Position your collaborative platform among other tools

No one waited for the implementation of your collaborative platform to move forward with their tasks. 

Also, the implementation of a collaborative platform will necessarily come up against existing tools with which it will compete. The question of the use of email, the intranet, or a particular document sharing and project management solution will be raised fairly early in the project. As nature abhors a vacuum, it's up to you to ask the best practices and use cases associated with each tool. 

• Why a collaborative platform?
• What should I use an Intranet for?
• What role does email play?
• Where should you store documents?
• Which tool do you need to organize and moderate work meetings? 
  

There is no single answer to all these questions. 

The introduction of new technologies, especially in the field of communication, shows that a new technology never completely replaces the previous ones: it brings new capacities and possibilities that were not possible with the previous ones and, at the same time, makes the previous ones obsolete for a whole range of uses. 

In the same way that email has not totally replaced traditional mail, the implementation of a collaborative platform will not totally replace the intranet or email—at least not in the short term. 

Talkspirit is a tool available to all to support new working practices: 

• communication, 
• access to information and sharing, 
• decision making, 
• project management, 
• discussion, 
• sharing of ideas, 
• mutual aid, ... 
  

When it comes to a global deployment, at the scale of an organization, the collaborative platform will therefore naturally compete with all the tools serving the same purposes (and there are many!). 

Email is by far the tool most directly impacted by the implementation of a collaborative platform.

Also, if the groups deployed aim to replace the use of email, be exemplary in your practice. And of course, do not duplicate/share by email content already published on the collaborative platform...

Beyond the question of tools, it's really a question of uses. 

We recommend to the steering committee working on the launch of the platform to: 

• Establish a vision and the major use cases that will be deployed on your platform to position your collaborative platform among other solutions in the short, medium, and long term.
• Adopt governance at each group's level  by specifying the way in which you will work within the group to replace or complement other existing tools and solutions, in line with the overall trajectory defined above.