Uniting a Global Workforce with Unified Communications and Collaboration

Unified Communications is a wonderful thing.    Unified Communications and Collaboration is even better.   It's like getting peanut butter in your chocolate.  Or Chocolate in your Peanut Butter.    It's about bringing people together to connect over work-based projects and professional concerns. However, there's more to being truly integrated into a workforce, than simple communication. Though communication is crucial, Unified Communication and Collaboration is better. By integrating collaboration capabilities and productivity solutions into a comprehensive UC suite, customers can improve their workflows and deliver better business outcomes. 

Is Your Company Communicating, or Collaborating?

Before you can make any real progress in the move towards UC&C over UC, you need to find the line between communication and collaboration. For some, collaboration can be described as a distinct act wherein people come together to create something new. Simply put, it's defined more by the outcomes of the activities than the mechanics of interaction and communication.

For instance, there's a significant difference between social networking and collaboration. Though social networks focus on building relationships within an organization, collaboration is not focused on making connections. Instead, collaboration considers the complexities of getting work done in smaller, and more focused teams.

Right now, collaboration services that are built around team chat seem to be getting the most attention. Team chat provides companies with reduced overhead, which allows users to simply begin messaging each other instantly while learning more about the collaboration features that might be available along the way. While rich and effective communication can inspire collaboration, the two issues aren't the same thing. It's only "collaboration" in an enterprise when you're creating or doing something.

Unified Communication and Collaboration with Coolhead, Google and RingCentral

So, how can enterprises jump head-first into the concept of collaboration? Well, the first step may be considering the multitude of benefits offered by cloud services, such as those provided by experts like Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite. Gartner recently published a report into collaboration services that outlined four distinct areas enterprises can't ignore, including video streaming, work stream collaboration, insight engine, and citizen development services.

Workstream collaboration can otherwise be identified as truly unified communication and collaboration. In other words, it's communication and collaboration services that are completely streamlined. According to No Jitter, some people feel that "WCC" allows for reductions in communication processing time of as much as 50%.  Moving into the G Suite UC&C collection of services means transforming the way you work, by sharing files easily, collaborating quickly, and uniting employees across a range of locations. Teams can move forwards faster and get more done each day.

With G Suite, customers can work together on the same file, across different devices, at the same time. Everything is stored in a single, secure location, and central IT administration makes managing everything easy. What's more, because you can begin collaboration efforts through instant chat services, hangouts, and video communication, collaboration is fully integrated into the communication experience.

Bringing Unified Communications to Collaboration

Different applications within G-Suite offer different solutions for better communication and collaboration in the workforce.    RingCentral for Google provides even tighter integration between Unified Communications and Collaboration.   For Instance, the Gmail add-on allows for SMS, MMS and voice calls.

 Google G-Suite's "Hangouts Meet" provides video meetings for businesses.    With Meet, you can connect with teams anytime, anywhere, from easy-to-join video calls. Just set up a meeting and share a link to begin. The lightweight interface and smart participant management solution make larger business calls easy.  The 30 user participation limit is quickly raised to 1,000 with RingCentral's Google integration and conferencing capabilities.

Obviously, Google Hangouts introduces the "communication" side of communication and collaboration, but there's so much more than that to it. Additionally, Meet is completely integrated with the rest of G Suite, which means that individuals can join meetings directly from their Calendar or an email invite.

Imagine a worker on G-Suite is communicating with their coworker through Google Hangouts. At the same time, they could bring up Google Sheets and begin to collaborate with that worker on a project, sharing ideas and annotations in real-time. If a time needs to be made to discuss the next step of the project with a client, both of the people in the Hangouts call can arrange something suitable according to their specific calendar, and they can invite their client to the call through that same calendar note.

With Google Drive, updates to the project are instantly saved, meaning that people within the workforce don't have to worry about individually managing each document and sharing it with the people who need to see it. Through a single link, collaboration can be extended throughout the workplace, with Gmail, or Hangouts.

Google Admins #RocktheGSuite with Google Cloud Identities and RingCentral Provisioning.

On top of all that, the IT leaders within a business can easily manage the devices, data, and users within their collaborative network quickly and easily, without having to worry about disparate applications, or employees who might try to bring their own solutions into the workplace.  

For a G Suite Admin, RingCentral Users can be added and removed easily, groups can be set up instantly, and security options can offer peace of mind for the workforce in the form of 2-step verification and sign-on.

With G-Suite and similar cloud office offerings, individuals in the workforce can take communication to the next step with fully integrated apps, and diverse new solutions. What's more, because it's on the cloud, companies can evolve and update as they see fit. With the delivery of "App Maker" citizen developers, including system administrators and analysts can even create solutions to bridge the gaps in their UC&C deployment for a completely bespoke "work stream collaboration" effort.

Making the Most of Google's Cloud Office Offerings

Today, IT leaders in the business space are moving more readily towards cloud-based office services such as the ones provided by G-Suite. Part of the reason for this move is that these solutions can provide brand-new tools for growth, as well as traditional enterprise technologies, such as productivity and email suites.

While providing room for simplicity and innovation in the world of collaboration, cloud-based services also free up IT resources for other essential initiatives within the workplace. The only issue is that IT leaders remain confused regarding how they can use new functions like social searches and collaborative search. Without a full understanding of what's available, it's impossible to fully appreciate the ROI of what's available.

For now, the key goal for most businesses is to identify the adoption strategies within cloud unified collaboration and communication services that will allow them to make the most of their cloud office solutions, and create an agile workforce that can holistically access the services of the cloud.

The Apps Admins behind Coolhead Tech are experienced and certified in managing both RingCentral communication applications and Google G-Suite apps. This means that they're in a unique position to help you lift and shift your core services from the backs of IT, and into the enterprise cloud. With the right help, you can instantly transform your business infrastructure, and move from unified communication to unified communication and collaboration.