Collaborate More to Innovate Faster

Better Content Collaboration with G Suite

The ability to collaborate better has limitless benefits for the enterprise; from iterating on projects in real-time to bringing products to market quicker. In this article, we will focus on how enhanced collaboration results in better and more efficient content creation. Whether your team is working on a sales pitch together or you are responsible for maintaining the company intranet, the amount of content being created within the enterprise every day is enormous. The ability to do so more efficiently across time zones and in real-time allows employees to spend more time focused on what really matters.

It is estimated that by 2020, 80% of large and midsize organizations in mature regions will have deployed one or more content collaboration platform (CCP) products to implement a content productivity and collaboration strategy. Gartner defines the CCP market as a range of content-centric platforms enabling secure file productivity and content collaboration for individuals and teams as well as supporting the creation of a modern digital workplace. Google has helped millions of businesses address their content management challenges and transform the way they work by offering G Suite, which provides a set of user-friendly collaboration tools with the security, controls, and compliance every enterprise needs.

Recently, G Suite has been recognized as a leader in the Gartner 2017 Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms (CCP). Gartner’s report evaluates vendors based on their vision and ability to execute. The G Suite strengths that Gartner highlighted in their report include:

• Google has a renewed approach to enterprise priorities and needs and a focus on better customer support and roadmap visibility.
• Evolution of Google Drive through artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and natural language for classification and search.
• A global infrastructure for fast access to data that can store and serve large files (up to 5 terabytes) at high speed.
• Rich platform APIs enable developers to integrate existing business applications with Google Drive or build new ones.

G Suite provides advanced capabilities for content collaboration, beyond the ability to work on a document, sheet, or presentation at the same time. Below, we highlight some of the exciting product launches and new capabilities to take enterprise content collaboration to the next level.

Bring Ideas to Life on Jamboard

In today’s modern office, we may find ourselves collaborating over instant message and conference calls more often than sitting down face-to-face with our colleagues. The Jamboard brings physical collaboration capabilities into the digital space. Essentially, the Jamboard is a digital whiteboard that employees can use to brainstorm by typing text, drawing, and dropping in images. Employees can work together (whether they are on-site or remote) by holding a conference call on the screen, while simultaneously drawing out their ideas on the Jamboard.

This tool truly provides a collaborative experience for colleagues to be creative and hands-on during brainstorming sessions. Remote employees can interact alongside their co-workers by downloading the Jamboard application on their mobile device. Once the brainstorming session is over, the Jamboard file can be saved to the drive on G Suite and sent out to the team. For a more in-depth demo of the Jamboard, check out the video below.

Sharing Content Fosters Collaboration

Companies can utilize an intranet to foster collaboration among teams and departments with knowledge and content sharing. LumApps is G Suite’s recommended enterprise portal to connect employees and effectively deliver the right content to the right person. LumApps brings everything you need to work in one place: personalized content, business applications and social communities. LumApps is fully integrated and synchronized with G Suite, so employees can work more efficiently, collaborate smarter and connect with coworkers. Features include:

1. The right content to the right people: You can personalize your pages’ content according to the user’s profile information.
2. Find co-workers to collaborate with: Set up a user directory to bring people together. You can even search by skills or locations to identify the right people for your project.
3. Engage your team: Let your team know you enjoyed an article by liking or commenting. Collaborate on projects and share well-organized information with communities, directly within the intranet site.

Easy Access to Files

To successfully collaborate, team members need quick and easy access to their project materials. The latest additions to Google Drive help employees work more efficiently by providing the tools to find relevant content as fast as possible.

1. With Google Drive File Stream, you stream your Drive files directly from the cloud to your computer, freeing up disk space and network bandwidth. Because Drive files are stored in the cloud, any changes you or your collaborators make are automatically updated everywhere. You’ll always have the latest version.
2. Google Drive Quick Access provides further accessibility to documents. This feature utilizes machine learning to guess what file you are most likely to want to search for, taking into account the time and frequency of when you are usually working on the document; once the ML calculates what files you are most likely to be working on, it will place them at the top of your Drive.
3. G Suite also added Team Drive functionality to the platform. Google Team Drives are shared spaces where teams can easily store, search, and access their files anywhere, from any device. Unlike files in My Drive, files in Team Drive belong to the team instead of an individual. Even if members leave, the files stay exactly where they are so your team can continue to share information and get work done.

Video Content is King

Bringing video into the mainstream of an employee’s workday will make learning easier, more interesting, and provide employees with the flexibility to access content whenever and wherever they are. Communicating via video is proven to be a more impactful and memorable method of sharing content because our brains process video 60,000 times faster than text, and with a much higher rate of comprehension.

Reveal is a video streaming platform for businesses with enterprise-level security. Employees can leverage Reveal as a tool to collaborate with each other by creating videos for training, corporate communications, or employee engagement. For example, employees can record a video of a training session, instead of trying to schedule a meeting to fit everyone’s schedule. Employees can then watch the training session at a time that is convenient for them and the content will likely reach a much larger group of employees. In fact, Forrester research shows employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than to read a document. Encouraging a culture of video communication will foster more valuable and engaging content.

For more information on how you can optimize your content collaboration with G Suite, contact us here.