Transform the Way You Work with Collaboration Portals
When COVID-19 broke out, many countries across the globe announced lockdowns to curb the virus, resulting in a massive shift to remote working and schooling. This, in turn, led to a huge uptick in the usage of team collaboration tools; for example, Microsoft Teams experienced a 40% increase in demand.
In fact, the team collaboration tools market is expected to register a CAGR of 18% over the forecast period of 2021-2026, according to a Research and Markets report.
Content and collaboration solutions – such as enterprise collaboration portals – are strongly influenced by digital workplace needs such as real-time collaboration, tracking, and sharing and are key to enhancing organizations’ productivity and streamlining processes in real-time.
Clearly, the adoption of collaboration and information management tools is even more important now for businesses to differentiate themselves and better compete in the market.
Why Do You Need a Collaboration Portal?
By adopting a comprehensive, intuitive, and interactive collaboration portal, you can drive higher productivity and efficiency, as well as engagement between your employees, clients, and other stakeholders. Specific benefits include:
Increased communication and improved collaboration
These tools enable teams to work together effectively, collaborate on and publish documents, maintain task lists, implement workflows, and share information.
Resource allocation and time management
Collaboration portals can track project management documents and display real-time information to show the resources available for work allocations, which saves time.
Self-service collaboration
A portal can empower employees to create, collate, and distribute their work across verticals without any external intervention, saving operational costs and time.
Content management and sharing
A collaboration portal can facilitate access to knowledge scattered across several sources to discover new content or get a consolidated overview of data.
Your business can also realize increased transparency, organization-wide alignment, centralized content, and achievement of internal communications goals.
Types of Collaboration Portals
Juggling interactions between today’s business applications, websites, and data can be complex. That’s why increasing numbers of organizations turn to portal solutions to help them manage mission-critical information and streamline operations, as well as increase user productivity, engagement, and satisfaction.
There are a variety of portals that meet different needs, for example:
Intranets or enterprise information portals
Extranet portals
Partner portals
Knowledge management portals
Community portals
Human Resource Management System (HRMS) portals
Essential Features of Collaboration Portals
Applications
An interactive portal offers links to access applications easily, so users will spend less time searching for them.
Remote Access
Remote access to information is the cornerstone of these portals because it enables users to collaborate in real-time.
Document Repository
A collaboration portal should store and retrieve document information and maintain regular backups to prevent data loss.
Security
It must leverage user or group-based security solutions to protect critical information like corporate documents and assets.
Integration
The portal must have the ability to mix with existing tools or new ones – such as integrating a calendar with email.
Customization
A portal should offer features to customize the existing software as needed.
User-Friendly
Effective collaboration portals must be easy to understand and accessible.
Search Function
It needs to offer advanced search capabilities so users can save time, be more productive, and create and collaborate effectively.
Employee Collaboration Portals in a Post-COVID World
As a virtual and global workforce becomes more common even for smaller enterprises, effective internal portals and intranets will be crucial for providing a centralized access point to business operations, processes, and people. For the distributed post-COVID workforce, employee portals will continue to play a vital role in internal communications, as well as employee engagement, satisfaction, productivity, and safety.
Trianz’ new platform, Pulse, is an employee portal solution that offers all the above. As a next-generation digital workplace, it delivers a personalized experience while enabling business continuity and valuable business outcomes with far-reaching impact.
We created Pulse as part of our focus on the future workplace, which is intelligent and location-independent – and where people, information, and technology connect seamlessly. We designed it to meet the needs of an intelligent workplace by providing a one-stop shop that enables employees to:
Plan, view, and manage tasks and projects and set priorities in real-time
View their calendars and access calls directly
Centralize and share documents
Get alerts
Set, track, and hit goals
Access all apps, email, key links, and contacts from a single location
Manage meetings and stay in the know with the latest news and blogs
Socialize and share social posts
Collaborate with cross-functional teams in real-time
As a web and mobile platform, Pulse enables your employees to have access to all the information they need for their engagements and projects, as well as collaboration opportunities. It also offers the four key characteristics of a powerful employee portal:
Transparency
Ease of collaboration
Ease of access
Frequent publishing
Transform Your Portal to Meet Your Users’ Needs
The true test of an effective collaboration portal is to see if an enterprise’s employees, customers, suppliers, and/or business partners begin and end their day with it.
This can be a reality if your portal provides access to people and expertise through collaboration; enables key business processes and access to the right information; is integrated with everything the user needs; is personalized for each user; and is easy and quick to navigate and use.
