Enterprise Collaboration Software

Enterprise Collaboration Software

Communifire is a complete enterprise collaboration software platform. Used by small business and enterprises, alike, you can connect employees, reduce meetings, provide better customer support, launch a knowledge base, and much much more.

"Enterprise collaboration" can cover a lot of ground, including social collaboration, social intranet, social knowledge base, social customer support, social marketing, and any number of other point solutions you could stick "social" in front of to make them more engaging and more collaborative. We'll cover the benefits of each of these in turn before taking on the costs and then reasons for not implementing it.

Benefits of Enterprise Collaboration

The common thread through out all these different "social" solutions is that they take advantage of humans' social nature and the familiarity of most employees (naturally especially the younger employees) with social networking tools and interactions.

Team Collaboration

Whether you're collaborating in a department, on a project across departments, or with partners and customers, Communifire team collaboration software will keep your projects on track and your team connected.

• Employee engagement: More people have a chance to contribute their unique perspective, knowledge and ideas to improve project outcomes and quality.
• Fewer meetings: With easy access to the latest updates and information and a platform to share and develop new ideas there is little reason for people to get together all at the same time, unless it is to celebrate progress.
• Buy-in: With more stakeholders informed and involved throughout there are few surprises and disagreement at the end of the project.
• Less email clogging up server: The content is stored in the platform where anyone can access the latest version without having to find the most recent email. Everyone in the project is kept up to date with changes without having to CC everyone with all the changed content.
• Discovery of unexpected talent: If the project is open to a large enough portion of community social connections between individuals can spread word about the project to unexpected places and catch the attention of someone with skills previously unknown to the organization.

Social Intranet

For communicating with employees and organizing information and work, Communifire social intranet software brings your employees together to collaborate, stay up to date on company happenings, access important company documents, and find the people with expertise you need to get work completed.

• Less time spent looking for information: Information in a social intranet is not biased toward department silos but instead to where people actually use (and therefore would be inclined to look for) the information.
• Best and most popular content made more accessible: Based on employee ranking of content and view counts the best and most popular content is brought to the surface and offered up in quick lists and menus. 
• Compelling communication channel: As the intranet becomes more valuable in finding information, organizing work and facilitating collaboration it also becomes a compelling channel to broadcast company news and views to employees, improving culture and awareness of company goals and achievements.
• Hub for all work: It is possible to connect other solutions into a social intranet build on a social enterprise network. This can be either by simply linking to these other systems with a single sign on to actually integrating other systems' information and interface into the platform.

Social Knowledge Base

Build a living library of helpful documents, instructional materials, and self-help information. Communifire's knowledge management software makes it easy for you to organize and share your company’s knowledge and assets across departments and with customers and partners.

• Easy to organize and discover information: Information is organized and prioritized organically so the most important matters get taken care of first and the information gathers where people are inclined to look for it.
• Intuitive tools: Social collaboration tools like wikis, forums and Q&A have become commonplace in people's lives thanks to public social media sites, there is little to no learning curve for these tools.
• Consolidate knowledge from multiple sources: Anyone with insight to share on a topic is open to do so, the social aspect and the familiar tools make people more inclined to contribute more
• Searchable: Tagging and organic organization of information makes it easier to find through search.

Social Customer Support

Communifire's customer support software tools lets you interact with your customers in real time, launch customer support communities, provide self-help knowledge bases, build customer relationships, and increase customer satisfaction. 

• Lower costs: Build a knowledge base of information from FAQ that customers can access on their own... many will prefer it this way anyway.
• More product sales: Customers interacting with each other will share application and benefits of your products, encouraging new uses that may require additional products or licenses.
• Increased satisfaction: Create a private space for all or most valued customers to collaborate and support them more personally
• Fewer repeated questions: Bring all of a customer's team together in a space so they can all see and later search for answers to their own questions
• Quicker and better informed responses: With the history for a customer in one place more of  your team can jump in reduces the reliance on a single resource

Social Marketing

An online community and marketing website with content designed to be engaged with

• Branding as thought leader: Your site becomes where people go to discuss the latest trends and network with other like-minded professionals
• Market insight: See previous.
• Credibility of messages: Customer testimonials and social interactions add credibility to your marketing messages
• Control discontent: You learn about discontent quickly and can respond to it quickly, often scoring points for your commitment to responding to customer complaints

Enterprise Collaboration Costs

If you choose the "right" collaboration platform you can accomplish all of the above under a single license, by controlling who has access to what information and can see what areas.

Pricing varies dramatically based on which solution you choose but as a point of reference, the Communifire platform has an unlimited user license option for $10,000 per year.

For the complete cost picture, add $3500 per year for support, and $500 per year for us to host it (you can host yourself of course and then just factor in those costs).

The greatest cost variable is how much you want to customize the look and feel and functionality of the platform to suit your unique business needs. This might be as little as a week or two of a person's time or a month or two for a small team of web designers tweaking CSS and HTML to make the site work to your unique specifications.

Then you let it loose on the company, getting some key connected people to drive popularity and awareness of the site as they go about their business accruing the benefits enjoyed by "social" businesses. 

Why not to implement?

Pretty much any organization for where the above benefits would be liabilities should not implement a social collaboration network.

For example, organizations with strict hierarchies where information and instruction flow down with only output flowing back up may encounter difficulty with the employee engagement of an enterprise social network.