The rapidly-evolving technology landscape has, of course, provided more modern means of communication, extending pathways and enabling powerful mechanisms for eliciting better teamwork. As a result, persistency has become a defining characteristic of what we now call team collaboration.
Persistence is becoming an increasingly common element across both team collaboration and threaded communications (TC). It's something that can either be synchronized one-to-one or many-to-many. Whether meetings are scheduled or ad hoc, a comprehensive record of the conversation can now always be there.
Traditionally, a key flaw in most collaboration solutions, as well as messaging applications, was the lack of persistence and context. A team couldn't preserve the full state of a session or conversation and return to it later or share it with new team members to better inform future decisions and actions.
Together Everyone Achieves More
Many businesses today operate with geographically-dispersed workforces. But whether they're working from a branch office, at home, or travelling, employees need the ability to work as teams. A persistent team collaboration solution allows employees to connect, communicate, and collaborate, no matter where they are in the world, at any time, on any device.
In today's collaboration-focused business environment, having persistency of communications also enables new project participants to get up to speed faster and, more importantly, from a much more fully informed position, immediately raising the value of their input.
As an added benefit, deploying a persistent unified communications strategy that ties everything together allows for a more communicative workforce and creates a more positive working environment. The overall effect is an enhanced experience from line of business all the way to end users.
What Exactly Is Persistence?
A persistent solution provides access to a complete history of communication events, which allows collaborators to recapture the context of a conversation in one single thread, quickly and easily. It emphasizes the user experience while combining the multitude of tools that collaborators use during sessions, enabling users to relive a meeting in full context and providing all who access the thread with the experience of "having been there."
The "Persistency" Checklist
All of the above sounds great, but acquiring the right collaboration solution in order to achieve persistency may not be as simple as you think. When faced with an overwhelming amount of choice in the marketplace, consider the following to determine which solution is best for your business:
- Employees have to want to use it -- Investments only make sense if they get used, so ensuring your solution delivers a positive user experience is absolutely key to successful employee adoption.
- Enough tools in the box? -- Be sure to procure a UC solution with the right level of functionality, which includes file and photo sharing, voice and video calling, persistent chat, messaging, and presence management.
- Scalability -- Ensure the UC solution is flexible enough that it can cost-effectively scale as the organization grows and/or user adoption spreads.
- Security --
To keep all that new priceless IP safe, look for solutions with standards-based security protocols.
- The choice is not all yours -- Ensure the solution will be able to cope with end-user preference for different device types, platforms, and operating systems. Whichever persistent team collaboration solution you choose should not require your employees to change their preferred communications tools and devices. Rather, it should support and enhance them.
Persistence can open up transparent dialogue between employees, directly enhancing productivity and profitability. By creating opportunities for more transparency and information sharing, and for more improved collaboration opportunities, work becomes more meaningful and interactive. Get this right and your business could be transformed, giving it greatly desired competitive advantage.
Moving forward in 2018, we'll increasingly see the expansion of persistence beyond traditional UC applications like conferencing and video. Apps and business process tools will begin to be added to the persistence layer, providing even greater value to enterprises.