The chance meeting… Or how not to adopt a collaboration solution by accident

We have the skills, the experience and the ability to deliver a ‘best fit’ meeting and collaboration solution for your business.

Since the word ‘Skype’ became a slang term for a video call and arguably put Microsoft at the top of list of most recognisable collaboration solutions, albeit through acquisition, the collaboration space has become a maze of solutions, options and packages that businesses have to wade through to find the one that fits the best.

To complicate things even further, today’s IT world is driven more than ever before by consumerisation: users adopting technology that they find easier to use or more readily accessible than the solution their IT department offers. Nowhere is this more evident than with collaboration and in particular the use of online meeting tools. Meetings tools are now everywhere – WebEx, WebEx Teams, Microsoft Teams, Slack, GoToMeeting and more. Are they all the same? Why choose one over the other? How do you avoid the pain of choosing the wrong solution – or worse adopting a solution by accident?

A typical scenario could see your marketing department sharing files with their copywriter using Dropbox; your sales team routinely using GoTo Meeting for customer calls; and your engineering or production teams using Slack because they are ‘techies’ and like stuff that started out as open source. If you’re the CFO then this accidental adoption may deliver unexpected savings in reduced travel and expenses – but the loss of centralised control of your data and the ‘ad hoc’ charging models of some solutions may outweigh any financial benefits, keeping your CEO or CTO awake at night. Moreover, all of these ‘user adopted’ systems are outside of your IT security policy and present a security risk to your business information, a risk you cannot control because you don’t control the platforms. Of course nobody is ‘supposed’ to be using these but if you don’t provide the features in any of your existing collaboration systems your users will find another way. Before you know it your de facto solution will be something your users adopted rather than were given as an enabler to closer working.

At Redcentric we’ve not only seen our customers face these situations, but had to deal with the very same issues and choices in our own collaboration journey. As a result we are in a great position to help navigate the confusing maze of collaboration and deliver real results. We’ve helped customers understand the hidden cost of ‘bundled’ products like Skype for Business Online, helped mitigate risk with solutions that include proper security and information management enabling compliance.

There’s a great deal of choice in collaboration and every vendor will tell you their solution offers the best choice of features, integrations and has the most cost-effective user model. For businesses the drive to standardise on one solution is challenging. With leading technology from Cisco and Microsoft in our portfolio and a long history of delivering robust, reliable voice services, Redcentric is well placed to guide you to your ideal, integrated collaboration solution.

We have the skills, the experience and the ability to deliver a ‘best fit’ meeting and collaboration solution for your business – and having done it for ourselves we can help you navigate some of the pitfalls! To avoid adopting a/our-solutions/communications/collaboration/n ‘accidental’ collaboration and meeting solution, make your next step a very deliberate one in our direction.

To know more about Redcentric’s Managed Collaboration Services, please click here.


Related Posts

redcentric

Redcentric

0800 983 2522 sayhello@redcentricplc.com