Connected workspaces optimized for collaborative work offer their customers a lot of benefits: streamlined workflows, productivity boosts and improved teamwork. These benefits have stoked business interest; in turn, that’s incentivized different kinds of cloud-based application providers to reframe their products to meet that interest.
For enterprise buyers, that means plentiful options for enabling connected workspaces. These include:
- Pure-play hub/team workspace apps from providers such as ClickUp, Coda, and Notion
- Task/project management platforms from providers such as Airtable, Asana, Smartsheet, Wrike, and Zoho
- Communications/collaboration platforms from providers such as Microsoft, Slack, and Zoom
- Productivity suites from providers such as Microsoft and Google
- Content collaboration/management apps from providers such as Box, Google, Microsoft, and Zoom
However, such diversity of focus and function can make the task of selecting—or standardizing on, as the case might be—the right collaborative workspace platform rather daunting.
Well-rounded connected workspaces have three core use cases: centralized knowledge, content collaboration and management, and project/task management. Many will then layer in additional capabilities, such as asynchronous communications, goal tracking and reporting, resource management, and note taking. If project management is the primary pain point, starting with a connected workspace platform with that heritage is the logical choice. If the ability to collaborate on and manage document flows is the chief goal, then starting with a provider that specializes in content management is the better choice... and so on.
After narrowing down by provider type, there are a host of other factors to consider when making a product decision. Here are six top considerations, based on Metrigy’s “
- Ease of use/accessibility – Slightly more than half of the IT executives and other business leaders studied named ease of use and accessibility as their No. 1 criteria beyond core capabilities. A connected workspace needs to have a clean, intuitive design that employees can quickly and easily navigate and customize. Template libraries and pre-built workflows are nice-to-haves, so employees don’t have to start from scratch each time they begin a new project or content creation. Localization—i.e., the use of native language, etc.—is another consideration for some companies (83.4% of companies in the Metrigy study said localization was at least somewhat important to them). Mobile accessibility falls in this category too, for keeping on up work while on the go.
- Dashboards/reporting – Similarly, a connected workspace dashboard should provide a clear overview of task and project status and workloads, as well as enable managers to quickly track a team’s performance based on key performance or other metrics they designate. More advanced capabilities include the ability to analyze project data and spot potential risks or opportunities, and run security and compliance checks, among others.
- Application integration and customization – Facilitating all the work a team would like to do within a connected workspace may call for integration with third-party applications... say Figma for engineering teams, Tableau for business analysts, Salesforce for customer support specialists, or Slack for asynchronous communications. As IT and other business decision makers evaluate their options, they should explore their short-listed providers’ app marketplaces for availability of out-of-the-box integration with their needed apps. Additionally, companies that foresee requiring custom integrations should evaluate connected workspace providers on their ability to support low-code/no-code development.
- AI/generative AI capabilities – As expected, connected workspace providers are rapidly adding generative and other advanced AI capabilities, including agentic AI, to their platforms (see earlier posts here and here). Recent examples include Asana’s AI Studio, a no-code builder that allows teams to use plain language instructions to design and deploy AI-powered workflows; Smartsheet’s Amazon Q for Business connector, for enabling unified workspace search using AWS’s generative AI assistant; and generative AI additions to the Wrike Work Intelligence platform. IT will need to carefully vet how providers are using AI to ease project management, content collaboration, search, team interactions, etc.
- Customer support – At a minimum, connected workspace providers should offer self-service support via community forums, knowledge base articles and how-tos, and video tutorials. These will not suffice for larger implementations, which will require more hand-holding before, during, and after implementation in order to optimize the platform and ensure strong adoption.
- Cost – Beyond entry-level freemium versions often available from connected workspace providers, IT or other buys can expect per-user pricing to range from roughly $5 to $25 monthly, on an annual basis, depending on tier, with customized pricing available at the enterprise level. In some cases, buyers should expect to pay an additional cost for AI—and those prices can range dramatically. Notion, for example, charges an additional $8 per user/monthly (on an annual basis) for its AI assistant, while Microsoft adds $30 per user monthly for its Copilot offering.
While there are other factors to take into consideration, assessing and deciding based on these six should result in a well-chosen platform indeed capable of helping companies realize the promises of a connected workspace for collaborative work management.
