When talking about enterprise collaboration, many of us tend to jump directly into the specific technologies (like SharePoint) and workloads (email, business process management, social) that we know and are familiar with. We tend to view all of our needs through the lens of what we are familiar with. Not too long ago, information workers were limited to email, telephone, and in-person meetings for their collaboration options, but we now have many other options. However, problems can arise when too much focus is placed on any single collaboration workload, making it difficult for teams and individuals to communicate, share, and collaborate. Working across or between Office workloads -- and not just within those workloads -- should be part of an organization's planning as you begin to think about your collaboration strategy.

The reality of our daily work activities rarely look as clean cut and ideal as the technology demos we see at tradeshows, where every product and their underlying features address each and every scenario. Most technology follows the 80-20 rule: they can generally provide us with 80% of what we need, but the real effort is in delivering the other 20%. SharePoint is a great example of this 80-20 rule, providing a strong baseline of collaboration capability -- but without a strong alignment with our key business activities, many end users will turn to other tools and applications to get their work done. When organizations take the time to understand how their employees work, and refine the movement between workloads, those employees become more engaged.

People are like water running downhill -- we prefer to travel the path of least resistance. We want instant gratification with all of our technology.

To improve upon that 80-20 rule and enhance team productivity, it is important to understand how people actually accomplish their work. Don't just focus on the primary workloads -- think about the entire user experience. Where collaboration can add value is between those workloads. For example, moving an idea from an email you receive to something that is actionable -- maybe a shared space or a community where people can gather and comment, expand on the idea, iterate on a plan to move forward or to fold it into other plans. From there, that idea could spark the creation of a formal project plan, a team site within SharePoint, or any number of activities across other workloads.

We talk about the need to decrease "data silos" but what we really need to focus on is removing "workload silos."

The expansion of productivity features within the Microsoft Office suite of tools is a great example of how Microsoft is trying to help customers better work between their various workloads. The inclusion of Skype for Business and OneNote within Outlook is an excellent example of helping end users move between one workload (email) and their other productivity tools (communications via Skype, content creation using OneNote) to better complete their work.

Working between workloads is about reducing the number of clicks, removing additional windows, and aligning tools and platforms into more of an integrated solution, rather than independent functional silos. Removing those functional silos is an important part of the way Beezy approaches enterprise collaboration scenarios. We look closely at the way people share information, how they create, tag and either publish or store content, and how they build community momentum so that our solutions provide value end-to-end.

Beezy helps our customers connect-the-dots between Office workloads, which has a direct impact on measurements that matter: adoption, engagement, productivity, and innovation. We accomplish this by enhancing and extending the functionality that SharePoint and the Office suite provide with additional capabilities that fill the 80-20 gap, so that your end users are more successful.

If you have not yet seen Beezy in action, isn't it time you took a look? Schedule your demo today.