• Over-the-top deployment to provide teams with a secure environment where they can work together in real time to coordinate projects, events or situations with messaging, video, content sharing and real-time connectivity

We understand choosing a solution in this complex can be difficult. If you are considering implementing a collaboration solution, we're here to offer a consultation.