Collaboration is the act of working in unison with our colleagues, suppliers, partners and clients.

We all know advantages that teamwork offers. Group participation invokes contribution and a shared purpose is probably the most powerful motivator. Perhaps best of all is that teamwork leverages our strengths and offsets our weaknesses. So, the whole is truly greater than the parts.

So what are Collaborative Solutions and how do they help us?

Collaborative Solutions are focused combinations of software tools and technologies that enhance our ability to work together. These solutions offer the opportunity to extend the reach of our teams, making it easier to communicate and share knowledge within our teams, and ideally, allow collaboration regardless of where we are in the world, what time it is, what tools we have to hand or prefer.

Traditional business systems tend to work in silos of information. Modern collaboration tools empower the Information Worker to transcend these silos.

Depending on your organisational context, collaboration solutions can:

Save Time
Increase Productivity
Increase Efficiency
Increase Mobility / Support Remote Workers
Increase Sales
Decrease Costs
Improve Customer Support and Service
Speed the Supply Chain
Reduce Time to Market
Streamline Processes
Reduce Risk
Facilitate Governance
Re-enforce Corporate Culture

Collaborative Solutions

Alphawest Collaborative Solutions span a range of technologies and vendors. Like one of our more influential and recognisable vendors, Microsoft, we seek to provide “pervasive” collaboration capabilities.

Collaborative tools fall into two distinct groups of hardware, software and services; those concerned with communication in all its forms, and those that provide an optimised forum for collaboration and the information it encompasses or engenders. And, of course, some technologies fall into both categories.

Alphawest analyses our clients' needs and environment, selecting and blending these technologies to deliver the best return on investment.

Collaborative Communications

Alphawest solutions work to meld e-mail, instant messaging (IM), fax, voicemail, telephones, mobile devices, video and web conferencing into a single unified system that is available to users regardless of location or type of network connection.

This helps our clients build connections, overcoming the tyrannies of distance, reducing travel, and increasing both immediacy and intimacy that are so central to maintaining the benefits of collaboration and reducing the number of meetings needed to achieve our goals.

Collaborative Platforms

Alphawest uses collaborative software solutions and integrations to create team platforms (or team spaces) that manage the underlying content, and more broadly, information in order to support and improve team efficiency.

Our clients seek tools that assist in project management, document authoring, and any other recording or governance activity necessary to keep teams in sync and increase efficiency through easy search and access to information.

Web based collaboration tools have provided new ways of sharing information across the broader organisational context: blogs, wikis and social networking offer alternatives to dissemination of information by email and other means.

The issue with these technologies is the breadth of offerings in the market. How does an organisation select the right platform and/or tools? Alphawest is one of Australia’s largest Information Management practices and has experience in designing and deploying Information Management solutions from Records Management, through Electronic Document Management and into Web Content Management.