This speech updates themes from my Social Collaboration for Dummies book (Wiley, 2013). Since the book was published, team messaging tools such as Slack have begun to generate much more excitement, investment, and competitive energy than the enterprise social networking platforms I was writing about at that time.
At IDG’s Digital Collaboration 2017 conference in Stockholm, I discussed this trend in the context of efforts to unify multiple modes of communication and collaboration in one platform versus the trend toward rapid proliferation of specialized workplace tools — and the opportunities to create unified experiences out of diverse tools.