The Right Touch of Collaboration

Execs Weigh in on Collaboration

End users are looking to IT for tools that will help them increase productivity across what in many cases are sharply reduced workforces, but execs are expressing distrust of collaboration tools.

The problem with collaboration software in the cloud is that just about every offering made available thus far lacks any specific purpose.

That’s the position of Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch, which has just launched a collaboration application developed in conjunction with the Dachis Group on top of the MindTouch content management service in the cloud.

The MindTouch Social Intranet with Workforce by Dachis Group has been specifically created to meet the needs of a collaboration application service in the cloud that is built around the way organizations need to manage content.

Existing collaboration applications in the cloud are more or less open-ended systems that don’t provide any real framework for doing real work, said Fulkerson. The MindTouch Social Intranet combines the expertise of MindTouch and Dachis Group to create something that has been designed from the ground up to handle a specific set of business challenges without requiring any heavy-lifting from the customer in terms of deployment or set-up. In the future, Fulkerson added that customers should expect to see additional purpose-built applications being made on top of the MindTouch service.

Fulkerson just may be on to something. One of the primary reasons that collaboration applications have been slow to take off in the cloud is because too many vendors want to build a platform for collaboration, rather than a platform for running various types of collaboration applications that ultimately need to be as varied as the scenarios they are deployed in.