<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

\n\nContrary to the modern workplace evangelists who are wearing a brush, and lot of pink paint, people in business are the ones who need to deal with this brave new world, its challenges, promises, difficulties and failures. \n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By definition, a modern workplace as we consider it today aims to help employees, customers and suppliers collaborate, share, and organize information using modern technologies, anytime, anywhere, from any device. So, it is all about collaboration, after all. Collaboration is a hot topic since many, many years, and only in the past few decades it has something to do with the IT. Telephone was the first major revolution in the enterprise collaboration. Then fax, email and file shares followed. Collaboration tools like Microsoft SharePoint were the next logical and important step, which brought order, rules and governance into the concept of collaboration. That explains the major success of Microsoft SharePoint and similar tools. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

• <\/figure><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n

  But every\ncollaboration tool since email had one major issue: lack of communication.\nCommunication is in the essence of the human nature, and, furthermore, it is the\ncornerstone of collaboration. It is great that SharePoint & co. can show\nusers the difference between different versions of a Word document, but they\nwill still not know why those changes have happened on the first place.\nCommunication was not in focus of those tools. We might even say that\nSharePoint has tried to discourage the communication, and to make information\nworkers just a part of the work flow. It was then a natural urge for users to\nskip SharePoint, and to send the new version of \u201cthat document\u201d via email, and\nto explain the differences in the email body. This is how they were closing the\ncommunication gap. This was the major problem of all collaboration tools,\nsince\u2026 well, since SharePoint. There was this SharePoint cartoon, from Dan Lewis,\nback in the MOSS 2007 times<\/a>, where a guy uploads a document into the\ndocument library, and walks over to his colleague, to tell him that the\ndocument has been uploaded. It was a good laugh about that guy, who presumably\ndidn\u2019t understand SharePoint. Or maybe there should be instead a laugh about\nSharePoint, not understanding the nature of human collaboration?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  Modern\nWorkplace, with its promise to enable mobile and remote workers as well, came\nwith the promise to also close this gap in collaboration. The promise first came\nwith the social collaboration tools, such as Yammer or Facebook Workplace, but\nthis approach was doomed to fail, since those two, as well as all other major\nsocial-only tools, had a lack of fundamental collaboration functionalities: procedures,\npolicies and governance. Social tools can, and if properly used will,\nsignificantly increase effectiveness and quality of collaboration. No more\nemail CC hell. No more review comments hell in Word Documents. But it will fail\non its own, if it is offered without collaboration and content-related\ncommunication. And this is what Microsoft seems to understand now, introducing in\n2017 Microsoft Teams, as [to the largest degree] governable and controllable\nplatform, which relies on well-established building blocks such as SharePoint,\nExchange and Skype. Social tools should not aim to replace collaboration tools,\nthey should aim to leverage them and enhance them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

  <\/p>\n

  \n\t\t\t

  \n\t\t\t <\/div><\/div>\n\t\t