For the last 20 years, I have been part of a boutique consulting firm and the last two years have seen dramatic changes. We had an office, but the objective was never to be there – as a consultant, your objective was to be at a client site, to be chargeable.

 

I spent time working while on planes, trains, automobiles, client sites, airports, and coffee shops. I was always challenged to stay connected with other members of our team. Phone calls, remote access, Skype, file shares, and a plethora of other tools were used to keep track of things and to share information with one another. We had email in the Office 365 cloud and some basic replication capabilities with OneDrive, but that was not scalable, nor collaborative. Collaboration was never easy and rarely authentic.

 

In 2017, we started looking at procuring better collaboration tools. We investigated several tools including Microsoft Teams (release March 2017), but they only had pieces of the solution we were looking for. We replaced more expensive video conferencing with Skype for Business Online, for some decent video conferencing capabilities, and added cloud-based UC from another third-party provider to improve our access to voice communications. This was better than what we started with, but not yet the solution we needed – too many point tools and not enough integration or workflow.