The Cloud Makes It Rain Money: The Business in Cloud Computing - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 361

■ No incentive to change collaboration behavior
■ Lack of strong leadership to drive collaboration
■ Lack of interest by senior management in team collaboration initiatives
Cloud collaboration tool providers have created solutions to address these issues. These
include integration of email alerts into collaboration tools and the ability to see viewers of
a document. Tools are also put into one piece of software to reduce complexity and support
task management.
Organizations now prefer to use single software solutions for solving all their collabora-
tion needs rather than relying on multiple different solutions. Cloud collaboration providers
are now replacing a complicated mix of email clients, FTP clients, and instant messengers.
The best cloud collaboration tools include the following features:
■ Real-time commenting and messaging features for timely project delivery
■ Presence indicators to identify members active on shared documents
■ Allowing users to set permissions and manage activity profiles
■ Allowing users to set personal activity feeds and email alert profiles to keep track of
the latest activities per resource (document) or user
■ Allowing public space to share and collaborate with users outside the company firewall
■ Adherence to the company security and compliance framework
■ Auditing of documents shared within and outside the organization
■ Reduced number of workarounds for sharing and collaboration on large files
Gartner in 2011 outlined a five-stage model on the maturity of firms with regard
to cloud collaboration tools ( Maturity Model for Enterprise Collaboration and Social
Software , Gartner, 2011):

A reactive firm is one with only email as a collaboration platform and a culture that
resists information sharing.

■

A basic firm is one where technology support teams are established and activities
are stabilized.

■

An emerging firm is one where new and emerging technologies are evaluated as
possible choices on a qualitative basis.

■

An expanding firm is one where new and emerging technologies are evaluated as
possible choices on a quantitative basis.

■

A pervasive firm has universal access to a rich collaboration toolset and a strong
collaboration culture.

■

Collaborating with Telepresence

Telepresence is a set of technologies that allow people across geographical distances to
communicate and collaborate with each other in real time using various multimedia types
such as voice and video.