|
As you may know, the lines between messaging and collaboration software continue to blur. Enterprise software these days span email, collaboration, document sharing, project management, CRM, content management, and office productivity and god knows what. Each suite offers something different, making comparisons virtually impossible! Sigh, the "sharepoint alternative" market used to be so much simpler... In this chaos, one new market category seems to be emerging - solutions which integrate messaging and collaboration features in the same suite. Google Apps, Microsoft BPOS, HyperOffice, LotusLive, Zimbra all seem to fall in this category. Recently, HyperOffice wrote an article on how choosing an integrated messaging and collaboration suite had many benefits for users over buying these two separately. A few benefits are:- 1) Less solutions to manage: No multiple vendor relationships to manage, no multiple consoles to log in to, no multiple admin accounts to get hassled by. 2) Cheaper: Buying a single suite with integrated capabilities is invariably cheaper than buying multiple solutions for messaging and collaboration. 3) Innovation: When email and collaboration tools are in a single suite, you can think of the system as a unified whole, and think of innovative ways in which different aspects of the solution can interact to benefit users. For example, emails delegating tasks can be pushed into the project management system with a single click. This ability to innovate would not be available if the email and collaboration solution were separate. 4) Seamless Data Exchange: Data can flow freely between different parts of the solution. Documents can interact with emails, contacts can interact with calendars and so on.
|
