Do you want to set up a Digital Workspace within your company but don’t know how to choose? Here are the right questions to ask yourself to make your project a success.
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What Is A Digital Workspace?
The Digital Workspace, also called a collaborative platform, is a digital workspace that aims to simplify collaboration and communication within a company. To do this, it goes through the centralization of data.
A Digital Workplace consists of several collaborative workspaces in order to dedicate some to well-defined uses. Depending on the spaces, we will thus find business software, documents, contacts, or instant conversations.
This type of platform has taken an increasingly important place within organizations, especially in recent months with the exponential development of telework. Their success is not only due to the current health context but also to the many advantages of these interfaces: mobility, flexibility, and even real-time communication.
How Does A Collaborative Platform Work?
The Digital Workspace centralizes all of a company’s information in one place. They are thus accessible to all employees, obviously with editing and/or consultation rights pre-defined by the solution administrator.
The platform will be gradually enriched thanks to the content submitted by users and the resulting interactions. The functionalities present on this type of platform are quite similar to those available on consumer cloud services: document management, project monitoring, contact directory, instant messaging, diaries and shared calendars, etc.
What Are The Questions To Ask Yourself When Choosing A Digital Workspace?
Before choosing your collaborative platform, you will first have to identify the functional needs of the company and its employees. Like a marketing project, you can set up “personas” and try to determine which functionality will be relevant to develop for the users you have identified. The latter can, depending on the size of the company, be very varied: business manager, accountant, HR manager, sales manager, or even communication officer. Knowing each user profile is essential to properly define the appropriate workspaces.
Among the questions to ask yourself are:
Why Set Up A Digital Workspace Within The Company?
Who will use the platform, both internally (employees) and externally (customers, partners)? How many users will there be? Will it be a platform to bring together independents?
What Problem Do You Want To Solve With This Workspace?
Will, the solution be developed internally, via external service providers or will you use a pre-designed SaaS solution?
What Budget Do You Have?
Your objective is obviously for this collaborative platform to become your main tool, so don’t try to imagine the needs of the users: involve them in this project from the definition of the needs. You will discover the business needs and features they expect from this solution.
Essential Features
Future users will help you determine the business features to include in your platform, but some are common to any collaborative platform:
- The dashboard to see key information at a glance on the solution home page.
- Document management (GED) to share and edit documents.
- Instant messaging to exchange in real-time with members of your team or customers.
- Project management, to monitor projects and assign certain tasks
- An address book to centralize contacts in a secure space.
- A shared calendar so everyone can see upcoming meetings or project deadlines.
- An electronic document signature to facilitate the official signing of documents remotely.
Don’t forget to check the compatibility of your future collaborative platform with your current tools (messaging, invoicing, CRM, etc.), ensure data security (and their use if you go through a third-party service, especially if it is free), and pay attention to the ergonomics and design of the platform so that it is quickly adopted by its users.
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