Collaboration: paths to success

An application or a feature?

As various point solutions for collaboration were launched, companies tried them out, but in addition to low adoption in some cases, they often ended up with multiple applications to cover different types of collaboration: one for document sharing, another for instant messaging and yet another for video conferencing. Incentive, Inc. developed a collaboration solution for small businesses that provided an integrated, streamlined experience. For an annual fee of about $100 per user, companies could get an easy-to-use software tool that covered the basic functions of collaboration.

Over the past few years, however, founder and CEO Rickard Hansson concluded that general purpose collaboration tools were unlikely to be sustainable because they were not sufficiently embedded in workers’ daily routines. “We knew that collaboration was a necessary and important part of work, but we came to see it as a function and not a product,” says Hansson. “What tends to happen is that there is a burst of enthusiasm and then interest drops off because it is not well integrated into people’s work.”

In 2016, Incentive teamed up with Microsoft and adapted its software for use as a plug-in for Dynamics 365, the customer relationship management solution. The product was called Dynamics Connect. “This was a huge success,” Hansson says, “because users were collaborating from within their primary application.” During the summer of 2017, Incentive launched Weavy, its embeddable collaboration framework. The framework incorporates all the functions of Incentive’s standalone product but is designed to be embedded into enterprise applications.

“We call it the Swiss Army Knife for collaboration,” Hansson says. “Weavy does everything that most companies need, from within their employees’ primary applications. It can be integrated into these applications with a single line of code and has the same functionality as our standalone product.” Since Weavy provides multiple collaboration tools, companies can eliminate the duplicates they are using, which simplifies maintenance and improves security. “There is a clear trend that more and more applications are leading the way with built-in collaboration tools like in-app chat, messaging and commenting,” concludes Hansson. “The need for siloed, standalone collaboration tools as point solutions or platforms is falling away quickly.”